JTR Museum

[Pcdunn]

Welcome to Tombstone

Proper museums are vehicles for education, just like books and articles and conferences. I should think that everyone in our field would be in favor of a Jack the Ripper Museum, if done right.

If there are controversial displays, or displays with strong graphic content, do what museums have always done; hang a sign saying some visitors might find these materials offensive.

If money is being made from a museum, who cares? I'm sure the city officials in Indiana view the Dillinger museum as a nice little money-making opportunity for their community. If the museum is worthwhile, that's what counts.

I've been to your lovely town of Tombstone, Mr. Earp, and I really enjoyed my visits. All of the displays, museums, shops, live entertainments, and tours focused around yourself and your family, friends, and enemies are well done, and some are educational. And I am sure most residents do indeed make money from visitors interested in the "shoot-out at the OK Corral."

I think a museum on the Ripper crimes would be better titled "The Whitechapel Murders Museum" since we don't know much beyond the names of several of the victims, when, where, and how they were murdered, and some limited evidence that has survived.

[Pcdunn]

Hello, Wyatt.

No I have nothing against a John Dillinger Museum. He was, after all, a real person whose biography is known, and was important to a specific place and time in United States history.

I think it is deceitful to promise one kind of a museum (The History of Women in the East End Museum) and deliver another (The Jack the Ripper Museum), and on those grounds I approve of the protesting.

[Ianwelly]

Duped

This has been controversial. The owner Mark -Palmer Edgecumbe led people to believe in his original planning application that it was to be a Museum of Women's History.
"documenting the formidable role of women in the “social, political and cultural heritage” of London, to “celebrate the contribution of East End women”, to create an oral history archive of women living in the East End today. The images and words within the planning documents suggest a showcase of womens’ power and activism: referencing the Suffragette movement, the Matchgirl strikes, the Women’s Social and Political Union, the Eq"ual Pay marches, women of the Black Trade Unions movement, anti-racist campaigning."
A lot of people felt duped and it was prevented from opening on the first day by a protest.

http://www.thesociologicalreview.com/information/blog/still-public-still-furious-jack-the-ripper-and-cultural-misogyny.html

[Wyatt Earp]

Proper museums are vehicles for education, just like books and articles and conferences. I should think that everyone in our field would be in favor of a Jack the Ripper Museum, if done right.

If there are controversial displays, or displays with strong graphic content, do what museums have always done; hang a sign saying some visitors might find these materials offensive.

If money is being made from a museum, who cares? I'm sure the city officials in Indiana view the Dillinger museum as a nice little money-making opportunity for their community. If the museum is worthwhile, that's what counts.

[Wyatt Earp]

I think it should be protested, and props to the community for doing so! A scholarly museum on the history of working- class women in the East End would be great, but not this thing.

Great articles, hope the papers keep it up. Let's KEEP it closed!

Do you also want to shut down the John Dillinger Museum?

I’m among the many who don’t like the “promise one thing and deliver something else” aspect to the thing, especially when a true women’s history museum is clearly needed. In principle, however, I don’t see anything wrong with a “Jack the Ripper Museum,” as long as it’s handled in a responsible way.

[GUT]

I think it should be protested, and props to the community for doing so! A scholarly museum on the history of working- class women in the East End would be great, but not this thing.

Great articles, hope the papers keep it up. Let's KEEP it closed!

Museum that honors those poor unfortunate women would be great, and by that I mean all those who found themselves on the street, (or close too) selling their bodies to survive, do sad.

[Pcdunn]

I think it should be protested, and props to the community for doing so! A scholarly museum on the history of working- class women in the East End would be great, but not this thing.

Great articles, hope the papers keep it up. Let's KEEP it closed!

[miss marple]

There is no question that Jack the ripper is being used to promote a museum dealing with Womens history. Suich a museum is needed[ there is a women's history library] but it is shameful to exploit women in this way by focussing on a murderer of women in order to attract publicity. It has not opened yet due to protests, If the museum wishes to be taken seriously the name will have to change. I am bloody pissed off about it. There is more to the eastend than jack the ripper.

Miss Marple

[Wyatt Earp]

Thumbs-up to a women's history museum.

Thumbs-up to a Jack the Ripper museum (as long as Jack isn't glorified).

The history of crime is a sub-field of history, and I think it's appropriate to have museums devoted to it, provided they are genuinely educational and operated in a responsible manner.

