Representing Tradition in an Age of Progress: Technology and American Identity in Exhibitions and Museums, 1824--1952 (2009)
Sneddon, Matthew T. (Author)
University of Washington
Hevly, Bruce
Edition Details: Advisor: Hevly, Bruce
Physical Details: 280 pp.
Language: English
One of the central tasks of this dissertation is to examine what role the promotion of technological and scientific progress plays in the construction of national identity. For over two centuries exhibitions of the industrial arts, science, and technology at fairs and museums provided sites where millions of Americans encountered and voiced ideas about the relationship between technology and the nation's past, present and future. Efforts to reconcile technological and scientific changes with tradition at these places put fundamental values on display in architecture and exhibits. I argue that national identity is rooted in the negotiation between the old and new, between ideas of tradition and progress. Through this lens the political and cultural contexts that underlay the promotion of technological and scientific progress come to the foreground. My approach maps physical places that embodied important changes in this reconciliation, from Carpenters' Hall in early nineteenth-century Philadelphia to Seattle's Museum of History and Industry in the mid twentieth century. The path from north to south to west shows the transition from promoting progress with a past steeped in the legacy of the Revolution, republican ideology, and Yankee ingenuity, to a past animated by the West as America and frontier metaphors. Although connecting technological and scientific achievements to a uniquely American heritage was on the face of it a nationalist exercise, each map site has shown the regional dimension of this project. Northern, southern, and western exhibitions drew on historicized national ideals in ways that aligned with regional agendas, whether the classical republican rhetoric of northern exhibitions used to support protectionist economic policies, or the frontier metaphors of western fairs to celebrate the natural resource extraction and development of the West. Across time and space, the map reveals a nation that has valued progress alongside appeals to a historical legacy of liberty, freedom, independence, and opportunity as some of the most enduring touchstones of national identity.
...MoreDescription Cited in ProQuest Diss. & Thes. . ProQuest Doc. ID 305013246.
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