Goodwin’s Ghosts

Recent news about Colonial Williamsburg outsourcing the management of its for-profit business entities has inspired questions about the museum’s original intent and how it should shape the institution’s future. This article offers a fresh look at the institution’s founding, and argues that the original idea for the museum was far spookier than researchers have acknowledged. In fact, elements of the uncanny, from ghost stories to talk of spirits and time travel, have been present in nearly all of the foundation’s innovative historical interpretation since the 1930s.

Nauvoo Restoration Incorporated and a Formal Latter-day Saint Presence in Nauvoo

During the second half of the twentieth century, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormonism) returned in a formal and dramatic way to Nauvoo, Illinois. This chapter discusses that return, beginning with the restoration work of J. LeRoy Kimball and the organization he headed, Nauvoo Restoration Incorporated. Over a period a several decades, Kimball led a team of renowned archaeologists and historians to restore Nauvoo into a Midwestern version of Colonial Williamsburg. Eventually, however, tensions between the historical and the religious led to a shift in emphasis for the site, as those directing Nauvoo Restoration embraced the proselytizing potential among the thousands who took to the road in the post-World War II tourism boom, visiting sites like Nauvoo.