That's my take.

[GUT]

I lurbs you, GUT..in an old woman crone way. You could be my chile, as we say in NOLA.

Don't let HER hear you say that, she says I'm hers and no one else better even look at me.
[But then again I have eyes for her only].

[Rosemary]

Gut

I lurbs you, GUT..in an old woman crone way. You could be my chile, as we say in NOLA.

[GUT]

A genuine museum yes I would go.

But it would need genuine artifacts and tell the real story ( or as close to as possible). And not just be a shop in disguise.

Two examples spring to mind he in Aus.

We have Port Arthur, which was a penal settlement (but also in 1996 the scene were 30+ people were massacred by an idiot with a gun).

Now as a penal settlement it could ales be described as hell on earth, but they go out oh their way to tell the TRUE story (I know because my wife had a major disagreement with them, they asked to see he PhD thesis and changed the information they were giving out, hen persuaded she was right). That is a true Museum, even though the sell souvenirs.

They have also dealt with the mass murder tastefully, so those who wish to pay their respects or even mourn are able to do so, but in an in obtrusive manner.


We visit Port Arthur every few years.

We also have a number of "Museums" to Ned Kelly,msome are great, others are just an excuse to sell junk.

Most of those I avoid.

[Robert]

Bunny, I've sent you a PM.

[spyglass]

Hi all,
Little did I realise when starting this thread , what a s## storm it was going to turn out to be.
But is it now up and running for business? I notice that the website seems to be gone.

[Archaic]

My Two Cents (OK, Five Cents)

Here's another article, this one from The Standard: http://www.standard.co.uk/goingout/e...-10423690.html

I have to say that I do see the point of the protesters.

If someone proposed opening a museum dedicated to 'The History of Women in Seattle and Washington State', I would expect it to include exhibits on the Pioneer women who made the brutal trip westward by Conestoga wagons on the Oregon Trail, Native American women, early settlers in log cabins, and Suffragettes who helped secure the rights of women to vote.
I'd certainly expect it to include the 'Rosie the Riveter" women who labored at Boeing in WWII helping to build 98,965 aircraft (28% of US total aircraft production in WWII). Production included the B-17 “Flying Fortress” bombers used by the Eighth Air Force to assist the RAF in bombing the hell out of Nazi industrial targets, which helped us win the war!

If I visited the 'History of Women In Seattle & Washington State Museum' only to find it consisted of an historically inaccurate "recreation" of the bedroom of one of the women slaughtered by Ted Bundy or The Green River Killer, displayed their horrific autopsy photos and sold t-shirts glassware & coffee mugs celebrating the murderer as if he were a rock star, I'd picket and protest too!

If the developers want to create a Jack the Ripper attraction as a for-profit commercial venture, fine, it's a free country. But please have the decency to drop the pretense that it's a 'History of Women in the East End Museum' and - Oops! you just haven't gotten around to adding that little detail in small print to your elaborate skull & cross-bones signage.

They should just drop the word 'Museum'. Calling it a "museum" implies it will be fact-based and historically accurate, which even from the video we can all see it's not.

- As if Mary Kelly had a lovely bright apartment with cheerful clean floral wallpaper & an iron bed! Any fool can see from the photos she had a wooden bed-frame. We know it was a tiny cold dark decrepit makeshift "room" in a crowded old slum building.

It seems to me this "museum" is just another Ye Olde Ripper Gift Shoppe to sell t-shirts covered in fake blood depicting a fantasy figure in tophat & cape, which only perpetuates historically inaccurate myths.
I expect the Ripper black jellybeans or maybe "designer chocolates" shaped like mutilated body parts are next.

And Steadmand, yes I WOULD go to a real museum that really depicted the life of women and families in the East End during the Victorian era & other periods! It would be amazing.

New York City has a fantastic museum called 'The Tenement Museum' that occupies an old slum dwelling. Each apartment recreates what tenement life was like for a particular immigrant family who lived there at a specific time in its history. People have evemn donated original items from their families. I would love to visit a museum that accurately recreated East End Life over the centuries, wouldn't you? Think of all the East Enders who could donate original family photographs, histories and heirlooms to make the AUTHENTIC past come alive.

NY's TENEMENT MUSEUM: http://www.tenement.org/

Best regards,
Archaic