The State Museum of New Jersey in the state capital Trenton is free of charge and has a strange interpretation of native people. Although Native Americans are still very much alive, their history is interpreted through archeological ethnography instead of their living cultural experiences. The State Museum of New York in Albany does a better job.
The part of the museum that most people in the world would consider recent history, i.e. from the last 300 years, feels like digging through an old couple’s basement. There are dolls from when the state produced toys in the 1950s, old suitcases used by European immigrants, and pieces of furniture like grandfather clocks that don’t run. My favorite was a tavern door from 1800 that depicted Jersey residents as wealthy on one side and New Yorkers as poor on the other as one of the first examples of rivalry between the two states.
Americans gaze upon their flag in reverence during sports games, wave it at home, and salute it every morning at school. The museum’s civil war flag collection is one of its highlight exhibits showing how to decipher battle flags and tracing the journey of New Jersey regiments with maps.
The prehistoric exhibit has the world’s first discovered carnivorous dinosaur, the Dryptosaurus, a distant cousin of the T-rex. Charles Knight famously depicted it fighting as an aggressive and agile species in 1897. Of course, nobody knows for sure how dinosaurs behaved, but many of Knight’s other paintings of dinosaurs were hung in museums across America and helped shape their public perception as savage beasts.
A basement exhibit asks “What is new with archeology?” A good question. It has a bone from a Hadrosaurus, the state dinosaur, with arthritis. Depictions of dinosaurs from artists like Knight who take creative liberty on animal behavior misguided our perception of the natural world. We often forget that these living creatures were also prone to chronic diseases, for example. I wish they would expand on this question to show how new discoveries are being made on long-extinct animals in recent years to help put their lives in a more organic and biologically accurate perspective.
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