Local Museums in the Epistemic Context of the Belle Époque. The Founding Fathers’ Dilemma

The present article is based on the disputes caused by the means of organising the central and local museums from La Belle Époque, in order to identify certain concepts regarding heritage, as well as certain arguments that supported such concepts. Considering the clashes or convergences between different epistemes of that time, the present paper  exploits the academic polemics in order to emphasise the ways in which the development of sciences was – more or less directly – reflected by the evolution of the representations of the past. Thus, these confrontations are illustrated by appealing to the dominant figures of the Romanian cultural life from the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century.

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