‘To Polish and Adorn the Mind’: The United States Naval Lyceum at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, 1833–89

Abstract

The United States Naval Lyceum, a museum and library at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, offers a revealing insight into the history of American science, material culture, and museums. This article explores the Lyceum’s history to enlarge our understanding of the ways the nineteenth-century museums used artefacts of natural and human history to tell meaningful stories. The Naval Lyceum was a place where navy officers, as curators, could perform their worldliness, demonstrate their scientific expertise, and create connections to community and to the past, and where visitors might make emotional links to the worlds of nature and humanity.