A brief review of the newly reopened Museum of American History

American History was always my favorite of the Smithsonians growing up, and while I was saddened to see it close for renovation the September before I moved back to the city, I eagerly looked forward to seeing the museum post-facelift. Even discounting my DC chauvinism, the NAMH is like, the granddaddy of American History museums; I pictured dozens of respected and innovative curators and designers salivating to bring the landmark into the 21st century, and anticipated the fruits of their imaginations with baited breath.

I shouldn't have.

While many of the classic exhibits - Julia Child's kitchen, the 200 year old Boston house - have remained, others - the First Ladies' dresses, the artifacts representing American sport and the arts - are dramatically truncated, shells of once impressive displays. It is no exaggeration to say that the new or expanded exhibits lack any hint of creativity; each room seems a barely tweaked version of the one before it. It hardly helps that more than half of the exhibits could be accurately titled "War! Soldiers Were Brave!" or "Industrialization! It Works!" (or some combination thereof).

A visitor gets very little sense of any kind of complexity or conflict in this inexorable march of progress - particularly laughable is the tiny display box in the Paean to the Automobile exhibit containing a battered copy of The Feminine Mystique and noting that not everyone loved the suburbs... but wait, look at that silly early-model Honda Civic!

Compounding the failure to think at all creatively about what artifacts or narratives might represent America or Americans through time, the architecture and design are deeply uninspired - high ceilings seem not grandiose but airplane hangar-esque, and the overwhelming grayness of the whole aesthetic suggests nothing so much as the Holocaust Museum. Is there no joy, no light, no color to the American Experience?

I can't imagine this is what the curators meant to suggest, but coupled with the limited scope of its contents, the new NMAH gives the distinct impression that one is visiting the National Museum of the American Military Industrial Complex.