Opening the black box: an open‐source release of Maxent

Book Review| May 01 2022 Review: Curating America’s Painful Past: Memory, Museums, and the National Imagination, by Tim Gruenewald Curating America’s Painful Past: Memory, Museums, and the National Imagination by Tim Gruenewald. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2021. 304 pp.; 42 b&w images, notes, references, index; clothbound, $34.95; eBook, $26.49. Samantha Blair Schwartz Samantha Blair Schwartz Samantha Blair Schwartz, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar The Public Historian (2022) 44 (2): 136–138. https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2022.44.2.136 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Samantha Blair Schwartz; Review: Curating America’s Painful Past: Memory, Museums, and the National Imagination, by Tim Gruenewald. The Public Historian 1 May 2022; 44 (2): 136–138. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2022.44.2.136 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentThe Public Historian Search On a road trip taken during a move from Atlanta to Seattle in 2001, Tim Gruenewald was struck by the brutal differences in the preservation and commemoration of two historic sites—the site of the Wounded Knee Massacre and Mount Rushmore, both in South Dakota and involving the Lakota. In 2015, Gruenewald released the film Sacred Ground, which “explores the contrasting memories and mythologies about the American past” (xi) concerning these two sites. He continues this exploration of memory and mythology in Curating America’s Painful Past: Memory, Museums, and the National Imagination in what he refers to as a “sequel” to the film (xii). In his book, Gruenewald examines four museums located on the National Mall in Washington, DC: the National Museum of American History (NMAH), the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), and the National Museum of the American... You do not currently have access to this content.

Previous articleNext article FreeReviewsBulletin of the American Museum of Natural History. Vol. X. Article IV. A Complete Skeleton of Teleoceras fossiger. Notes upon the Growth and Sexual Characters of This Species. Henry Fairfield Osborn Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History. Vol. X. Article VI. A Complete Skeleton of Coryphodon radians. Notes upon the Locomotion of This Animal. Henry Fairfield Osborn Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History. Vol. X. Article VII. The Extinct Camelidae of North America and Some Associated Forms. J. L. Wortman Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History. Vol. X. Article XI. Evolution of the Amblypoda, Part I. Taligrada and Pantodonta. Henry Fairfield Osborn Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History. Vol. X. Article XII. Additional Characters of the Great Herbivorous Dinosaur Camarasaurus. Henry Fairfield Osborn W. T. LeeW. T. Lee Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Geology Volume 7, Number 3Apr. - May, 1899 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/608374 Views: 11 PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Archival News Yalie Kamara Archives Center, National Museum of American History at Smithsonian Institution This note is an edited version of a blog post originally published on the Smithsonian National Museum of American History website by Wendy Shay with contributions by Patricia Sanders. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Photograph of the Reverend Harold Mose Anderson. Courtesy of Patricia Sanders. The Reverend Harold Mose Anderson who had always been fascinated by the movies, saved his money and bought a home movie camera. Once he had it, he was seldom without it as he wandered the streets of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Much like a seasoned reporter, wherever he went, he always took time to load up the camera and check his film and equipment. The resulting motion picture, Reverend Harold Anderson's Black Wall Street Film, captured [End Page 350] from 1948 through 1952, has been preserved and made available for use by the National Museum of American History's Archives Center. Anderson's community was Greenwood, a neighborhood of particular cultural relevance in Tulsa, which is featured in the Power of Place exhibition of the new National Museum of African American History and Culture. Often referred to as "Little Africa" in the early years of the 20th century, it later became popularly known as "Black Wall Street." During a time in which segregation limited African-American housing options and prevented black customers from patronizing businesses that catered to white customers only, it had one of the largest concentrations of black-owned businesses in the country. Black Wall Street was a vibrant African American neighborhood with a thriving middle class and well-established institutions including schools, churches, and civic associations. In spite of its thriving nature, in 1921 Black Wall Street was the scene of a massive race riot during which hundreds of African American residents were killed and the neighborhood was burned to the ground. Born in 1922, Harold Anderson grew up hearing the stories and watching the neighborhood's rebirth. In addition to being a witness to the rebuilding and revival of the community, he was also a participant in it. As such, he documented the neighborhood's renewal with his 16mm motion picture camera. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Anderson's camera captured moments large and small within Tulsa's African American community. In this scene from the film, a young couple poses together while standing in front of the local movie theater. Anderson himself played a major role in the neighborhood's resurgence. A successful businessman, Anderson managed and then owned two [End Page 351] neighborhood movie theaters, a skating rink, a bowling alley, and a shopping strip, among other enterprises. He also brought the Golden Gloves boxing tournament to the area, making it accessible to African American fans. Anderson found it critical that Black Wall Street sustain independent African American businesses to ensure resident dollars would stay in the community and guarantee its future. Almost lost in a devastating house fire, Anderson's film recognizes the efforts and successes of the community. His film footage showed that by the 1940s Black Wall Street once again was home to active African American-owned businesses. He made a special effort to document the neighborhood's barbershops, groceries, taxi companies, jewelers, and other enterprises. He also captured its citizens in church, at school, participating in parades, and on the streets of the area. The film includes footage of Richard and Pat Nixon as they campaigned in Black Wall Street, which was the first time a vice presidential candidate visited the African American neighborhood. As a historic document the film provides a record of a significant time and place in African American history. It allows the viewer to feel the vibrancy of a community that triumphed over tragedy. For more information, visit americanhistory.si.edu/blog/black-wall-street. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences The Academy Film Archive has recently restored Cauleen Smith's 16mm short film Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (by Kelly Gabron) (1992). The archive, which holds the Cauleen Smith Collection, also recently made new prints of Smith's debut feature, drylongso (1998). Black Film Center/Archive at Indiana...

