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Author: Carin Berkowitz
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822982757
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 349
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Book Description
The nineteenth century witnessed a dramatic shift in the display and dissemination of natural knowledge across Britain and America, from private collections of miscellaneous artifacts and objects to public exhibitions and state-sponsored museums. The science museum as we know it—an institution of expert knowledge built to inform a lay public—was still very much in formation during this dynamic period. Science Museums in Transition provides a nuanced, comparative study of the diverse places and spaces in which science was displayed at a time when science and spectacle were still deeply intertwined; when leading naturalists, curators, and popular showmen were debating both how to display their knowledge and how and whether they should profit from scientific work; and when ideals of nationalism, class politics, and democracy were permeating the museum's walls. Contributors examine a constellation of people, spaces, display practices, experiences, and politics that worked not only to define the museum, but to shape public science and scientific knowledge. Taken together, the chapters in this volume span the Atlantic, exploring private and public museums, short and long-term exhibitions, and museums built for entertainment, education, and research, and in turn raise a host of important questions, about expertise, and about who speaks for nature and for history.
Author: Carin Berkowitz
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822982757
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 349
Get Book Here
Book Description
The nineteenth century witnessed a dramatic shift in the display and dissemination of natural knowledge across Britain and America, from private collections of miscellaneous artifacts and objects to public exhibitions and state-sponsored museums. The science museum as we know it—an institution of expert knowledge built to inform a lay public—was still very much in formation during this dynamic period. Science Museums in Transition provides a nuanced, comparative study of the diverse places and spaces in which science was displayed at a time when science and spectacle were still deeply intertwined; when leading naturalists, curators, and popular showmen were debating both how to display their knowledge and how and whether they should profit from scientific work; and when ideals of nationalism, class politics, and democracy were permeating the museum's walls. Contributors examine a constellation of people, spaces, display practices, experiences, and politics that worked not only to define the museum, but to shape public science and scientific knowledge. Taken together, the chapters in this volume span the Atlantic, exploring private and public museums, short and long-term exhibitions, and museums built for entertainment, education, and research, and in turn raise a host of important questions, about expertise, and about who speaks for nature and for history.
Author: Reed Gochberg
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197553486
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
'Useful Objects' examines the cultural history of nineteenth-century American museums through the eyes of writers, visitors, and collectors. Throughout this period, museums gradually transformed from encyclopedic cabinets to more specialized public institutions. These changes prompted wider debates about how museums determine what objects to select, preserve, and display-and who gets to decide. Drawing on a wide range of archival materials and accounts in fiction, guidebooks, and periodicals, this text shows how the challenges facing nineteenth-century museums continue to resonate in debates about their role in American culture today.
Author: Hooley Michael Graham McLaughlin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9780367787752
Category : Science museums
Languages : en
Pages : 94
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Book Description
Science Museums in Transition is intended to further discussion and debate on how museums address the political and social ramifications of science and, as such, should be of great interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students of museum studies, science, anthropology, education and history.
Author: Steven Conn
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226114934
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 318
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Book Description
Conn's study includes familiar places like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Academy of Natural Sciences, but he also draws attention to forgotten ones, like the Philadelphia Commercial Museum, once the repository for objects from many turn-of-the-century world's fairs. What emerges from Conn's analysis is that museums of all kinds shared a belief that knowledge resided in the objects themselves. Using what Conn has termed "object-based epistemology," museums of the late nineteenth century were on the cutting edge of American intellectual life. By the first quarter of the twentieth century, however, museums had largely been replaced by research-oriented universities as places where new knowledge was produced. According to Conn, not only did this mean a change in the way knowledge was conceived, but also, and perhaps more importantly, who would have access to it.
Author: Christoph Irmscher
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547577672
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 453
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Book Description
A provocative new life restoring Agassiz--America's most famous natural scientist of the 19th century, inventor of the Ice Age, stubborn anti-Darwinist--to his glorious, troubling place in science and culture.
