To organize and display : museums and American culture, 1876-1926 / Steven Conn.

Format:

Book

Manuscript

Microformat

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Conn, Steven.

Contributor:

Kuklick, Bruce, 1941- advisor.

University of Pennsylvania.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Penn dissertations--History.

History--Penn dissertations.

Local Subjects:

Penn dissertations--History.

History--Penn dissertations.

Physical Description:

x, 417 leaves ; 29 cm

Production:

1994.

Summary:

Between this country's Centennial and its Sesqui-centennial, the years described in this dissertation, America changed from a rural society to an urban society, from one whose white population came mostly from northern and western Europe, to one filled with new arrivals from southern and eastern Europe. Of all the transformations witnessed during this period this dissertation is concerned primarily with two nearly simultaneous upheavals. On one hand, the Civil War announced with fury the arrival of America's industrial future, which though it promised much, also proved profoundly unsettling. On the other, Darwin's Origin of Species, published in 1859, began to find an American audience during the war years. Darwin irrevocably changed the way Americans understood the world around them, though less tangibly perhaps than the transformation brought on by industrialism.

Museums are particularly fruitful places to examine these twin revolutions because they represent extraordinary places of intersection. A museum's success depends on the interaction and cooperation of curators, collectors, patrons, intellectuals, and the visiting public. The halls of a museum are unique places where these people and their different ideas and assumptions come together. This study views museums as the sites of intellectual and cultural debates, where the prevailing cultural ideas and assumptions of American society were put on display, and where changes in those assumptions were reflected.

This project examines five Philadelphia museums between 1876 and 1926, the Academy of Natural Sciences, the University Museum, the Commercial Museum, the Mercer Museum, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, to see what they reveal about the world-views of those who organized and visited them, and of the larger American society. By looking at a configuration of museums in the same city, rather than at a single institution, I will better be able to see how collaboration, competition, and interaction between institutions worked to shape knowledge and ideas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Notes:

Supervisor: Bruce Kuklick.

Thesis (Ph.D. in History) -- Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania, 1994.

Includes bibliographical references.

Local Notes:

University Microfilms order no.: 95-03747.

OCLC:

187466236