The evolution of a great mind: the life and work of Darwin

The Cover Design TILTING AT WINDMILLS ARTHUR P. MOLELLA At the beginning of the 1980s, the Smithsonian Institution’s Na­ tional Museum of History and Technology abruptly shed its original name, a designation that revealed its fundamental kinship with the Deutsches Museum and other national technical museums, to become the National Museum of American History (NMAH). The aim of the change was to repair an uncomfortable split in the museum’s identity, a rift that had evolved between the institution’s science and technol­ ogy departments, on the one hand, and the political and cultural history departments on the other. Example: transportation displays that focused on the technological development of railroads and auto­ mobiles, all but ignoring their effects on American cities and the American landscape. The refurbishing of the museum’s public image involved more than hoisting a banner to cover up an old name with a new one. At one time, it also included bold plans for a general face-lift of the building’s exterior. One such plan is represented by the architect’s sketch on the cover of this issue (fig. 1), showing a cluster of historic and modern windmills, some of them actually pumping water or gen­ erating electricity for the edification of museum visitors. Not shown in the sketch is a complementary treatment of the museum’s east side; there exists a similar architect’s drawing picturing a streamlined railroad locomotive on the lawn adjacent to the transportation hall. The instigator of these transformations was the museum’s newly appointed director, Roger G. Kennedy. When Kennedy announced the new name for the museum soon after his arrival at the Smithso­ nian, many believed that the institution had begun to renege on its original commitment to the history of technology and science. FeedDr . Molella is head of the Department of History and director of the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the National Museum of Ameri­ can History. He was Technology and Culture’s book review editor from 1983 through 1987, then an advisory editor until 1993.© 1995 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040- 165X/95/3604-0008$01.00 1000 Tilting at Windmills 1001 Fig. 1.—Technology and Culture’s fourteen-year home, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, might have looked something like this archi­ tect’s sketch if a proposed north front featuring a collection of old and new windmills had been accepted. But the only main-entrance change at the start of the 1980s was the museum’s name, which had been the National Museum of History and Technology. (Smithsonian Institution neg. 95-2679.) ing their apprehensions was the new director’s résumé. Unlike most of his predecessors, Kennedy was neither a technology nor science historian, but a banker, lawyer, and foundation officer with a keen avocational interest in the history of architecture.1 Fearing a down­ grading of science and technology, some loyalists of the old Museum of History and Technology went so far as to wage a campaign to restore the original name. Perhaps they were not aware that the same man who had rechristened the museum was simultaneously laying plans for a new institutional billboard giving pride of place to some enormous specimens of technology. Indeed, Kennedy turned out to be a good friend to the history of technology at NMAH. A devotee of architecture, but no fan of the building he found himself occupying, he was eager to experiment 'For a perceptive profile of Kennedy and his vision of the National Museum of American History, see Michael S. Durham, “Keeper of the Attic,” Americana 15 (No­ vember-December 1987): 43-48. 1002 Arthur P. Molella with ways of brightening the museum’s monolithic 1960s-style facade. The story of how windmills and locomotives almost found a home on the plaza of the National Museum of American History goes as follows. In early 1980, Kennedy asked the curatorial staff to submit sugges­ tions for artifacts to replace the fountain and surrounding landscap­ ing in front of the building. He wanted large objects that would lend visual interest to the facade and be suggestive of...

