"Thoughts in things": Modernity, history, and North American museums

ISIS

Volumn 96, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 586-601

  Kohlstedt, Sally Gregory ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33744946458     PISSN: 00211753     EISSN: 15456994     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/498595     Document Type: Review

References (94)

1. Two sources that best reveal Goode's outlook are his "Museums of the Future," in Annual Report of the Regents of the Smithsonian Institution: Report of the U.S. National Museum, Pt. 2 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1901).
2. Principles of Museum Administration (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1895).
3. The former is reprinted with other essays and a biographical sketch in Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, ed., The Origins of Natural Science in America: The Essays of George Brown Goode (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), pp. 321-348 (quotation from p. 347);
4. will cite this version hereafter. His work consciously challenged any perception that fieldwork and systematics were mere data gathering, tedious, and technical and, therefore, contrasted with the new biology that was theoretical, experimental, and for that reason scientific. Goode reflected on modernity in various aspects of life, including art and its intersection with science: "The scientific tendencies of modern thought have permeated every department of human activity, even influencing the artist. Many art galleries are now called museums, and the assumption of the name usually tends toward the adoption in some degree of a scientific method of installation." Goode, "Museums of the Future," p. 333.
5. The phrase comes from Edward P. Alexander, Museum Masters: Their Museums and Their Influence (Nashville, Tenn.: American Association for State and Local History, 1983).
6. See W. Brekhus, "The Sociology of the Unmarked: Redirecting Our Focus," Sociological Theory, 1998, 16:34-51.
7. The term "unmarked," derived loosely from linguistics, is used in cultural studies to indicate elements taken for granted as ordinary or everyday. Edward Lurie demonstrates that Louis Agassiz wanted the Museum of Comparative Zoology to train naturalists and to stand as his legacy, but the facility and its collections also burdened the senior zoologist and, eventually, his son Alexander; see Edward Lurie, Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1960).
8. Nathan Reingold's pioneering Science in Nineteenth-Century America: A Documentary History (New York: Hill & Wang, 1964) scarcely notes where the geological and natural history specimens collected by key figures in the volume were to be housed and investigated.
9. In Robert Bruce's otherwise comprehensive account The Launching of Modern American Science, 1846-1876 (New York: Knopf, 1987), museums are not indexed, although their collections and curators are mentioned in relationship to leading natural history societies.
10. For North American museums, the best examples combine intellectual and institutional perspectives. See, e.g., Mary P. Winsor, Reading the Shape of Nature: Comparative Zoology at the Agassiz Museum (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1991);
11. Joel Orosz, Curators and Culture: The Museum Movement In America, 1740-1870 (Tuscaloosa: Univ. Alabama Press, 1990).
12. For an overview see Ronald Rainger, "Recent Books on the History of Museums," Biology and Philosophy, 1995, 70:235-248.
13. There are no biographies of Goods, but see the eulogies in A Memorial of George Brown Coode, in Annual Report of the Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, Report of the U.S. National Museum, Pt. 2 (cit. n. 1);
14. Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, "History in a Natural History Museum: George Brown Goode and the Smithsonian Institution," Public Historian, 1988, 10:1-26.
15. Goode, "Museums of the Future" (dt. n. 1), pp. 328, 331.
16. Henry Cole, director of London's South Kensington Museum (later the Victoria and Albert Museum) when it opened in 1857, was in some ways an inspiration to Goode, having also argued that museums played an important role in defining rational public culture. On the broader context see Juan Ilerbaig, "Pride in Place: Fieldwork, Geography, and American Field Zoology, 1859-1920" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. Minnesota, 2002).
17. Goode, "Museums of the Future," p. 330;
18. Otis Mason, "Culture History" (diagram on p. 50), Manuscripts and Pamphlet File, National Anthropological Association, Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Washington, D.C.
19. thank Juliet Burba for bringing this item to my attention. See also Curtis M. Hinsley, Jr., Scientists and Savages: The Smitlisonlan Institution and the Development of American Anthropology, 1846-1910 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1982), esp. Ch. 4:
20. "From Cultural History to Cultural Areas: Anthropology in the U.S. National Museum" (pp. 83-123).
21. Steven Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926 (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1998), p. 4.
