Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-30T23:36:45.193Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A New Framing? Constitutional Representation at Philadelphia's National Constitution Center

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 August 2008

Mariah Zeisberg
Mariah Zeisberg
Affiliation:
University of Michigan. E-mail: [email protected])
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The National Constitution Center (NCC) in Philadelphia orients its representation of the Constitution around the role of “We the People” in the conduct of constitutional politics. The self-presentation of the NCC explicitly connects its participatory interpretation of the Constitution to the interactivity of the museum experience itself, and announces its aspiration that visitors “get involved!” In so doing the NCC draws upon an emerging edge in museum theory that emphasizes the capacity of museums to support political citizenship. Although the museum's aspiration to enact participatory citizenship is laudable, its exhibits—because of their technologies, use of space, and content—subvert, rather than sustain, the participatory ideal.

Type
Perspective
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 6 , Issue 3 , September 2008 , pp. 553 - 568
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abramson, Jeffrey B., Arterton, Christopher F., and Orren, Gary R.. 1988. The Electronic Commonwealth: The Impact of New Media Technologies on Democratic Politics. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Alexander, Edward P. 1997. The Museum In America: Innovators and Pioneers. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira.Google Scholar
Amar, Akhil Reed. 1987. Of sovereignty and federalism. Yale Law Journal 96 (7): 1425–520.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Amar, Akhil Reed. 2005. America's Constitution: A Biography. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Andolsen, Barbara Hilkert. 1986. Daughters of Jefferson, Daughters of Bootblacks: Racism and American Feminism. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press.Google Scholar
Annis, Sheldon. 1994. The museum as staging ground for symbolic action. Museum Provision and Professionalism, ed. Kavanagh, Gaynor. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Appleby, Joyce. 1992. Recovering America's historic diversity: Beyond exceptionalism. Journal of American History 79 (2): 419–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Austin, Regina. 2004–05. “The shame of it all”: Stigma and the political disenfranchisement of formerly convicted and incarcerated persons. Columbia Human Rights Law Review 36 (1): 173–192.Google Scholar
Bales, Kevin. 1999. Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Barber, Benjamin. 1988. Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Bauman, Zygmunt. 1987. Legislators and Interpreters: on Modernity Postmodernity, and the Intellectuals. Oxford: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Bennett, Tony. 1994. The exhibitionary complex. In Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Thought, ed. Dirks, Nicholas B, Eley, Geoff, Ortner, Sherry B.. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Bennett, Tony. 1995. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Bercovitch, Sacvan. 1979. The American Jeremiad. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Berk, Gerald. 1993. Alternative Tracks: The Constitution of American Industrial Order, 1865–1916. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Bérubé, Allen. 1990. Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Blatti, Jo. 1987. Past Meets Present: Essays about Historic Interpretation and Public Audiences. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.Google Scholar
Bodnar, John. 1992. Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Boorstin, Daniel. 1953. The Genius of American Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Brettschneider, Corey. 2007. Democratic Rights: The Substance of Self-Government. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Brown-Dean, Khalilah. 2007. Permanent outsiders: Felon disenfranchisement and the breakdown of black politics. National Political Science Review 11: 103–19.Google Scholar
Burnett, Christina, and Marshall, Burke, eds. 2001. Foreign in a Domestic Sense: Puerto Rico, American Expansion, and the Constitution. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burnett, Christina. 2005. Untied States: American expansion and territorial deannexation. University of Chicago Law Review 72 (3): 797–880.Google Scholar
Calhoun, John C., and Lence, Ross M., eds. 1992. Union and Liberty: The Political Philosophy of John C. Calhoun. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.Google Scholar
Cohen, Adam. 2003. “Cheering on The March of Constitutional Progress for as Long as It Lasts.” New York Times, August 17.Google Scholar
Conn, Steven. 1998. Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876–1926. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Cornell, Saul. 1999. The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788–1828. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Corwin, Edward. 1936. The Constitution as instrument and symbol. American Political Science Review 30 (6): 1071–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crane, Susan. 1997. Writing the individual back into collective memory. American Historical Review 102 (5): 1372–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crimp, Douglas. 1993. On the Museum's Ruins. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Crozier, Michael J., Huntington, Samuel P., and Watanuki, Joji. 1975. The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies of the Trilateral Commission. New York: The Trilateral Commission.Google Scholar
Devins, Neil, and Fisher, Louis. 2004. The Democratic Constitution. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Duncan, Carol. 1991. Art museums and the ritual of citizenship. In Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Karp, Ivan and Lavine, Steven D.. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.Google Scholar
