Those old ticket stubs from Britney Spears’ 2001 Oops!… I Did It Again Tour that you held onto for absolutely no reason may end up in a museum one day. At least that’s the gist of The National WWI Museum and Memorial’s latest exhibit opening Wednesday, January 27.
The Kansas City-based museum will feature “ephemera – objects usually meant to be thrown away, like ticket stubs, advertisements and written scraps,” from an archival collection that began in 1920.
“There is a wry sense of irony in objects meant to be short-lived that have lasted 100 years and are now preserved in a museum,” according to the museum’s press release.
The exhibit includes WWI-era dance cards, tickets, posters, and even a “Barometer of Feelings” chart that provided the British government a timeline of how women reacted to the war over the course of four years.
For the museum, the ordinary scraps from life “provide a wealth of historical information. Some were only used for their intended purpose and forgotten, others kept as souvenirs. But what they all have in common is the ability to tell the stories of the individuals who acquired them. The objects provide insight into those serving in wartime and context for a historical period shaped by a world in conflict, interpreting a catastrophic global event through human interaction.”
So next time someone criticizes you for keeping those ticket stubs, simply tell them that you are preserving history in the making.
