Sally Gregory Kohlstedt

Nature, not books: scientists and the origins of the nature-study movement in the 1890s.

Scientists played a key role in the first systematic introduction of nature study into North American public schools in the late nineteenth century. The initiatives of Wilbur Jackman and John Merle Coulter, affiliated with the young University of Chicago, and Liberty Hyde Bailey and Anna Botsford Comstock, at Cornell University, coincided with the “new education” reform movement that found object lessons and experience‐based education superior to textbook teaching. Educational psychologists and philosophers of the 1890s, including G. Stanley Hall, related curriculum methods to perceived developmental stages in children, with a focus on immediate experience. Putting these pedagogical ideas—gained in summer institutes, normal schools, and programs at Chicago and Cornell—into practice were administrators and classroom teachers in both urban and rural classrooms. By 1900, a consensus about the value of nature study among scientists, community leaders, and teachers established it as the recognized general method of studying the natural world in public schools across much of the United States.

Nature, Not Books

Scientists played a key role in the first systematic introduction of nature study into North American public schools in the late nineteenth century. The initiatives of Wilbur Jackman and John Merle Coulter, affiliated with the young University of Chicago, and Liberty Hyde Bailey and Anna Botsford Comstock, at Cornell University, coincided with the “new education” reform movement that found object lessons and experience‐based education superior to textbook teaching. Educational psychologists and philosophers of the 1890s, including G. Stanley Hall, related curriculum methods to perceived developmental stages in children, with a focus on immediate experience. Putting these pedagogical ideas—gained in summer institutes, normal schools, and programs at Chicago and Cornell—into practice were administrators and classroom teachers in both urban and rural classrooms. By 1900, a consensus about the value of nature study among scientists, community leaders, and teachers established it as the recognized general method of studying the natural world in public schools across much of the United States.

The Establishment of Science in America: 150 Years of the American Association for the Advancement of Science

This comprehensive history of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the largest and most significant general organization of scientists in America, provides a unique window on the development of science in the United States during the past 150 years. The Establishment of Science in America traces the evolution of the role of scientists in American society, public attitudes toward science, and the changing dimensions of the sponsorship of science and its participants. The essays by three distinguished authors connect the AAAS history to issues of continuing importance in American history, such as the integration of women and minority groups into mainstream professions and the role of expert knowledge in a democratic society. The volume divides the history of the AAAS into three parts: Creating a Forum for Science in the Nineteenth Century; Promoting Science in a New Century: The Middle Years of the AAAS; and Shifting Science from People to Programs: AAAS in the Postwar Years.

Thoughts in things

Late nineteenth‐century public museums in the United States were intentionally built to be modern, guided by administrators like George Brown Goode toward scientific goals that included preservation, research, and education. Self‐consciously preoccupied with the management of museums, intent on attaining mastery over the objects that constituted their museums, and persuaded that meaning derived not just from the objects themselves but from their explanation and configuration by experts, museum masters led a “new museum” movement. A century later, the critiques of postmodern scholars attest to the museum directors’ effective establishment of a modern profile. Historians of science, who once could take these institutions for granted as a lightly marked center of authority, now may use methods of social and cultural studies to open their institutional and intellectual frames. While cautious about theory‐driven arguments, such scholars benefit from the issues raised by cultural critics even as they rely on their own documentary methods to ensure that science is an integral component when examining ideas, language, and practice in context.

Essay review: Museums: Revisiting sites in the history of the natural sciences

Arguably the most productive sites for research and publication on the natural sciences in the nineteenth century, at least in North America, were the often architecturally dramatic museums of natural history and geology. Built in major cities and some smaller towns, on college and university campuses, and even within the estates of wealthy patrons, natural history museums were symbols and centers for science. In recent years historians of science, as well as anthropologists and sociologists, have concentrated on locations significant for modem scientific research activity, particularly the early academies and the scientific laboratories of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 1 Somewhat surprisingly, to date relatively little historical attention has been paid to the scientific institution most visible to the general public and most essential to those involved in the exploration and ordering of the worlds natural phenomena throughout the nineteenth century, and indeed to the present day. Natural history museums were the principal location for dialogues and the exchange of specimens among those debating the identification and connection among natural objects (and, later, human artifacts). Informal staff conversations, routine and pivotal decisions about the display of objects, the codification of specimen identities, and the explanations in museum publi-

Patronage, Practice, and the Culture of American Science: Alexander Dallas Bache and the U.S. Coast Survey

Acknowledgements Preface 1. Becoming a man of science 2. Reforming American science 3. Background to reform 4. Mobilizing for government science 5. Reforming the Coast Survey 6. Providing patronage for American science 7. Practising government science Notes.

