Museums and history
Traditionally, museums have served to collect and preserve objects from the past, with over the last 50 years the emphasis gradually moving towards exhibiting and interpreting their collections. Though historians had hitherto been more interested in the evidence of the traditional archive, the growing acceptance of the use of non-written materials as sources for professional history, coupled with the increasing accessibility of at least images of such sources thanks to the growth in digitisation, has prompted a greater interest in museum collections from academics. In addition, museums have begun to engage through their exhibitions with the problems of contested histories: for instance, the National Maritime Museum's approach to the depiction of slavery.
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