Reviews for You Have to Pay for the Public Life: Selected Essays of Charles W. Moore

The average rating for You Have to Pay for the Public Life: Selected Essays of Charles W. Moore based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-10-10 00:00:00 Marian Algarda Can I give negative stars?

Review # 2 was written on 2012-06-30 00:00:00 Roger Elliott I only skimmed through this, but I hope I can come back to it at some point. It deals with the origins of four house museums: Mt. Vernon, the Louisa May Alcott house, Monticello, and the Booker T. Washington birthplace museum. The point is that these museums come out of very particular moments in history, and we should understand that when we visit them. For example, the impetus to create a museum out of Mt. Vernon came out of the pre-Civil War period, when the country was divided and the cult of Washington was growing, and a group of wealthy Southern ladies were worried that Washington's home might fall into northern hands. In many ways they saw Washington as a paragon of Southern values and they wanted to promote that. A lot of times people (and I know I did this) visit these museums and simply assume that they have always been this way, or that they just kinda 'happened' when famous people died. But that's not the whole story, and getting these political backgrounds can be very illuminating in understanding what the museum is teaching its visitors.