JntertexTs, vol. 1» no. 2, Fall 1997 Inner Anxiety and Outward Exploration: The American Museum of Natural History and the Central Asiatic Expeditions Ronald Rainger T e x a s T e c h U n i v e r s i t y In the 1920s and 1930s, New York’s American Museum of Natural History initiated some of the most extensive and highly publicized explo¬ rations of the early twentieth century. Promoted largely by the institution’s president, Henry Fairfield Osborn, the museum sent scientists, explorers and wealthy business associates to “the ends of the earth” to record information and return with specimen collections for the vast repository on Central Park West.^ During the 1920s and 1930s, the museum sponsored Lincoln Ellsworth’s bid to be the first to fly over the North Pole (Amund¬ sen), Carl Akeley’s expeditions for elephants which he would later display in the museum’s Theodore Roosevelt Memorial (Akelcy; Haraway 26-58), and William ICing Gregory’s efforts to capture gorillas in the Congo (Gregory and Raven). Through the museum’s use of “incessant and nationwide publicity” (Wissler, 203), the public avidly followed the exploits of these and other explorers (Perkins). Among the museum’s most famous endeavors were the Central Asiatic Expeditions of the 1920s. Conceived and led by the museum scientist Roy Chapman Andrews, these were aseries of eight explorations between 1922 and 1930 to the Gobi Desert of Mongolia for the purpose of discovering the “missing link.” The expeditions received extensive coverage in peri¬ odicals and the popular press. In addition, Andrews was idealized as an intrepid explorer, adashing, fearless young gentleman pursuing adaring adventure in aremote, mysterious region of the world. Andrews reinforced that image through radio presentations, his popular book. On the Trail of Ancient Man^ and anumber of autobiographical accounts (Andrews, Ends of the Earth-, Lafollette 55, 57-58). Yet Andrews’s expeditions and personal ambitions embodied more than an interest in adventurous fieldwork and specimen collection. The Central Asiatic Expeditions as well as the museum’s other efforts were the product of aparticular culture. They reflected the ideas and objectives of an early twentieth-century New York elite of politicians, businessmen, scientists, and sportsmen who had close associations with the American Museum of Natural History. For those individuals’ expeditions to the Arctic, Central Africa or Asia constituted scientific analogues to America’s expanding 1 7 7 1 7 8 I N T E R T E X T S political and economic power. The museum’s expeditions were also ameans for preserving traditional ideals and values, for sustaining the power and prestige of aparticular class and ethnic group in asociety that was becoming increasingly urban, technological and pluralistic. As articulated by Osborn and actualized by Andrews, the museum’s outward ventures were an effort to quell inner anxieties among the museum’s and the nation’s elites. Those concerns and objectives reflected the museum’s social structure. By the early twentieth century, the American Museum was one of the largest institutions of its kind in the world. Although apublic museum, its trustees and administration were dominated by such powerful figures as the financier J.P. Morgan, the politician Joseph Choate, and railroad presidents E. H. Harriman and Cornelius Vanderbilt. Those individuals were not interested in science per se; rather the museum reflected their civic, philanthropic, and proprietary interests. As devout Protestants of Scottish and English heri¬ tage, these were men who had created the YMCA and served on the board of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. They helped establish the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Public Librar>^ and other major civic cultural institutions (Satterlee; Mercer; Rainger 54-56). Originally the American Museum did not embody any specific policies or objectives, but given its leaders’ religious interests and concern for social welfare and social control, it was to serve as aplace where the urban masses could participate in an acceptable form of entertainment and could learn of nature’s bounty andmagnificence(Green). By the early twentieth century the museum’s leaders were emphasizing an additional theme: the presen'ation of the country’s flora, fauna, and physical environment. The commercial, industrial, and...

Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and ReviewsVolume 32, Issue 1 p. 2-4 IN MEMORIAM Judith Masters 1955–2022 and Fabien Génin 1971–2022 Massimiliano Delpero, Massimiliano Delpero Department of Life Sciences and Systems Biology, University of Turin, Turin, ItalySearch for more papers by this authorIan Tattersall, Corresponding Author Ian Tattersall [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0002-0640-8248 American Museum of Natural History, New York, New York, USA Correspondence Ian Tattersall, American Museum of Natural History, New York, NY, USA. Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author Massimiliano Delpero, Massimiliano Delpero Department of Life Sciences and Systems Biology, University of Turin, Turin, ItalySearch for more papers by this authorIan Tattersall, Corresponding Author Ian Tattersall [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0002-0640-8248 American Museum of Natural History, New York, New York, USA Correspondence Ian Tattersall, American Museum of Natural History, New York, NY, USA. Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author First published: 30 November 2022 https://doi.org/10.1002/evan.21968Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL No abstract is available for this article. Volume32, Issue1February 2023Pages 2-4 RelatedInformation

Cercomacra manu is a distinctive new species in the family Formicariidae. The species is distributed locally in southeastern Peru and adjacent Bolivia at elevations below 1,200 meters. C. manu is secretive and restricted largely to extensive bamboo thickets. The female is gray below; this unusual feature-along with other plumage and vocal characteristics-places C. manu within a species group that contains four other, allopatric South American taxa. We suggest that manu is closest to C. melanaria of eastern Bolivia and Mato Grosso, Brazil.

Early Cultures of the Valley of Mexico: Results of the Stratigraphical Project of the American Museum of Natural History in the Valley of Mexico, 1928-1933. George C. Vaillant. (Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, Vol. 35, Part 3: 281-328, New York, 1935.) - Volume 2 Issue 1

Walter A. FairservisJr,: Archeological [sic] surveys in the Zhob and Loralai districts, West Pakistan. (Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, Vol. 47, Part 2.) pp. 273–448, plates 14–38. New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1959. $4. - Volume 24 Issue 3

