A Museum Rethinks How It Tells Delaware's Story
A major reinstallation at a state history museum wrestles with whose stories get told, and how a small state narrates its own past.
Every history museum eventually confronts a hard question: whose story is it telling, and who has been left out? A major reinstallation at a Delaware history museum has taken that question head-on, reworking its galleries to present a fuller, more honest account of the state's past.
The old version, curators acknowledge, was incomplete. Like many institutions of its era, it foregrounded the powerful and the prosperous while treating the enslaved, the Indigenous, and the working poor as footnotes, if it mentioned them at all.
The new approach widens the lens. Fresh research, community input, and objects long kept in storage now tell a more complicated story — one that includes the people whose labor built the state alongside the founders whose names adorn it.
The reinstallation has not pleased everyone, and debates over how to narrate a difficult past are rarely settled. But the museum has embraced the discomfort as part of its job. Telling a state's story honestly, its curators argue, means telling all of it — even the parts that are hard to hear.
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