State History

This article originally appeared on the AASLH website. 

For the fifth consecutive year, the Public History Research Lab of the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH) presents our National Visitation Report. This report is the only national effort to analyze trends in visitation at history organizations of all types and sizes, all across the United States. Through an annual survey, we gather visitation data to better understand year-to-year shifts in the way Americans engage with history organizations and to provide organizational decision-makers with benchmark data against which they can compare their own institutions.

Gathering data on a field as vast and institutionally diverse—in terms of size, structure, and purpose—as public history is no easy task. Some very small organizations lack the capacity to accurately track the number of visitors they serve, while some large institutions question the value of visitation metrics altogether. Indeed, tracking visitation trends is not the only way to measure public engagement or institutional health; it may not even be the best way. With well over 20,000 history organizations nationwide, however—including thousands of all-volunteer museums, historical societies, and other entities—there are few metrics comparable across the huge range of different institution types and sizes that make up our field. So, we present the findings below as a way of assessing how varied institutions have engaged with their audiences over the past two years, as the cultural sector and the nation continue to recover from the pandemic. Read more...