Duncan, Carol. 1995. Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Dworkin, Ronald. 1978. Taking Rights Seriously. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Englehardt, Tom, and Linenthal, Edward T., eds. 1996. History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past. New York: Henry Holt and Company.Google Scholar
Farr, Kathryn. 2004. Sex Trafficking: The Global Market in Women and Children. New York: W.H. Freedman.Google Scholar
Foner, Eric. 1995. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War, with a New Introductory Essay. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Gaither, Barry Edmund. 1992. Hey! That's mine! Thoughts on pluralism and American museums. In Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture, ed. Karp, Ivan, Kreamer, Christine Mullen, and Lavine, Steven D.. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.Google Scholar
Golden, Jane, Rice, Robin, and Kinney, Monica Yant. 2002. Philadelphia Murals and the Stories They Tell. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Goldsworthy, Jeffrey. 2006. Interpreting Constitutions: A Comparative Study. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Goodhart, Michael. 2001. Democracy, globalization, and the problem of the state. Polity 33 (4): 527–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Greenhouse, Linda. 2003. “1787 and All That.” New York Times, August 17.Google Scholar
Greenstone, J. David. 1988. Against simplicity: The cultural dimensions of the Constitution. University of Chicago Law Review 55 (2): 428–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gulliford, Andrew. 1992. The West as America: Reinterpreting images of the frontier, 1820–1920. Journal of American History 79 (1): 199–208.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gurian, Heumann Elaine. 1991. Noodling around with exhibition opportunities. In Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Karp, Ivan and Lavine, Steven D.. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.Google Scholar
Gutmann, Amy, and Thompson, Dennis. 2004. Why Deliberative Democracy? Princeton: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hamilton, Alexander, Madison, James, and Jay, John. 1992. The Federalist Papers, ed. Rossiter, Clinton. Cutchogue, NY: Buccaneer Books.Google Scholar
Hartz, Louis. 1955. The Liberal Tradition in America. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World.Google Scholar
Hattam, Victoria. 1993. Labor Visions and State Power: The Origins of Business Unionism in the United States. Princeton: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hattam, Victoria. 2000. History, agency, and political change. Polity 32 (3): 333–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hemberger, Suzette. 2001. What did they think they were doing when they wrote the U.S. Constitution and why should we care. In Constitutional Politics: Essays on Constitution Making, Maintenance, and Change, ed. Barber, Sotirios A., and George, Robert P.. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Hertz, Susan H. 1977. The politics of the welfare mothers movement: A case study. Signs 2 (3): 600–11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hirschl, Ran. 2004. Towards Juristocracy: The Origins and Consequences of the New Constitutionalism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Hofstadter, Richard. 1999. The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Hooper-Greenhill, Eileen. 1992. The museum in the disciplinary society. In Museum Studies in Material Culture, ed. Pearce, Susan M.. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.Google Scholar
Horowitz, Roger. 1995. Oral history and the story of America and World War II. Journal of American History 82 (2): 617–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hudson, Kenneth. 1987. Museums of Influence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Jardine, Nick. 2003. Whigs and stories: Herbert Butterfield and the historiography of science. History of Science 41 (2): 125–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jones, Ann. 2006. Kabul in Winter: Life without Peace in Afghanistan. New York: Metropolitan Books.Google Scholar
Jordanova, Ludmilla. 1989. Objects of knowledge: A historical perspective on museums. In The New Museology, ed. Vergo, Peter. London: Reaktion Books.Google Scholar
Kammen, Michael. 1987. A Machine That Would Go Of Itself: The Constitution in American Culture. New York: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Karp, Ivan. 1992. Introduction. In Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture, ed. Karp, Ivan, Kreamer, Christine Mullen, and Lavine, Steven D.. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.Google Scholar
Katyal, Neil Kumar. 2001. Legislative constitutional interpretation. Duke Law Journal 50 (5): 1335–94.Google Scholar
Kavanagh, Gaynor. 2000. Dream Spaces: Memory and the Museum. London: Leicester University Press.Google Scholar
Kersch, Ken. 2004. Constructing Civil Liberties: Discontinuities in the Development of American Constitutional Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keyssar, Alexander. 2000. The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Klein, Julia. M. 2003. “A Union of Word and Deed.” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 18.Google Scholar
Kramer, Larry D. 2004. The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krouse, Susan Applegate. 2006. Anthropology and the new museology. Reviews in Anthropology 35: 169–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lang, Caroline, Reeve, John, and Woollard, Vicky, eds. 2006. The Responsive Museum: Working With Audiences in the Twenty-first Century. England: Ashgate Publishing, 2006.Google Scholar
Lerner, Max. 1937. The Constitution and court as symbols. Yale Law Journal 46 (8): 1290–319.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levin, Lessard Daniel. 1999. Representing Popular Sovereignty: The Constitution in American Political Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Levinson, Sanford. 2006. Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where The Constitution Goes Wrong (And How We the People Can Correct It). Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levy, Leonard. 1985. Emergence of a Free Press. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Linenthal, Edward T., and Englehardt, Tom. 1996. History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past. New York: Henry Holt and Company.Google Scholar
