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Countries with the most museums in the world (2021) (thelemmy.club)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/history@lemmy.world
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[–] 17 points 3 months ago (8 children)

The USA has the world record for the most museums.

https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/781353-most-museums-country

And if you want raw data, check out this PDF:

https://www.imls.gov/sites/default/files/museum_data_file_documentation_and_users_guide.pdf

Would you believe the list on Wikipedia?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_museums_in_the_United_States

You doubting the truth does not make it any less true.

I live in a very small town in the USA (~300 people), and we don't have a single museum. But I can drive to what counts as a "city" here, and visit 2 art museums, a science museum, and a history museum.

There are 53 museums within driving distance of my home.

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  • [–] 18 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    Also, this is the raw number of museums, and the US has a large population.

    The US has about four times as many people as Germany, and about 5 times as many museums. If you control for population, it doesn't seem so weird.

    What's weird is that China has so few museums, and India doesn't even make the list.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago

    this was my first thought. per capita would make more sense but then also like some people above where talking about museums and yeah there are like large city type museums and there are much smaller ones. My town has a historical society that basically runs a museum of the towns past but it would like fit in a large condo. Now the major city downtown has an art, natural history, science and industry, planetarium that are places people travel to see and our in buildings you can spend a whole day at and not see everything plus equaly interesting grounds. So there are museums and then there are museums.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    Nobody seriously doubts the numbers. What we doubt is that "Johns Donut Museum" & co belong on such lists.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Seriously. I scrolled randomly through a list, stopped and saw "Bangor Police Museum". I don't think you really need a museum for the police force of some random-ass city that didn't even exist 200 years ago

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    It's nice someone keeps track of their history though. Not saying it'd likely consider it a museum though.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago*

    Oh yeah archiving is very important. Here we have local archives for basically everything relevant they can put their hands on. For a funny contrast with my example above, my hometown is more than 1000 years old and only has a museum dedicated to the few famous painters that lived there for a while.

    Now that I think about it it's very much possible that the oldest parts of my parents' house are older than the city of Bangor

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