The glossy marble floors and columns of America's august history museums are a far cry from the museums documented in Private History in Public by Tammy S. Gordon (AltaMira Press 2010), but the human impulse to gather, display and find meaning in stories and objects from the past is no less present in these collections.

Gordon moves outside the realm of professionalized history museums to guide readers through a world of museums organized and built around community history, family history, church history and personal history. She explores small public exhibitions within truck stops, community centers, libraries, even a bar or two. And in every setting, whether it's the Shoshone-Bannock Tribal Museum in Fort Hall, Idaho, or the Middlefield Cheese Factory in Middlefield, Ohio, Gordon looks for information about why this shared history is important, and what it honors and keeps alive.

"Like Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen's subjects [in the recently reviewed Presence of the Past] who focused not on the grand narratives of U.S. history but on the local, personal connections to the past, the creators of community exhibits," writes Gordon, "are motivated to display by the need 'to tell the story from our point of view.' "

The exhibits and collections in Gordon's book have not been vetted by panels of experts; the display cards are not coolly authoritative nor are there glossy exhibition catalogs. More often, there are handwritten index cards bearing such information as this one from the historical society in Fife Lake, Michigan, "NIDDY NODDY. A reel to wind and measure yarn. This was made by Mrs. Joseph Birgy's Grandfather."

Gordon, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington, points out that some of these small museums descend directly from the "dime" museums of the nineteenth century - interesting but dissimilar objects displayed because they are, at least to their curator, interesting. Ye Olde Curiosity Shop in Seattle , for instance, displays a mummy named Sylvester, a dessicated dog carcass ("Petri-Fido"), the flag from a Kamikaze plane, Native American crafts, a whale's penis and many other objects. "Every single nook and cranny is brimming with astonishing, wondrous new discoveries," according to its exhibition brochure. The Barnum-esque shop has been in the same location since 1899.

Professor Gordon understands that human beings like to keep stuff, and that somehow, a collection of 25,000 matchbooks, collected over 42 years, has a kind of narrative weight. Displayed in a barbershop in Sacramento, California, the matchbooks tell a story of what became a community project. People know the matchbooks are there, and in an increasingly smoke-free society, the matchbooks evoke an earlier time, when matchbooks were omnipresent and smoking was glamorous.

Written with a sense of humor and blissfully free of academic jargon, Private History in Public is a journey, literally and figuratively, through a past that has not been professionally curated. That past is, as Gordon makes clear, sometimes bizarre, often beautiful, always treasured.

"History is too important to be left to historians," says Henry Ford Museum & Greenfield Village president emeritus Harold Skramstad in the foreward to this engaging study. "The fact that community-based, entrepreneurial, and vernacular exhibitions exist is a wonderful affirmation of the importance of the past in people's lives."

Among the fresh ideas in Private History in Public are:

• These small museums display a skein of history that their creators feel has been neglected;

• They provide an opportunity for dialog that is often missing from professionalized history museums;

• The "curator" in these small exhibits and museums is often individual memory, or community memory.

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