Linenthal, Edward T. 1994a. The boundaries of memory: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. American Quarterly 46 (3): 406–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Linenthal, Edward T. 1994b. Committing history in public. Journal of American History 81 (3): 986–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Linenthal, Edward T. 2000. The contested landscape of American memorialization: Levinson's Written in Stone. Law and Social Inquiry 25 (1): 249–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Linz, Juan J., and Valenzuela, Arturo. 1994. The Failure of Presidential Democracy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacDonald, George F. 1992. Change and challenge. In Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture, ed. Karp, Ivan, Kreamer, Christine Mullen, and Lavine, Steven D.. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.Google Scholar
Mansbridge, Jane. 1986. Why We Lost the ERA. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marilley, Suzanne M. 1996. Woman Suffrage and the Origins of Liberal Feminism in the United States, 1820–1920. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mires, Charlene. 1999. In the shadow of Independence Hall: Vernacular activities and the meanings of historic places. Public Historian 21 (2): 49–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morris, Aldon D. 1984. The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Murphy, Walter F. 1980. An ordering of constitutional values. Southern California Law Review 53 (2): 703–60.Google Scholar
Murphy, Walter F. 1986. Who shall interpret? The quest for the ultimate constitutional interpreter. Review of Politics 48 (3): 401–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Norton, Anne. 1989. Alternative Americas: A Reading of Antebellum Political Culture. Chicago: Chicago University Press.Google Scholar
Pearce, Susan M., ed. 1992. Museum Studies in Material Culture. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.Google Scholar
Perin, Constance. 1992. The communicative circle: Museums as communities. In Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture, ed. Karp, Ivan, Kreamer, Christine Mullen, and Lavine, Steven D.. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.Google Scholar
Pope, Jacqueline. 1989. Biting the Hand That Feeds Them: Organizing Women on Welfare at the Grass Roots Level. New York: Praeger.Google Scholar
Post, Robert C. 2003. Foreward: Fashioning the Legal Constitution: Culture, Courts and Law. Harvard Law Review 117 (1): 4–112.Google Scholar
Post, Robert C., and Siegel, Reva B.. 2003. Legislative constitutionalism and Section Five Power: Policentric interpretation of the Family and Medical Leave Act. Yale Law Journal 112 (8): 1943–2060.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rabban, David M. 1997. Free Speech in Its Forgotten Years. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Read, James H. 2000. Power versus Liberty: Madison, Hamilton, Wilson and Jefferson. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.Google Scholar
Ritter, Gretchen. 1997. Goldbugs and Greenbacks: The AntiMonopoly Tradition and the Politics of Finance, 1865–1896. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robben, Alysia. 2007. A strike at the heart of democracy: Why legal challenges to felon disenfranchisement laws should succeed. University of the District of Columbia Law Review 10 (1): 15–34.Google Scholar
Rodgers, Daniel T. 1987. Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics Since Independence. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Rogin, Michael. 1987. Ronald Reagan, the Movie, and Other Episodes in Political Demonology. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Ross, Max. 2004. Interpreting the new museology. Museum and Society 2 (2): 84–103.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Satell, Ed. 2004. Foreword. In The American National Tree: Biographies from an Exhibit at the National Constitution Center. Philadelphia: National Constitution Center.Google Scholar
Schickler, Eric. 1994. Democratizing technology: Hierarchy and innovation in public life. Polity 27 (2): 175–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, Clark Barbara. 1997. Yorktown Victory Center: A museum of the American Revolution. William and Mary Quarterly 54 (2): 440–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, Rogers. 1999. Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Storing, Herbert. 1981. What Were the Anti-Federalists For: The Political Thought of the Opponents of the Constitution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Storing, Herbert. 1985. The AntiFederalist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Tocqueville, Alexis. 2000. Democracy in America, ed. Lawrence, George and trans. Mayer, J.P.. New York: Perennial Classics.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tushnet, Mark. 1999. Taking the Constitution Away from the Courts. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Vergo, Peter, ed. 1997. The New Museology. London: Reaktion Books.Google Scholar
Vogel, Susan. 1991. Always true to the object, in our fashion. In Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Karp, Ivan and Lavine, Steven D.. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.Google Scholar
Waldron, Jeremy. 1999. Law and Disagreement. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Washington, James M. 1986. A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. San Francisco: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Whittington, Keith. 2002. Extrajudicial constitutional interpretation: Three objections and responses. North Carolina Law Review 80 (3): 773–851.Google Scholar
Williams, Melissa S. 1998. Voice, Trust, and Memory: Marginalized Groups and the Failings of Liberal Representation. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Witcomb, Andrea. 2003. Re-Imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum. London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Woods, Thomas A. 1995. Museums and the public: Doing history together. Journal of American History 82 (3): 1111–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar