Renting History

House museums and historic sites have long functioned as unconventional providers of housing where employees who live onsite provide rental payments or exchange labor for housing. This article charts the growth of renting among house museums from the early twentieth century to the 1990s. House museums came to constitute a new class of landlord while tenants emerged as critical agents in the preservation of these sites. Whereas scholarship on the evolution of public history practice has focused on the public-facing labor of museum employees, shifting the focus to museum apartments reveals the intertwined nature of housing and labor in the growth of public history in the last century.