A New and Correct Map of the United States of North America Layd Down from the Latest Observations and Best Authorities Agreeable to the Peace of 1783.
A New and Correct Map of the United States of North America Layd Down from the Latest Observations and Best Authorities Agreeable to the Peace of 1783.
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bankruptcy and liquidation might be a good enough reason.
No wonder they’re being criticized - that’s the most inaccurate map of the U.S. I’ve ever seen.
The New York Public Library displayed Asher Durand’s Kindred Spirits, an iconic representation of the Hudson River School painting, for a century and then sold it to the Walmart heiress because it needed the money. She took it out of the public sphere saying that someday she was going to have a museum of fine art next to Walmart headquarters and display it there. It was shameful primarily because the sale was done privately and left out museums that may have wanted to bid on it.
The New Jersey Historical Society is a state and national treasure. The items housed there relating to the history of New Jersey and the United States are incredible. They should move the institution out of downtown Newark so people are not terrified of going there. Seriously I know of many people who’d like to go there but won’t because of where it is located.
How odd that they would sell their most important acquisition.
It is not uncommon for museums to sell off items of lesser importance as they upgrade their collections, but selling their most important is very strange.
This is plain BS, along the same fallacious lines as giving "humanitarian aid" to an unfriendly state, while "not helping" its government...a bookkeeping fiction.
The payment of the debt will free up future acquisition money; it is no different than selling this to acquire other pieces, and redirecting the current acquisition budget to debt payment.
Money is money is money, and none of it cares which account name is attached to it on the budget sheet.
That “map” is so wildly innaccurate that it’s essentially worthless anyway, so let somebody with more money than brains buy it. /sarc
Museums sell possessions frequently; it is done all the time.
Although I hate to see this happen, it is a lot better to sell the map at auction to a buyer with the funds and the will to care for it than to do what the Milwaukee museum has done in the past with excess inventory — dump it in Lake Michigan! I know this happens with libraries and museums all the time — they just get rid of excess donations. They do it quietly so as not to offend the donors, rather than pay for expansions to store the artifacts. I think that such material should always be put up for sale to an interested public.
Our County museaum had several valuable Alaskan Indian baskets that we sold last year to fund operation of the museum. (They had no direct bearing on our local history.) The museum director retired and now it is all run strictly on a volunteer basis.