Shaping a Revolutionary space

Terror, patriotism, the free market, racial equality: It's not farfetched to say that the issues of the American Revolution still obsess us.

Now, with the announcement that a new Museum of the American Revolution will open in 2015 at Third and Chestnut, we will have a place dedicated to sorting them out. "It's a great opportunity to really deepen our understanding of the formative moment," says Daniel Richter, director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. "I would hope it would tell a more complicated story than what is currently told. We had many different revolutions, among rich, poor, women, African Americans, Native Americans. These people were involved in a messy process. There were many different winners and losers."

One of the challenges for the museum will therefore be to simultaneously deepen and widen the familiar story of the American Revolution. It must teach while also drawing firm connections to the lives of Americans today.

"The process is more akin to filmmaking then writing a textbook," says Scott Stephenson, the museum's director of collections and interpretations. "People don't go to a museum to go to school."

At the heart of the museum is a collection of more than 2,000 objects mostly amassed in the early 20th century at the Valley Forge Historical Society by the Rev. Herbert Burk. But the vivid collection, which includes the field tent used by George Washington and the original commander-in-chief's standard flag, armaments, paintings, busts, and manuscripts, is heavy on iconic souvenirs of war and light on the grist of revolution.

The question, then, for Stephenson and for Robert A.M. Stern, who was recently named the project's architect, is how to create a museum of national objects that also feels as vitally alive as do the ideas and conflicts of the Revolution itself. "Will they see the objects in the collection as artifacts, or as a starting point for a conversation?" wonders historian Michael Zuckerman, an organizer of the 2013 conference "American Revolution Reborn: New Perspectives for the 21st Century."

"This is an immensely plastic moment in the study of the American Revolution," he says. "The museum could take a leadership role in figuring out what the Revolution means to Americans now."