| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Steven Conn. Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876–1926. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1998. Pp. viii, 305. $32.50.

This intelligent, entertaining study by Steven Conn examines the remarkable flowering of museums in the United States between 1876 and 1926, organized by the six categories in which museums sought to institutionalize knowledge: natural history, anthropology, commerce, history, art, and technology. Earlier museums were now characterized as collections "brought together with no purpose" (p. 8). The new museums instead provided wide public access to a "positivist, progressive, and hierarchical" worldview (p. 5). Whether in New York's Natural History Museum or the now-defunct Philadelphia Commercial Museum, physical objects, systematically ordered and displayed, were viewed as "the sites of meaning and knowledge" (p. 15). 1

The museum craze drew on the passion for order and rationality that also inspired the building of hospitals, libraries, and new universities. It also expressed the late Victorian "fascination with 'stuff'" evidenced in department stores and world's fairs (p. 13). More speculatively, Conn suggests that the United States has always been a visual culture, especially so at the turn of the century as non-English-speaking immigrants flooded the cities. For museum enthusiasts, universities occupied an inferior position, dispensing old knowledge rather than creating new. By the 1920s, the tables were turned. Universities gained a near-monopoly on the creation of knowledge. Museums educated school children, became cathedrals of art, or (as with the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village) served as tourist destinations that professionals viewed as exercises in nostalgia. . . .

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