Thesis ID: CBB001561472

Nature under Glass: Popular Science, Professional Illusion and the Transformation of American Natural History Museums, 1870--1940 (2007)

unapi

Cain, Victoria Elizabeth Moffit (Author)


Columbia University
Foner, Eric


Publication Date: 2007
Edition Details: Advisor: Foner, Eric
Physical Details: 418 pp.
Language: English

This dissertation investigates the evolution of visual culture, the influence of consumer capitalism and Progressive educational reform and the contests over a changing scientific landscape in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century United States by exploring the transformation of American museums of natural history during this period. Though most natural history museums served as research libraries of natural objects in the 1870s and 1880s, by the 1940s they had become popular attractions that merged scientific research and elementary science education, environmental advocacy, vocational training, artistic spectacle and public entertainment. Nature Under Glass explains how and why social, scientific and cultural pressures caused museum workers to abandon the nineteenth-century conception of the museum as a laissez-faire province of independent research and transform their institutions into palaces of popular entertainment and education instead. Three overlapping epistemological paradigms contributed to this institutional evolution. The elaborate taxonomic arrangements of nineteenth century natural history museums embodied the era's object-based knowledge systems, but the early twentieth century demand for emotion-based interest in natural history eventually superseded this form of display and resulted in more frequent use of spectacular illusion. An interactive and sense-based approach to natural history, inspired by contemporary Progressive educational theory, soon entered museum halls as well. This dissertation details how these epistemologies informed the curatorial practices and politics of natural history museums in the United States, and demonstrates that consumer capitalism and Progressive education radically changed how museums represented natural history to the public. New forms of exhibition deepened the impending schism between research scientists and those engaged in the popularization and amateur study of the natural world, augmented image-makers' power to shape popular conceptions of science and nature, and revolutionized museums and their social roles.

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Description Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 68/01 (2007). Pub. no. AAT 3249066.


Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001561472/

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Authors & Contributors
Kohlstedt, Sally Gregory
Rosenberg, Gary D.
Lunde, Darrin
Patricia Coorough Burke
Lesser, Thomas A.
Cameron, Marlena Briane
Concepts
Natural history
Museums
Societies; institutions; academies
Popularization
Science and society
Paleontology
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, early
20th century
Early modern
Renaissance
21st century
Places
United States
Philadelphia, PA
Wyoming (U.S.)
New Brunswick (Canada)
Tokyo (Japan)
New York City (New York, U.S.)
Institutions
University of Wyoming
American Museum of Natural History
University of California, Berkeley
National Museum of Natural History (U.S.)
Smithsonian Institution
University of Minnesota
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