Introducing Peace Museums

Joyce Apsel

This volume examines peace museums, a small and important (but often overlooked) series of museums whose numbers have multiplied world-wide in recent decades. They relate stories and display artifacts―banners, diaries, and posters for example about such themes as: art and peace, antiwar histories, protest, peacekeeping and social justice and promote cultures of peace. This book introduces their different approaches from Japan, which has the largest number of sites, to Bradford, UK and Guernica, Spain. Some peace museums and centers emphasize popular peace symbols and figures, others provide alternative narratives about conscientious objection or civil disobedience, and still others are sites of persuasion, challenging the status quo about issues of war, peace, disarmament, and related issues. Introducing Peace Museums distinguishes between different types of museums that are linked to...