22. Sally Gregory Kohlstedt and Paul Brinkman, "Framing Nature: The Formative Years of Natural History Museum Development in the United States," Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences, 2004, 55(Suppl. 1, no. 2):7-33
23. (this article was part of a special issue, entitled Museums and Other Institutions of Natural History: Past, Present, and Future, edited by Alan E. Leviton and Michele L. Aldrich).
24. Museums and Other Institutions of Natural History: Past, Present, and Future Ibid.
25. For a broader look at the ambitions of museum architects, whose designs influenced North American museum builders during this period, see Carla Yanni, Nature 's Museums: Victorian Science and the Architecture of Display (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1999).
26. Paul L. Farber, Finding Order in Nature: The Naturalist Tradition from Linnaeus to E. O. Wilson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2000).
27. On American efforts see W. Conner Sorensen, Brethren of the Net: American Entomology, 1840-1880 (Tuscaloosa: Univ. Alabama Press, 1995), esp. Ch. 12;
28. Mark Barrow, Jr., A Passion for Birds: American Ornithology after Audubon (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998).
29. On public visitors see Samuel J. M. M. Alberti, "The Museum Affect: Visiting Collections of Anatomy and Natural History," in Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences, ed. Aileen Fyfe and Bernard Lightman (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, in press).
30. The aspirations, trials, and day-to-day realities of museums founded by naturalists are evident in studies like Winsor, Reading the Shape of Nature (cit. n. 4). The responsibility could seem overwhelming, and the New York Academy of Science's members recalled that having a fire that destroyed their collections was, in fact, a blessing in disguise.
31. See Kohlstedt and Brinkman, "Framing Nature" (cit. n. 9), p. 13.
32. After demonstrating what he terms the "object-based epistemology" of this period, Steven Conn makes the provocative point that the assumptions about objects would be fundamentally challenged by Einstein's relativity, which relied on objects not at all: Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life (cit. n. 8), p. 4.
33. See Sophie Forgan's contribution to this Focus section and her '"But Indifferently Lodged . . .': Perception and Place in Building for Science in Victorian London," in Making Space for Science: Territorial Themes in Building for Science in Victorian London, ed. Crosbie Smith and Jon Agar (London: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 195-215.
34. On the American Museum of Natural History see Kohlstedt and Brinkman, "Framing Nature," pp. 1-23.
35. This orientation is understandable, as scholars sought to understand the rise of laboratory sciences and thought that fieldwork produced new knowledge only in the emerging field of ecology; see the then-pathbreaking work of Garland Allen, Life Sciences in the Twentieth Century (New York: Wiley, 1975); this outlook is also evident in much of the literature well into the 1990s.
36. Reingold, Science in Nineteenth-Century America (cit. n. 3), took the collections for granted when looking at the work of naturalists;
37. A. Hunter Dupree, Science in the Federal Government: A History of Policies and Activities to 1940 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1957), emphasized those who resisted having a museum as pan of the Smithsonian;
38. Bnice, Launching of Modern American Science (cit. n. 3), although it treated a somewhat earlier period, also included little about collections at the Smithsonian or in natural history societies.
39. Some examples are Robert E. Kohler, Landscapes and Labscapes: Exploring the Lab-Field Border in Biology (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2002);
40. Philip J. Pauly, Biologists and the Promise of American Life: From Meriwether Lewis to Alfred Kinsey (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000);
41. Gregg Mitman, Reel Nature: America's Romance with Wildlife on Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1999).
42. Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1992), esp. pp. 167-190;
43. Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 5, 1.
44. Ethnographic objects are particularly subject to scrutiny and reassessment, as in Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture (London: Routledge, 2000);
45. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991).
46. Donna J. Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 8;
47. Haraway, "Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City. 1908-1936," Social Text, 1984, 77:20-64.
48. A recent and nuanced discussion of class and race is Tony Bennett's "Selective Memory: Racial Recall and Civic Renewal at the American Museum of Natural History," in Pasts Beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 114-135.
49. Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, "Masculinity and Animal Display in Nineteenth-Century America," in Figuring It Out: Visual Languages of Gender and Science, ed. Bernard Lightman and Ann B. Shteir (Hanover, N.H.: Univ. Press New England, forthcoming);
50. Ronald Rainger, An Agenda for Antiquity: Henry Fairfleld Osborn and Vertebrate Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, 1890-1935 (Tuscaloosa: Univ. Alabama Press, 1991).