The highly respected ichthyologist, Clarence Lavett Smith, Jr. (Smitty), passed away on February 10, 2015, in Fort Collins, Colorado, at the age of 87. The majority of Smith's career (35 years, until 1997) was spent as a curator at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). Particularly newsworthy during his time at AMNH was his dissection with colleagues in 1975 of a coelacanth Latimeria spp., making the surprising discovery that these ancient fish were livebearers. Smith was raised in Hamburg in western New York and obtained his B.S. degree from Cornell University, M.S. degree from Tulane University, and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. While being schooled, Smith worked under the direction of such ichthyological stalwarts as Ed Raney and Reeve Bailey. Drafted by the Army in 1954 while working on his doctoral degree, he served in the Army Medical Corps at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C. and the Tropical Medical Research Laboratory in San Juan, Puerto Rico. In Puerto Rico, he discovered a love for the tropics and, in his spare time, even managed to describe two new species of blennies. In his career, Smith taught at a number of universities in the New York City region, in the south and midwest United States, and in Hawaii and Guam. Most of his summers were spent teaching or conducting research at biological stations, including Ohio State's F.T. Stone Lab on Lake Erie, the AMNH Lerner Marine Laboratory at Bimini in the Bahamas, and the Smithsonian's Research Station on Carrie Bow Cay, Belize. Smith wrote more than 100 scientific books and journal articles on fish, plus some popular works, including in 1994, Fishwatching: An Outdoor Guide to Freshwater Fishes. Though interested in anything ichthyological, Smith's primary research focuses were the biodiversity and community and behavioral ecology of coral reef fishes, especially in the Caribbean and Pacific, and the zoogeography and life histories of the freshwater fishes of New York State. However, he also published on many other topics, including classical comparative taxonomy and fossil and larval fishes. Although Smith was not truly a theorist, he did publish a useful primer on cladistics in the AFS Fisheries magazine in 1988 titled, “Minnows First, Then Trout,” as that approach to taxonomic classification became predominant. Smith was involved with many scientific and natural history societies, and he served in leadership and board positions with a number of Hudson River-related and other environmental organizations. His time spent living underwater as part of the Tektite Program and Hydrolab earned him membership in the exclusive New York Explorer's Club. While at AMNH, he also participated in themed tours for the public, leading snorkeling excursions on tropical coral reefs. Clarence Smith's famous coelacanth dissection in 1975. Smith is on the right. Photo credit: AMNH. Smith and wife Marjorie in lower left with his various students circa 1987. Photo credit: Moses Chang. I had the privilege of earning two graduate degrees under Smith's mentorship. Smith loved engaging graduate students, especially when piling us into his van and spending a day chasing spawning Sea Lampreys Petromyzon marinus just for the joy of it or a week in the field seining and electrofishing to collect specimens and contribute site data for his landmark 1986 publication, The Inland Fishes of New York State. As a student, I spent a good deal of time in his laboratory, which doubled as his office. With Smith's high visibility as an AMNH curator, I often heard him field telephone calls with all kinds of questions about fish from the public or reporters. After finishing such a phone conversation, he'd sometimes lean back in his chair, ruminate for awhile, and then say “You know John, life is an ichthyology exam.” If so, then Smith passed with the highest of grades.

