Making Military Histories in Museums Editorial Introduction

The papers in this section of the November edition of Museum and Society are the result of a conference held jointly by the National Army Museum and the School of Museum Studies, Leicester, in September 2013. The call for papers asked academics and professional museum curators, along with interested members of the public and former army personnel, to think about the challenges the Museum faced as it planned a £23 million Heritage Lottery Fund redevelopment project. The conference engendered lively debates and opened up discussions on a range of practical and intellectual issues around the collection, research, care and exhibition of military objects. Unlike many academic conferences (held usually in universities) this event, hosted by the National Army Museum in London, did indeed attract many interested members of the public, some former army personnel, whose contribution added new insights to the debates. In addition we were fortunate to attract professional curators, designers and educators all working in this field. Inevitably many of the contributors to the conference did not have the time to write up their papers for an academic journal. Nevertheless our call for papers arising from the conference for this journal attracted a pleasing number of submissions many of which are included here. Among the enlightening and thought provoking papers that, for various good reasons, did not make it into this Journal were two papers that looked back to the early years of the Imperial War Museum (IWM). These provided an instructive contrast to the update the audience received from another contributor on the redevelopment IWM London then had in hand. Ensuring that expectations are met was the theme of a paper delivered on audience research for the First World War exhibition then being planned at the Science Museum, and the sheer hard work involved in mounting a European Union-funded travelling exhibition where there were a plethora of different stakeholders to satisfy vividly emerged in a presentation on the Liberation Route Europe Foundation’s commemoration plans for 2014. Three papers by given members of the School of Museum Studies, Dr Viv Golding on ‘Narrative and Affect in Kurdistan Museums’ and Dr Ceri Jones and Jocelyn Dodd presenting on ‘The Impact of War and Conflict: Using Museum Collections, Personal Experiences and Intergenerational Practice to Develop People’s Understanding’ and Dr Amy Barnes ‘Representing the Soviet “Other” in British Cold War Museums’ debated some of the challenging issues arising from these topics. In the end, central to the conference was the dialogue between museum professionals and university researchers, and this was triumphantly given flesh in a joint paper delivered by Alan Popper (Royal Lincolnshire Regiment Museum) and Claire Hubbard-Hall (Bishop Grosseteste University) which demonstrated that object-based learning in higher education could be facilitated to advantage by military museums. Turning now to the papers we are pleased to include here, it can be seen that they cover diverse approaches and incorporate a variety of disciplines. Military history can all too often be seen as something to be put in a silo, labelled military, which can thus be contained and managed, so only those who are interested in it need engage with the complex moral, emotional and ethical issues that the subject raises. However, nearly all museums have materials possessing military connotations, such as the V&A’s quilts sewn by soldiers, and Furneaux and Pritchard’s paper investigating these quilts encourages consideration of the complex emotional engagement a work made of pieces of uniform from often now dead colleagues engenders. The two speakers’ paper considers the personal, the private and the gendered world of the soldier outside the framework of the battlefield, reminding us that close