This roundtable brings together historians and museum professionals to discuss the mixed legacies of museum collecting, current object-focused history work within American history museums, and its challenges and future potential. As repositories dedicated to preserving and interpreting the tangible remnants of the past, history museums are the ideal partners to academic historians for producing engaging social history for the public. And indeed, great strides have been made by museums to forefront the use of material culture and oral history along with written sources in crafting historical narratives since Thomas J. Schlereth described this as an “engaging future task for both museum and academic historians” in the early 1990s.

However, today many museums large and small find themselves at a critical crossroad, with plans for future projects clashing with long-term behind the scenes challenges that impede such progress. For institutions with collections decades or even centuries old, antiquated collecting interests may not support new directions in scholarship. For others, a history of nonexistent or subpar collections and acquisitions policies has bloated store rooms to capacity with artifacts of uncertain provenance or historical significance. This discussion will address these conflicts between the legacies of museum collecting and modern museum practices today and through the examples of recent exhibition and collections projects at five museums and historical societies, address how all cultural institutions looking to tell complex and relevant histories today must first grapple with decisions made in the past.