There is a vast array of museums around the world suiting all kinds of tastes. Even the extremely bizarre museums such as the Toilet Museum in Delhi or the Museum of Torture in Prague attract masses of tourists each year. However, a recent survey by Reach Advisors carried out amongst 5.500 Americans showed that visiting historical sites and historical museums is disappointingly less popular among tourists than the stranger museums mentioned above. The results tend to suggest that people visit historical museums just because they happen to be in the same town or city they are visiting for different reasons. In other words, very few people travel to a place in order to visit an historical museum. People, if going somewhere to visit a museum, tend to favour museums of a more brutal and rarer nature.
Whether pretending to be cultural minded or not, 62% of those surveyed claimed that they visit historical museums as they wish to emerge themselves in the past. On a similar note, 85% said that they feel it is important to preserve the past and remind ourselves of it. Unfortunately, the answers of the remaining 15% in this category were not disclosed. They would have certainly provided some food for thought. If people believe history means nothing and is a mere and irrelevant detail, then where do they think we come from?
The survey managed to help researchers reach the conclusion that historical museums need to work more on attracting women, especially women with children. Men tend to go for this segment more than their female counterparts. Men are apparently even more likely to take their children to historical museums than their wives are. This is valid for all age groups of men and even for children under and over 10 years of age. In terms of race, it was revealed that Caucasian people go for historical museums more than any other group of people in America, with American Asians being the least frequent visitors. The sad yet blatant fact deriving from the survey as a whole is the fact that families nowadays in the United States prefer to do other things than visit historical museums. Indeed, just 31% of such a group of people have even been to any historical museum. It seems museum need to do a lot of advertising work for the situation to change.