51. A detailed account focusing on the Hall of Africa is found in Jeannette E. Jones, '"In Brightest Africa': Naturalists' Images of Africa and the American Museum of Natural History, 1910-1936" (Ph.D. diss., State Univ. New York, Buffalo, 2003).
52. Susan Sheets-Pyenson, alerted to issues of colonial relationships through her research on the Peter Redpath Museum in Montreal, produced the single most comprehensive account of colonial museums: Cathedrals of Science: The Development of Colonial Natural History Museums during the Late Nineteenth Century (Kingston/ Montreal: McGill-Queens Univ. Press, 1988). Her account emphasizes the dedication of determined colonial administrators but does not ignore the fact that they also served as conduits for the "spoils of empire that swelled collections" in Britain and Europe (p. 5).
53. On the gathering of cultural authority see Paul DiMaggio, "Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston: The Creation of an Organizational Base for High Culture in American Society," Media, Culture, and Society, 1986, 4:33-55.
54. For a comparative perspective on Germany see Andreas W. Daum, "Science, Politics, and Religion: Humboldtian Thinking and the Transformations of Civil Society in Germany, 1830-1870," in Science and Civil Society, ed. Lynn Nyhart and Thomas H. Broman, Osiris, 2002, 17.-134-140;
55. H. Glenn Penny, "The Civic Uses of Science: Ethnology and Civil Society in Imperial German," Osiris ibid., pp. 228-252.
56. For a fascinating look at how these dynamics operated both in the field and among museums see Douglas Cole, Captured Heritage: The Scramble for Northwest Coast Artifacts (Vancouver: Univ. British Columbia Press, 1985).
57. The amount of data in registrar books and annual reports is enormous, but computers now make it possible to compile and correlate information that reveals patterns about timing, geography, and object types, as well as changing foci, in the biological, geological, and anthropological sciences. A digitization project involving more than 270,000 items at the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford provides striking evidence of how imperial connections drove museum collections; see http://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/dcf.html to see how their acquisitions came in by decade, by continent, and by source.
58. On museum practice see Mary Ann Andrei, "Breathing New Life into Stuffed Animals: The Society of American Taxidermists, 1880-1885," Collections, 2004, 7:149-195;
59. on field and museum preparations in paleontology see Paul Brinkman, "The Second American Jurassic Dinosaur Rush, 1895-1905" (dissertation in progress, Univ. Minnesota).
60. Barbara R. Stein, On Her Own Terms: Annie Montague Alexander and the Rise of Science in the American West (Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 2002);
61. Delia Griffin, "The Educational Work of a Small Museum," Proceedings of the American Association of Museums, 1907, 2:139-144;
62. Alice R. Northrop's Wanamaker Date Book, 1907-1914, Northrop Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Cambridge, Mass., which reveals some of her work in the museum and on excursions with New York City teachers.
63. Kohler, Landscapes and Labscapes (cit. n. 16);
64. Henrika Kuklick and Robert E. Kohler, eds., Science in the Field, Osiris, 1996, 11.
65. Ilerbaig, "Pride in Place" (cit. n. 6), underscores the tensions surrounding the reputations of naturalists, but he does not concentrate on museums.
66. Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions (New York: Macmillan, 1899) was, in part, a critique of the wealthy urban elite whose money was used to buy for themselves or their special causes - often museums - objects that were demonstrations of wealth. Natural history museums were favored by big game hunters who, increasingly restricted by hunting laws, could argue for special exemptions in order to donate trophies.
67. Susan Leigh Star, "Craft vs. Commodity, Mess vs. Transcendence: How the Right Tool Became the Wrong One in the Case of Taxidermy and Natural History," in The Right Tools for the Job: At Work in the Twentieth-Century Life Sciences, ed. Adele E. Clarke and Joan H. Fujimura (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1992), pp. 257-286.
68. Goode made this connection explicit in "Museums of the Future" (cit. n. 1)
69. because he hoped to encourage communities to invest in museums, another instance of what Lynn Nyhart and Thomas H. Broman discuss in their introduction to Science and Civil Society (see note 21, above).
