Essay Review: museums: revisiting sites in the history of the natural sciences.

Abstract

Arguably the most productive sites for research and publication on the natural sciences in the nineteenth century, at least in North America, were the often architecturally dramatic museums of natural history and geology. Built in major cities and some smaller towns, on college and university campuses, and even within the estates of wealthy patrons, natural history museums were symbols and centers for science. In recent years historians of science, as well as anthropologists and sociologists, have concentrated on locations significant for modem scientific research activity, particularly the early academies and the scientific laboratories of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 1 Somewhat surprisingly, to date relatively little historical attention has been paid to the scientific institution most visible to the general public and most essential to those involved in the exploration and ordering of the world's natural phenomena throughout the nineteenth century, and indeed to the present day. Natural history museums were the principal location for dialogues and the exchange of specimens among those debating the identification and connection among natural objects (and, later, human artifacts). Informal staff conversations, routine and pivotal decisions about the display of objects, the codification of specimen identities, and the explanations in museum publi-