In a startling passage near the beginning of Useful Objects: Museums, Science, & Literature in Nineteenth-Century America, Reed Gochberg describes Charles Willson Peale's 1792 proposal to preserve the corpses of the Founding Fathers’ “by the use of powerful antisepticks.” The nation would greatly benefit, Peale assured the American Philosophical Society, if he could “hand down to succeeding generations, the relicks of such great men” (44). If not, portraits would have to do.One can only imagine what the public might have made of a Benthamized George Washington; Gochberg's lively account of early nineteenth-century museums and their audiences suggests that reactions might have run the gamut. Gochberg places her readers in many familiar destinations—Peale's American Museum, the British Museum, the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology—but peoples them with skeptical observers. “I hate museums,” writes Henry David Thoreau. “They are dead nature collected by dead men.” This did not stop Thoreau “murdering” a turtle to send to Harvard Professor Louis Agassiz, a tension that animates Gochberg's timely book.As nineteenth-century museums made “promises to provide useful knowledge to increasingly broad audiences,” Gochberg shows, they encountered “varied and competing responses that many visitors, writers, and critics took away from the collections they established” (190–91). Observers interrogated the museums they visited, bringing “competing notions about expertise” and their own ideas about “what would be preserved, valued, and considered worthy of study” (2–3). Using interdisciplinary methods of literary criticism, material culture studies, and intellectual history, Gochberg presents an engaging account of these overlapping, multivocal, and contradictory conversations about museums’ authority.Gochberg's subjects inhabit “a transitional period in disciplinary formation,” between the early modern “cabinets of curiosity” and emergence of more specialized museums in the second half of the nineteenth century (7). The studies in Useful Objects are arranged chronologically, beginning with the American Philosophical Society's circulating cabinet in the 1770s and continuing through the first half of the nineteenth century, with tendrils following William James past the 1870s. The overall impression is not so much change over time as an extended moment of possibility, with recurring themes and anxieties. Gochberg highlights ongoing conversations about loss, decay, and preservation, as well as a constant push and pull over the meaning of expertise.While many previous works have explored early museums’ claims to authority, Gochberg is more interested in observers who questioned that authority. A title like Useful Objects might imply a book about the strong connection between museum collections and extractive capitalism or imperial expansion, but Gochberg is more interested in interrogating her own title from the perspective of the writers, visual artists, and critics who populate her pages. “Useful” to whom? To what end? And how does something dynamic—a museum visitor's shadow, a community of bees, a Walden Pond turtle—become an object?Some of Gochberg's historical actors are luminaries of the American literary canon: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman. Others are known to scholars, but less familiar to a wider audience: the Ojibwe author Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, the artist Orra White Hitchcock, the self-educated fugitive William Wells Brown. Gochberg offers lively readings of these giants, often focusing on their lesser-known essays or journal entries, as well as intriguing re-readings. In one fascinating section, Gochberg examines the work of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, whose white husband, Henry, expropriated her stories for his own ethnographic and scientific racist purposes. “Yet,” Gochberg argues, “across her own writings—and even in some of Henry's, Jane's voice emerges to question his position as an expert observer” (70).At a time when museums are undergoing another period of interrogation and transition, Useful Objects is itself a useful history. The tension between curatorial authority and the intellectual work of people who staked their own claims to museums will interest scholars, students, and museum professionals alike. Gochberg features the author William Wells Brown's enthusiasm for the British Museum as a place where he can celebrate his self-education and prove his “aesthetic capacity,” and explore the diminished horizons of the artist Orra White Hitchcock, whose private diaries reveal both her own paleontological expertise and her deference to the professional success of her professor husband. There is, perhaps, a bit more room for Gochberg's discussion of the private collecting practices of women and people of color, as suggested by her reading of the Plumfield natural history museum in Louisa May Alcott's Little Men and one of an “Afric-American Picture Gallery” imagined by William J. Wilson in 1859. Gochberg sticks with the literary sources, though one could easily imagine her book “sparking” many fruitful inquiries into more concrete practices.Teachers looking to assign Useful Objects to undergraduate students will find its deliberate structure helpful. Each chapter has a clearly marked introduction and conclusion, and is subdivided into focused readings of particular texts. A standout chapter on Emerson, Whitman, and the United States Patent Office Gallery (which Whitman knew during its time as a Civil War hospital) could be assigned separately in any course in American Studies, history, or literature. Yet, at a brisk 192 pages, there is no real need to leave anything out.Near the end of Useful Objects, Gochberg explores the connection between William James’ experiences as a collections assistant to Harvard professor Louis Agassiz and the relationship between museum work and James’ Pragmatism, the idea that “theories of truth must be flexible enough to accommodate new experiences” (180). It is an apt note for discussions about modern museums. In reading Gochberg's book, we may find that there is not much “new” about the demands to the question the underlying assumptions of museum collections—their violence, their categories, their audiences. These discussions are as old as the museums themselves. By exploring their nineteenth-century incarnations, Gochberg provides a useful opportunity to discuss their present and future.