On 23 March 1923, 18-year-old Ernst Mayr observed a pair of Red-crested Pochards Netta rufina on a pond in Mortizburg, Sachsen, Germany. This species had not been seen in Germany in over 75 years and this sighting changed the course of 20th-century ornithology and evolutionary biology, and marked the beginning of one of the most extraordinary careers in science. Ernst Mayr was born on 5 July 1904 in Kempten, Bavaria. He died on 3 February 2005 in Bedford, Massachusetts. His life spanned a century that saw remarkable changes in ornithology and evolutionary biology – changes in which he was an active participant. It is an impossible task to summarize such a life and accomplishments in a brief memorial, and I will not attempt to do so. Rather, I shall try to present a glimpse of Ernst Mayr as an ornithologist, scientist and person. Like many ornithologists, Mayr developed a strong interest in natural history and birds as a child. His family encouraged these activities but, when he graduated from the Gymnasium, he planned to pursue a career in medicine, a family tradition. Everything changed when his famous sighting of the Pochards led to a meeting with Professor Erwin Stresemann of the Berlin Museum. This was the first of a series of serendipitous events that shaped Mayr's career. Stresemann encouraged Mayr to abandon medicine in favour of ornithology. The availability of a curatorial position at the Berlin Museum spurred him to complete his PhD in 18 months, and at the age of 21. Shortly thereafter, the unavailability of Lord Walter Rothschild's bird collector led to an opportunity for Mayr to undertake a collecting expedition to New Guinea in 1928. While still in New Guinea, he was invited to join the Whitney South Sea Expedition of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in the Solomon Islands. The AMNH had no one with the background to curate and describe the birds of the Whitney Expedition and hired Ernst Mayr to do so in 1931, initially on a temporary and year-to-year basis. In 1932, Lord Rothschild was forced to sell his bird collection to the AMNH and Mayr became the first and only Whitney–Rothschild Curator. The first phase of Mayr's career, which began in Germany and continued throughout his tenure at the AMNH, was as a systematic ornithologist and biogeographer. During this period he described an amazing total of 26 new species, and 445 new subspecies of birds, mostly from Melanesia and the southwest Pacific. This remained an area of interest throughout his life, culminating with the publication of The Birds of Northern Melanesia (2001), co-authored with Jared Diamond. Mayr's extensive work on the nature and significance of geographical variation of birds of the southwest Pacific led directly to his ‘second career’ as an evolutionary biologist. He was invited to present a series of lectures on speciation in the Jesup Lectures at Columbia University. These lectures were published as Systematics and the Origin of Species (1942), establishing Mayr's position as one of the chief architects of the ‘neo-Darwinian synthesis’ that laid the basis for modern evolutionary biology. Questions about the nature of biological species and the processes that resulted in the formation of new species dominated Mayr's endeavours during his later years at the AMNH. This focus continued during his early years at the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) at Harvard University, where he moved in 1953 as an Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology, a position he held until his formal ‘retirement’ in 1975. These efforts resulted in the publication of his encyclopaedic Animal Species and Evolution (1963) and its abridged and revised version Populations, Species, and Evolution (1970). Mayr's attempt to grapple with the nature of biological species and other problems of evolution, and his long-standing interest in the philosophy of science, led to his ‘third career’ as a historian and philosopher of biology. These interests became increasingly dominant during his later years at Harvard, but really flourished after his ‘retirement’. He produced a series of books that will define these areas for subsequent workers: Evolution and the Diversity of Life (1976), The Growth of Biological Thought (1982), Toward a New Philosophy of Biology (1988), One Long Argument (1991) and What Makes Biology Unique? (2004). The last book appeared a month after his 100th birthday, capping a career that resulted in a staggering list of over 850 publications. Mayr's extraordinary scientific productivity can be attributed to several factors. He had a photographic memory and could recount details of papers that he had read decades previously. His commitment to science was absolute – he probably worked on one or more manuscripts every day of a professional life that spanned more than 80 years. Even while ‘relaxing’ at his summer home in New Hampshire, he would rise early in the morning and dictate non-stop for 3–4 h. The tapes were delivered to his secretary in Cambridge for transcription into first drafts of manuscripts. His command of the English language was remarkable, and his simple and concise prose made even complex ideas accessible to his readers. As an ornithologist, Mayr was a generation ahead of most of his colleagues. He joined the American Ornithologists’ Union in 1927, prior to moving to America. However, he was unenthusiastic about the state of ornithological research in North America, as evidenced by his comments on the papers presented at the first AOU meeting that he attended in Detroit in 1931. In an interview in November 2003, he recounted that he was ‘terribly bored by the triviality of the lectures – it was all about a new breeding record for so-and-so's warbler for the state of South Dakota or an early arrival date for so-and-so's sparrow in California’. Although most of his ornithological publications related to systematics, this reflected the constraints of his employment more than his interests. He had a broad understanding of the behaviour, ecology and biogeography of birds, and developed innovative ideas in these areas in his doctoral thesis and other publications. The patterns of avian distribution and ecology that were the focus of North American ornithology in the early decades of the 20th century were less interesting to him than were the processes that generated these patterns. He ‘escaped’ the boring paper sessions at the 1931 AOU meeting and went to the library, where he met a kindred spirit, Margaret Morse Nice. Mayr and Nice worked over the