‘The Direct Medium of the Vision’: Visual Education, Virtual Witnessing and the Prehistoric Past at the American Museum of Natural History, 1890-1923

Abstract

In the early 20th century, artists and administrators at New York City’s American Museum of Natural History relied upon the tools of visual education to help visitors ‘virtually witness’ the prehistoric past. This decision to reconstruct a world no one had ever seen aroused hot debate among the museum’s staff. Reconstructions forced the museum’s scientists, artists and administrators to decide whether emotional, scientific or artistic truths were in conflict and, if so, which should take priority. The conflicts over the museum’s reconstructions of the past illuminate the difficulties of rendering information that could not be verified by eyewitnesses, and the limitations of visual education when it came to representing scientific and historical information.