As demonstrated by the Trump administration’s recent assaults on the Smithsonian and similar developments in Poland, Hungary, and elsewhere, museums remain a major flashpoint in culture wars and a key target of aspiring authoritarians around the globe. This development is nothing new: repressive regimes have long sought to control memory institutions and, with them, collective narratives around identity, belonging, and exclusion.

In this Crosstalk, Josh Arthurs and Irina D. Mihalache provide historical perspective into the dynamics of museums under dictatorship, exploring the interplay of political exigencies, museological practice, and the personal motivations of cultural workers in Mussolini’s Italy and Ceaușescu’s Romania.

Arthurs’ article examines a 1937 archaeological exhibition marking the bimillenary of the Emperor Augustus’ birth that is widely regarded as the apex of the Fascist cult of romanità (Romanness). Mihalache explores a museum of the Communist Party built in the 1960s in Bucharest, about which there is no contemporary collective recollection.