According to new research published in June by the American Association for State and Local History—a project I directed—the United States is home to more than 21,500 history museums, historical societies, and related history organizations. The vast majority of those institutions operate on shoestring budgets and many are run entirely by volunteers, a fragile dynamic that raises major challenges when it comes to both planning for and recovering from any disruption. There are also thousands of additional entities, from cemeteries to community organizations, that hold critical pieces of the nation’s cultural patrimony in their care. Simply put, American history is everywhere.
Increasingly, so are natural disasters. Last year, the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), declared 58 “major disasters” in the United States; Hurricane (later Tropical Storm) Ida caused six of those, stretching from Louisiana to Connecticut. Others included wildfires in California and Colorado, mudslides in Washington, and tornadoes in Tennessee. Twenty separate disasters last year each caused more than a billion dollars in damage, the second highest annual total on record. Already in 2022, the country has experienced 24 major disasters, from wildfires in New Mexico and landslides in Puerto Rico to severe flooding in Kentucky, Montana, South Dakota, and elsewhere.
The dispersed nature of the nation’s historical assets makes calculating the precise scope of the resulting loss nearly impossible—a major problem of its own—but evidence of it is easy to find.
Just last month, several history organizations in Kentucky were devastated by flooding while the Strawbery Banke Museum in Portsmouth, N.H., revealed that historic buildings on their campus now regularly fill with nearly two feet of water. Last year, the Superior Historical Museum outside Boulder, Colo., burned to the ground in the Marshall Fire, losing the entirety of its historical collection. In 2019, staff from the Arizona Historical Society had to rush to save collections items from their Pioneer Museum from the encroaching “Museum Fire”—so named because it began near another museum, Flagstaff’s near-century-old Museum of Northern Arizona. On the Eastern Shore of Maryland, rising sea levels are erasing the history of Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. Even the Smithsonian Institution is vulnerable, with the National Museum of American History fighting back flooding into critical collections storage spaces amid rising tides and heavy rain. A simple search for “flood” or “fire” and “museum” brings up many other examples just from the past year.
Yet despite the very real, immediate impact natural disasters have on history organizations each year, there are few resources available for either planning or recovery—and not nearly enough urgency to begin providing them.