next several decades to introduce North American ornithologists to the innovative work in avian ethology and breeding biology that was being conducted by researchers in Western Europe. Mayr was instrumental in the publication of Nice's monumental study on the life history of the Song Sparrow Melospiza melodia, a work that was the starting point for many areas of modern avian population biology. Among those who knew Ernst Mayr only casually through brief exposures at scientific meetings, he had a reputation as being somewhat aloof, even cold. His incisive questions were frequently damaging to the egos and confidence of their recipients. However, there was no malice in Mayr's comments. He was single-minded in his pursuit of truth and accuracy in science, and asked the same questions of a beginning graduate student that he would of a senior colleague. Those who were fortunate enough to know him personally describe a different Ernst Mayr. He was a warm and gentle individual who was especially supportive of young scientists. He delighted in inviting students and other academic waifs to evening socials at his home in Cambridge, or to join family celebrations on his farm in New Hampshire at Thanksgiving (where they would be invited to help cut the year's supply of firewood). In his early years at the AMNH he encouraged many young ‘birders’ to pursue scientific studies of the birds that they were observing. After he became famous, he would spend hours providing detailed and encouraging comments on unsolicited manuscripts received from students. He was a demanding, but supportive and helpful, graduate supervisor. Ernst Mayr was a superb naturalist who savoured the natural world around him. He felt considerable regret that the constraints of his career had limited the amount of time that he had been able to devote to the study of living birds. His interests went far beyond birds. In his later life, acceptances of invitations to give lectures around the world would be accompanied by requests that he be helped to observe some local ornithological speciality or other natural feature. He was perhaps happiest when he was guiding groups of visiting friends around his New Hampshire farm, sharing his profound knowledge of the local natural history with them. He was a man of deep social conscience. At the end of World War II, Ernst and Gretel Mayr worked with a number of North American ornithologists to help provide relief to their colleagues in Germany and Western Europe. In the 1960s Mayr was deeply opposed to the Vietnam War and the politicians who supported it. He was one of the first recipients of the National Medal of Science in 1969, but travelled to Washington to accept it from Richard Nixon only because it provided an opportunity for his grandchildren to visit the White House. Most of the royalties from his books and the honoraria associated with the many prizes that he received were directed to support the library at the Museum of Comparative Zoology (now the Ernst Mayr Library), to an endowment to the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panamá to support the research of students from developing nations, to the Nature Conservancy, and to other similar philanthropies. The honours and awards bestowed on Ernst Mayr during his life are too numerous to list. Working in a field that was not eligible for a Nobel Prize, he captured the ‘triple crown’ of biology: the Balzan Prize (1983), the International Prize for Biology (1994) and the Crafoord Prize (1999). He received honorary degrees from 17 institutions, including both Oxford (1966) and Cambridge (1982). Prizes from scientific societies included the Godman–Salvin Medal from the BOU (1994), the Wallace Darwin Medal (1958) from the Linnean Society of London, and the William Brewster Memorial Award (1965) from the American Ornithologists’ Union. He was an honorary member of no fewer than 48 scientific societies. He was especially proud of his recognition by fellow ornithologists and was an Honorary Member of the BOU (1956) and ten other ornithological societies. I visited Ernst at his beloved farm in southern New Hampshire on the occasion of his 100th birthday in July 2004. As we sat and chatted, he drew my attention to the song of a Wood Thrush Hylocichla mustelina. He was excited by this and launched into an animated description of how, over the previous 50 years, he had observed the almost complete disappearance of this bird from the area and of its gradual replacement by the Veery Catharus fuscescens. He was an ornithologist at the beginning and at the end! A symposium celebrating the 100th birthday of Ernst Mayr was held during the 122nd Stated Meeting of the American Ornithologists’ Union in Québec, Canada, in August 2004. The papers presented in this symposium have been published recently (Bock, W.J. & Lein, M.R. (eds.). 2005. Ernst Mayr at 100: Ornithologist and Naturalist. Ornithological Monographs no. 58) and provide extensive information on many of the topics covered in this obituary. This monograph also includes a complete bibliography of Ernst Mayr by Jurgen Häffer, along with a DVD containing excerpts from a video-taped interview with Ernst Mayr in November 2003.

Evolution writ large

Darwin An exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History

This thesis will focus on three museums: the American Museum of Natural History in New York, New York, the Mobile Museum of Art in Mobile, Alabama and the Morikami Museum in Del Ray Beach, Florida. Overall the museums took surprisingly different approaches to designing their exhibits. The American Museum of Natural History gave a general overview of Japan and China. The Mobile Museum of Art focused only on pottery and the Morikami Museum focused on the Japanese immigrants that settled in Del Ray Beach. Differences and similarities of these museums and what these exhibits tell the viewer about the two cultures will be addressed in this thesis. It will present a view on what these museums could have done differently to better explain the uniqueness of Japan and China. The American Museum of Natural History and the Mobile Museum of Art presented Japan and China as static and unchanging cultures; this is far from the truth. On the other hand, the Morikami Museum showed how the Japanese immigrant community is a rich community that has changed over time. The Morikami Museum created a unique exhibit that immersed the viewer into the Japanese culture and really showed what meaning the artifacts held in the culture, which is something the other museums failed to do.