After three centuries of development museum displays have become more diverse and stunning since the beginning of the 21st century. As exhibition is museums’ first line of contact with their visitors, museums are alike throughout the world in making every effort to organize exhibitions with new devices and techniques, with the hope to offer visitors an unique museum-visiting experience. Usually the historical displays are found the most boring and monotonous genre among museum exhibitions. But when museum exhibitions combine the social pulse, the nostalgia atomsphere, and innovative devices and methods, they do capture the visitors’ attention. The paper first reviews the development of museum exhibitions, and then analyzes the important factors in the past three centuries that shaped the development. Moreover, the tendency to favor the new and discard the old is a common personality trait among people today. Given so, the paper discusses the difficult situation faced by historical exhibitions. Does “new” mean better? Should anything old be tossed away? In the 21st century, we hope to find a new position for historical exhibition, trying to achieve perfect harmony between the old and the new. With new concepts and techniques developed in historical exhibitions, a new direction for history museums can be located. Also, in the paper some foreign cases are studied to analyze the successful factors of several history museums established in Japan in recent decades. Finally, it generalizes four key elements for the development of historical exhibitions in the future as sources of reference for museums both in theory and in practice.