Working Hard to Bring Our Museum and Its Stories Straight to You
P
erhaps there is something to that Friday the 13th superstition, after all. It was on Friday, March 13, 2020 that the American Civil War Museum staff and board began to realize the full impact of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, prompting the Museum’s closure beginning on March 16. The first months of 2020 were good ones for the Museum. Our visitation numbers were up, our financial picture was improving, our public programs had been very successful, and our search for a new CEO was ramping up (including initial meetings with the search firm scheduled for Monday, March 16). As it did for all of you, everything changed that weekend. Meeting remotely, the Museum’s senior staff began immediately to craft a strategy for continuing our educational work as much as possible 6 S U M M E R / FA L L 2 0 2 0
without meeting face-to-face with students or the general public. Like public schools and other museums, we shifted to online programming and took advantage of the same technology that made it possible for our employees to work from home and meet with each other. Many of you are familiar with the results. Instead of canceling our scheduled public programs – History Happy Hours, Foundry Series, and Book Talks – we have been holding them using the Zoom platform. This has made it possible for members and visitors from around the nation and around the globe to sit down with a beer and enjoy a talk and a Q&A session on such topics as the Richmond “Bread Riot,” Civil War amputations, the backstory of Richmond’s Jefferson Davis monument, “The False Cause,” the “Great Partnership” between Robert E. Lee and “Stonewall” Jackson, and Black Churches in the
Post-Emancipation Struggle, the looting of Fredericksburg, and, in commemoration of the 19th Amendment centennial, Women’s suffrage and the Civil War. Beyond just continuing our programs, we decided to increase the number and variety of our offerings. We extended our popular History Happy Hour series through the summer instead of suspending it in June, July, and August, as we have in previous years. We also have produced special videos of staff members displaying and discussing specific items from the collection storage vaults and sponsored a “Let’s Talk” forum about the Monument Avenue statues. The staff has offered numerous virtual programs for residents of assisted living facilities. These programs join the dozens of earlier programs available on the Museum’s own YouTube channel and on C-Span’s website.
