Features
International opening – The Legacy Museum, Alabama
This important new museum was created out of a wider campaign to confront the legacy of slavery, lynching and segregation in the US, finds Rebecca Swirsky
World view
Eleanor Mills talks to Nicholas Thomas, the director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge, about global cultures, collections and repatriation. Photography by Phil Sayer
Trendswatch – book clubs
Museums are starting a new chapter in an attempt to engage more people with their collections, says Deborah Mulhearn
Beauty and the beasts
Deborah Mulhearn discovers how museums are making animal magic in their displays on the natural world
Northern Lights
As the Great Exhibition of the North gets underway in Newcastle and Gateshead, Geraldine Kendall Adams looks at how the programme has come together against background of political upheaval.
On the money
Jonathan Knott finds the value of museums researching, interpreting and putting their collections of coins and medals on display
Just cause
Deborah Mulhearn discovers what museums are doing to mark the centenary of the 1918 Representation of the People Act, which gave some women the right to vote and paved the way for wider electoral reform
Being Brunel, SS Great Britain, Bristol
This museum on the life and work of the Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel deconstructs what he made and what made him. By Nicola Sullivan
Spyscape, New York
Eleanor Mills talks to Shelby Prichard, the chief of staff at this espionage museum, about tapping into visitors’ inner James Bond