Otis T. Mason's Tour of Europe: Observation, Exchange, and Standardization in Public Museums, 1889

Abstract When the Smithsonians curator of anthropology, Otis T. Mason, took a two-month tour of European museums, he participated in a tradition of learning from museum peers even as he demonstrated one way that international standards for museum practice were shared and extended in the late nineteenth century. In this era of major museum building, an emerging group of professional administrators were increasingly self-conscious about the status of their own institutions and eager to adopt state-of-the-art practices. Masons tour was timed to enable him to attend the specialized society meetings held in conjunction with the Jubilee International Exposition in Paris in 1889. The rest of his tour was spent visiting museums in Britain and northern Europe where he met leading museum administrators including William Flower, Adolph B. Meyer, and Adolph Bastian. Masons letters to the National Museums director, George Brown Goode, and to his wife, Sallie Mason, and daughters, Sallie and Emilie, offer a valuable window on European museums in the late nineteenth century and reveal the networks that facilitated an exchange of materials and ideas among a museum specialists and administrators as they established increasingly similar standards of museum practice.

Innovative Niche Scientists: Women's Role in Reframing North American Museums, 1880–1930

Women educators played an essential role in transforming public museums that had been focused on collections and research into effective educational and informational sites that engaged broad publics. Three significant innovators were Delia Griffin of St. Johnsbury Museum in Vermont who emphasized hands-on learning, Anna Billings Gallup who shaped a distinctive model museum for children in Brooklyn and Laura Bragg of the Charleston Museum who established strong collaboration with the local public schools. Joining museum curatorial staffs and professional associations that were largely male, these women educators and their peers typically provided pedagogical insights and teaching skills that enabled them to work effectively with school systems, teachers, pupils and parents. Genuinely interested in natural science, they shaped careers which included opportunities to engage with science, provided a considerable degree of autonomy and enabled them to experiment with hands-on learning. They built networks of museum educators and influenced the young American Association of Museums. Women museum educators created a bridge between semi-public natural history establishments for collection, preservation and scientific research and an active audience of teachers, pupils, visitors and patrons. Their efforts transformed museums into sites for education and broad public access to science in the early 20th century.

Museum perceptions and productions: American migrations of a Maori hei-tiki

Museum objects have biographies shaped by their material, geographical and cultural origins, their initial intended purpose, and the ways in which they are valued and interpreted by curators and public audiences. Often one object becomes highly symbolic of a particular group even as its presentation over time reflects changing perceptions of the culture as well as the individual object. A Maori hei-tiki - a small but distinctive greenstone pendant - collected by Charles Wilkes on his United States Exploring Expedition in 1840 provides insight into changing museum practices, museum networks of exchange, the impact of professionalizing expertise in ethnology and anthropology since the late nineteenth century, shifting public interests and expectations, and, indeed, the unanticipated ways in which museum objects find their way into exhibition, in this case at the Smithsonian Institution. The material resilience and embedded historicity of the hei-tiki remain as a counterbalance to its versatility as an object useful in multiple stories over nearly two centuries.

Innovative Niche Scientists: Women's Role in Reframing North American Museums, 1880-1930: Women museum educators

Women educators played an essential role in transforming public museums that had been focused on collections and research into effective educational and informational sites that engaged broad publics. Three significant innovators were Delia Griffin of St. Johnsbury Museum in Vermont who emphasized hands-on learning, Anna Billings Gallup who shaped a distinctive model museum for children in Brooklyn and Laura Bragg of the Charleston Museum who established strong collaboration with the local public schools. Joining museum curatorial staffs and professional associations that were largely male, these women educators and their peers typically provided pedagogical insights and teaching skills that enabled them to work effectively with school systems, teachers, pupils and parents. Genuinely interested in natural science, they shaped careers which included opportunities to engage with science, provided a considerable degree of autonomy and enabled them to experiment with hands-on learning. They built networks of museum educators and influenced the young American Association of Museums. Women museum educators created a bridge between semi-public natural history establishments for collection, preservation and scientific research and an active audience of teachers, pupils, visitors and patrons. Their efforts transformed museums into sites for education and broad public access to science in the early 20th century.