70. Soraya de Chadarevian and Nick Hopwood, eds., Models: The Third Dimension of Science (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 2004);
71. Haraway, Primate Visions (cit. n. 18);
72. Karen Wonders, Habitat Dioramas: Illusions of Wilderness in Museums of Natural History (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1993).
73. Ann Shteir has noted that women, including the Mintorn family, were involved in creating backdrops for habitat groups; this. was discussed in her colloquium presentation '"Fac-Similes of Nature': Modeling Wax Flowers for Art, Science, and Profit," Univ. Minnesota, 9 Apr. 2005.
74. Cindy Sondik Aron, Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999).
75. One exception to the lack of information on early educational work in museums is Edward T. Klunk, "The Chicago Academy of Sciences: The Development and Method of Educational Work in Natural History" (Ph.D. diss., Loyola Univ., Chicago. 1995).
76. Horace Newton Winchell, "Museums and Their Purpose," Science, 24 July 1891, 18:43. This Minnesota geologist-turned-anthropologist was adamantly opposed to popular and ephemeral alternatives to the rational, systematic presentation of specimens at the University of Minnesota and newly founded Minnesota Academy of Sciences.
77. Suzanne Fischer, '"Diseases of Men' and Medical Authority in Early Twentieth-Century Milwaukee," paper presented to the Midwest Junto, Mar. 2005, provides one example of a network of anatomy museums that operated in the Midwest from the 1890s into the 1920s. Public exhibitions contributed to scientists' distrust of entertainment even as they heightened public interest.
78. See Orosz, Curators and Culture (cit. n. 4);
79. Andrea Stulman Dennett, Weird and Wonderful: The Dime Museum in America (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1997);
80. David Brett Mizelle, "To the Curious': The Cultural Work of Exhibitions of Exotic and Performing Animals in the Early American Republic" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. Minnesota, 2000).
81. Steven Allison-Bunnell specifically links the dioramas to this movement in his conference paper "Forward to Nature: Natural History Dioramas and the Idea of Wilderness," American Society for Environmental History, Tucson, Arizona, 15-18 Apr. 1999.
82. "Transporting a Rain Forest: Natural History Research as Public Exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution, 1960-1975" (Ph.D. diss., Cornell Univ., 1996).
83. A particularly important overview is Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Empire, ed. Roy MacLeod, Osiris, 2000, 15.
84. Regarding the widespread data for work on species distribution see, e.g., Jeremy Vetter, "Science along the Railroad: Expanding Field Work in the U.S. Central West," Annals of Science, 2004, 61:187-211;
85. Robert E. Kohler, All Creatures: Collectors, Biologists, and Biodiversity, 1850-1950 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, forthcoming).
86. The classic discussion of fairs and expositions is Robert Rydell, All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1984).
87. Randolph Stam, "A Historian's Brief Guide to New Museum Studies," American Historical Review, 2005, 110:68-98.
88. He argues that this "tidal wave" of museum studies "crested in the early 1990s" (p. 68) and further references Andrea Witcomb, Re-imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 147-162.
89. A parallel point is made in Daniel Wickberg, "Heterosexual White Male: Some Recent Inversions in American Cultural History," Journal of American History, 2005, 92:136-157. He suggests that "cultural historians need to be more like intellectual historians; they need to take ideas and language a lot more seriously than they have been willing to do" (p. 156).
90. Sharon Macdonald, "Posing Questions about the Purposes of Museums," rev. of Peter Vergo, ed., The New Museology, Current Anthropology, 1990, 31:225.
91. Recent exhibitions and conferences, e.g., have highlighted the historical and scientific role of museums, including "Curious in Our Way: The Culture of Nature in Philadelphia, 1740 to 1840," at the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, 23 June 2003-31 Dec. 2004.
92. an exhibition connected to a symposium on "Stuffing Birds, Pressing Plants, Shaping Knowledge: Natural History in North America, 1730-1860";
93. "Lost, Stolen, or Strayed: The Fate of Missing Natural History Collections," a conference held at the Naturalis Museum, Leiden, The Netherlands, 10-11 May 2000.
94. Kevin Winker, "Natural History in a Post Diversity Era," Bioscience, 2004, 54:455-459.