Picturing Nature and Childhood at the American Museum of Natural History and the Brooklyn Children's Museum, 1899-1930

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yearly visit to a science museum is an iconic feature of the childhoods of twenty-first-century American schoolchildren; however, in the early twentieth century, such visits were novelties. The American Museum of Natural History (founded 1869) and the Brooklyn Children's Museum (founded 1899) both began serious educational efforts with children in the New York City public schools in the first decade of the twentieth century. In this article, I will show how museum personnel represented child patrons' museum experiences to their donors, supporters, and the public, investigating links between the way each museum pictured the intersections of science, pedagogy, and childhood in the museum setting, and larger understandings about the way that modern knowledge advanced according to social class. Science, perceived as a powerful force, was understood as an integral part of the Progressive Era's ideology of cultural advancement; the adults teaching science to children in museum con- texts were mediating knowledge and teaching habits of mind that they viewed as profoundly important. In the magazines, films, and publicity that each museum produced for its networks of supporters and for the public, child patrons appeared in photo- graphs, offering proof of the museum's good works. Historians agree that the widespread interest in childhood during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era coincided with the growing popularity of everyday photography in a mutually reinforcing way, resulting in a plethora of representations of children in photo- graphs around the turn of the twentieth century. 1