Author: Stephen M. Cohen
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0197545505
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 545
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Book Description
"Over twenty years have passed since the First Edition was published in 1998; in that time changes both technological and human have occurred. Regarding human changes, we regret the death of one of the co-authors, Dr. Paul S. Cohen, just as preparations began in 2004 for the Second Edition. Hence this book has a new co-author, Dr. Stephen M. Cohen. The basic premises and criteria for inclusion in our book, however, have not altered. The GPS has rendered the art of map-reading nearly obsolete and many sites have added instructions to their facilities. Thus we have removed the need for us to include detailed directions. In addition the Internet now provides most of us with a ready and quick fountain of site information, sometimes accurate, and occasionally not. This information includes details about most of the sites we have chosen to include in the Second Edition, such as temporary exhibits, changeable daily schedules of lectures, and guided tours. In fact, many websites even provide driving directions. By request of our readers we have included information about how to go to sites by public transportation. In the Second Edition, we continue our focus on providing an ancillary background to each site, including some of the unusual, unique, or important aspects of its collection. As before, at least one of the authors has visited practically every site we discuss. We now include each site's own website and unusual directions such as latitude and longitude to correct for occasional errors in GPS directions or when a site may be reached by water as well as land. Because this book showcases science and technology for a worldwide readership, we now indicate metric units as well as English units for all measurements. This edition now lists treasures in all fifty states. We have split America's Scientific Treasures into three separate volumes, highlighting different geographical areas of the United States: the East Coast, the Midwest, and the West. In this way, you, the user, can more easily carry this book as you travel"--
Author: Stephen M. Cohen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197545513
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 545
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Book Description
Whether you are planning a road trip or looking to engage with history from the comfort of your couch, the second edition of America's Scientific Treasures is sure to satisfy your craving for scientific and technologic history. Stephen M. Cohen and Brenda H. Cohen, a mother-son pair, take readers through countless museums, arboretums, zoos, national parks, planetariums, natural and technological sites, and the homes of a few scientists in this exciting volume. The two combine their expertise in chemistry and history, making this an educational travel guide for science and technology enthusiasts. The book is split into nine geographic regions and organized by state, and it includes how to get to each place, whom to contact, whether it is handicapped-accessible, and even where you can grab a bite to eat nearby. Cohen and Cohen provide the history and significance of each location, plus they offer images for notable locations like the African Savanna at the San Francisco Zoo & Gardens and the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center in the Anchorage Museum. The resulting book is a navigable travel guide perfect for any science or technology enthusiast. So, what are you waiting for? Let's take a journey through the history of American sciences and engineering.
Author: Karen A. Rader
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022607983X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 482
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Book Description
Rich with archival detail and compelling characters, Life on Display uses the history of biological exhibitions to analyze museums’ shifting roles in twentieth-century American science and society. Karen A. Rader and Victoria E. M. Cain chronicle profound changes in these exhibitions—and the institutions that housed them—between 1910 and 1990, ultimately offering new perspectives on the history of museums, science, and science education. Rader and Cain explain why science and natural history museums began to welcome new audiences between the 1900s and the 1920s and chronicle the turmoil that resulted from the introduction of new kinds of biological displays. They describe how these displays of life changed dramatically once again in the 1930s and 1940s, as museums negotiated changing, often conflicting interests of scientists, educators, and visitors. The authors then reveal how museum staffs, facing intense public and scientific scrutiny, experimented with wildly different definitions of life science and life science education from the 1950s through the 1980s. The book concludes with a discussion of the influence that corporate sponsorship and blockbuster economics wielded over science and natural history museums in the century’s last decades. A vivid, entertaining study of the ways science and natural history museums shaped and were shaped by understandings of science and public education in the twentieth-century United States, Life on Display will appeal to historians, sociologists, and ethnographers of American science and culture, as well as museum practitioners and general readers.
Author: Joanna Page
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 178735976X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 286
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Book Description
Projects that bring the ‘hard’ sciences into art are increasingly being exhibited in galleries and museums across the world. In a surge of publications on the subject, few focus on regions beyond Europe and the Anglophone world. Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art assembles a new corpus of art-science projects by Latin American artists, ranging from big-budget collaborations with NASA and MIT to homegrown experiments in artists’ kitchens. While they draw on recent scientific research, these art projects also ‘decolonize’ science. If increasing knowledge of the natural world has often gone hand-in-hand with our objectification and exploitation of it, the artists studied here emphasize the subjectivity and intelligence of other species, staging new forms of collaboration and co-creativity beyond the human. They design technologies that work with organic processes to promote the health of ecosystems, and seek alternatives to the logics of extractivism and monoculture farming that have caused extensive ecological damage in Latin America. They develop do-it-yourself, open-source, commons-based practices for sharing creative and intellectual property. They establish critical dialogues between Western science and indigenous thought, reconnecting a disembedded, abstracted form of knowledge with the cultural, social, spiritual, and ethical spheres of experience from which it has often been excluded. Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art interrogates how artistic practices may communicate, extend, supplement, and challenge scientific ideas. At the same time, it explores broader questions in the field of art, including the relationship between knowledge, care, and curation; nonhuman agency; art and utility; and changing approaches to participation. It also highlights important contributions by Latin American thinkers to themes of global significance, including the Anthropocene, climate change and environmental justice.
Author: Yu Xie
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674065042
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 241
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Book Description
Alarmists argue that the United States urgently needs more and better trained scientists to compete with the rest of the world. Their critics counter that, far from facing a shortage, we are producing a glut of young scientists with poor employment prospects. Both camps have issued reports in recent years that predict the looming decline of American science. Drawing on their extensive analysis of national datasets, Yu Xie and Alexandra Killewald have welcome news to share: American science is in good health. Is American Science in Decline? does reveal areas of concern, namely scientists' low earnings, the increasing competition they face from Asia, and the declining number of doctorates who secure academic positions. But the authors argue that the values inherent in American culture make the country highly conducive to science for the foreseeable future. They do not see globalization as a threat but rather a potential benefit, since it promotes efficiency in science through knowledge-sharing. In an age when other countries are catching up, American science will inevitably become less dominant, even though it is not in decline relative to its own past. As technology continues to change the American economy, better-educated workers with a range of skills will be in demand. So as a matter of policy, the authors urge that science education not be detached from general education.
