Art News

Uniforms, swords and long-barreled guns: Civil War museums changing as view on war changes

NEW ORLEANS (AP).- Inside Louisiana’s Civil War Museum, battle flags line the walls. Uniforms, swords and long-barreled guns fill museum cases beside homespun knapsacks, dented canteens and tiny framed pictures of wives that soldiers carried into battle. In the back, there’s a collection devoted to Jefferson Davis, one-time president of the Confederacy, complete with his top hat and fancy shoes at the spot where his body once lay in state. It’s all housed in a little red stone building next door to the bigger and much more heavily visited Ogden Museum of Southern Art and near the National World War II Museum. Yet 150 years after the Civil War, the little museum finds itself struggling — like others both in the North and South — to make changes and stay relevant with new generations. For some museums, that means more displays on African-Americans