Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926 (Hardcover)

by Steven Conn (Author) "We begin with a visit..." (more)
Key Phrases: commercial museum, older natural history, museum builders, New York, United States, South Kensington (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
During the last half of the nineteenth century, Americans built many of the country's most celebrated museums, such as the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Chicago's Field Museum. In this original and daring study, Steven Conn argues that Americans built these institutions with the confidence that they could collect, organize, and display the sum of the world's knowledge. Examining various kinds of museums, Conn discovers how museums gave definition to different bodies of knowledge and how they presented that knowledge--the world in miniature--to the visiting public. 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 pathbreaking analysis is that museums of all kinds shared a belief that knowledge resided in the objects themselves. Using what Conn has termed an "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 By the first quarter of the twentieth century, however, museums had largely been replaced by research-oriented universities as places where new knowledge was produced.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.

Beautifully written and powerfully argued, Conn's work is a major contribution to our understanding of America's intellectual history.

From the Inside Flap

During the last half of the nineteenth century, many of the country's most celebrated museums were built. In this impressive study, Steven Conn argues that Americans, endowed with the belief that knowledge resided in objects themselves, built these institutions with the confidence that they could collect, organize, and display the sum of the world's knowledge. Conn describes how museums gave definition to different areas of scholarship, and how they occupied a central place in America's intellectual life.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 314 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; illustrated edition edition (December 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226114929
• ISBN-13: 978-0226114927
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
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• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,929,702 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)