Museums and American intellectual life, 1876-1926

Book

Museums and American intellectual life, 1876-1926 / Steven Conn.

Summary:

Conn's study includes familiar places like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Academy of Natural Sciences, but he also draws attention to forgotten ones, like the Philadelphia Commercial Museum, once the repository for objects from many turn-of-the-century world's fairs. What emerges from Conn's analysis is that museums of all kinds shared a belief that knowledge resided in the objects themselves. Using what Conn has termed "object-based epistemology," museums of the late nineteenth century were on the cutting edge of American intellectual life. By the first quarter of the twentieth century, however, museums had largely been replaced by research-oriented universities as places where new knowledge was produced. According to Conn, not only did this mean a change in the way knowledge was conceived, but also, and perhaps more importantly, who would have access to it.

Record details

ISBN: 0226114929 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN: 9780226114927 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN: 0226114937
ISBN: 9780226114934
Physical Description: 305 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.
Publisher: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, c1998.

Content descriptions

Bibliography, etc. Note:: Includes bibliographical references (p. 263-293) and index.
Formatted Contents Note:: 1. Museums and the Late Victorian World 2. "Naked Eye Science": Museums and Natural History 3. Between Science and Art: Museums and the Development of Anthropology 4. The Philadelphia Commercial Museum: A Museum to Conquer the World 5. Objects and American History: The Museums of Henry Mercer and Henry Ford 6. From South Kensington to the Louvre: Art Museums and the Creation of Fine Art 7. 1926: Of Fairs, Museums, and History.