Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.3 | The History Cooperative

Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926. By Steven Conn. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. vii, 305 pp. $32.50, isbn 0-226-11492-9.)

Steven Conn's masterly study of late-nineteenth-century American museums transports the reader to a strange and wonderful intellectual universe. In the late 1800s, he argues, museums were the preeminent center and source of knowledge production in a wide variety of disciplines; museums placed a premium on making new scholarship publicly accessible, and visual learning in the form of looking at museum objects was central to the public dissemination of scholarly knowledge. Far from representing elitist bastions of privilege and exclusivity, museums in the fields of history, art, anthropology, natural history, and even commerce sought to extend public knowledge and understanding of the world, not as the popularizers of knowledge created in university-centered seats of academic learning, but as the repositories of material evidence from which even the "untrained observer" could ascertain historical truth, scientific fact, and sophisticated knowledge about aesthetics and the natural world. . . .

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