Papers by Victoria Cain
Stories and artifacts from the history of science are difficult to find in many popular science m... more Stories and artifacts from the history of science are difficult to find in many popular science museums in the United States. This essay makes a case for why such museums should include the history of science in their halls and how they might go about doing so. Using several Boston-area museums as case studies, it explains why the history of science can be so hard to find in contemporary science museums and then offers several examples of instances in which museums have successfully integrated science and history in their halls. Ultimately, the essay suggests, historians of science and popular science museums should cultivate new partnerships; it concludes with a brief sketch of how they might do so. hen it comes to science's material heritage, the Boston metropolitan region offers an embarrassment of riches. This isn't much of a surprise; its constellation of universities, medical centers, corporations, and laboratories has held a prominent place in the universe of scientific research for more than a century. Many materials related to this work have found their way into collections of historical artifacts in local museums, archives, and historic sites. 1 Yet at the Museum of Science, Boston (MoSB), one of the area's best-known and most popular museums, visitors can have a hard time locating evidence of this history. They can marvel at recent inventions by the region's researchers, and they can contemplate how scientific research is currently used in Boston's physical landscape. One typical display features RoboBees, tiny flying microrobots developed in 2013 by scientists at Harvard's Wyss Institute; another explores the current relationship between engineering and the Charles River; and a third considers the science and politics of wind energy. But the museum's exhibits hardly acknowledge Boston's scientific heritage, nor do they address how historical scientific politics and practices, scientific thought, and various social milieus shaped the research that the MoSB celebrates.
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This article explains why and how, between the 1890s and the 1920s, American educators and educat... more This article explains why and how, between the 1890s and the 1920s, American educators and educational publishers tried to use photographic media to (1) help students form concepts of an increasingly complex modern world, and (2) discipline students’ eyes and minds to guarantee uniform modes of visuality. Educators hoped these related projects would prepare the nation’s future citizens to participate constructively in modern democratic society and a global industrial economy. These efforts, I argue, inadvertently resulted in a remarkably powerful, if unofficial, visual idiom of the nation-state, replicated in and across classroom visual aids. But educators’ attempts to teach students constructive visual skills were far less successful, I suggest; determining just what constituted ‘good seeing’ and training students in those practices remained an elusive educational ideal rather than a classroom reality. Consequently, educators quickly abandoned the effort to inculcate disciplined modes of seeing. The geographic iconography that emerged in this era persisted, however, lasting decades after the ideals that had prompted its construction had disappeared.
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Paedagogica Historica, Oct 2012
Urged on by a young generation of reform-minded professionals, museums in the United States adopt... more Urged on by a young generation of reform-minded professionals, museums in the United States adopted the premises and practices of consumer culture in the early twentieth century. This article argues that this turn towards consumer culture resulted from a new institutional commitment to public education and a radical re-conception of visual pedagogy. In doing so, the article opens dialogue between two bodies of scholarship that rarely inform one another: the history of education and the history of early twentieth-century consumer culture. Focusing on natural history museums, the article explores how and why museum reformers gradually came to accept the psychological principles underlying advertising and salesmanship and to believe these principles could be employed on behalf of education. It chronicles how museum staff increasingly emphasised visual pleasure as a pedagogical tool, and constructed displays to arouse attention, attraction and desire for knowledge. Finally, it describes how these new pedagogical ventures did not always have the effect that reformers anticipated.
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Journal of Modern Craft, Mar 2012
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common-place, Jan 2012
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Science in Context, Jun 2011
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Journal of Visual Culture, Dec 2010
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museum + society, Jul 2008
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Annals of Iowa, 2009
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American Quarterly, 2008
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Book Chapters by Victoria Cain
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Recent Papers by Victoria Cain
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Museum and Society, vol 6(2), pp. 152-171, Jul 2008
This paper explains how and why many American museums of science and nature moved away from the t... more This paper explains how and why many American museums of science and nature moved away from the traditional content and methods of natural history in the period from 1930 to 1980. It explores diverse motivations for the shift from dead, stuffed displays to live, interactive exhibits, and the consequences of that
shift for museums as both educational institutions and as institutions of research. Ultimately, it argues that debates over museums’ content and display strategies drew strength from and reinforced a profound transformation in the institutional
history of twentieth-century American science and technology: namely, the separation of research and public education. By the late 1960s, the American museum landscape had been transformed by this development. Older natural history museums competed for visitors and resources with ‘new’ style science
museums, and although both remained popular cultural institutions, neither had achieved a coherent new institutional identity because debates about the role of the museum in science continued. Thus, we suggest, in the mid-twentiethcentury natural history and science museums were more important in both the
history of biology and the history of science’s public culture than has previously been acknowledged.
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Books by Victoria Cain
Rich with archival detail and compelling characters, Life on Display uses the history of biologic... more 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. Victoria E. M. Cain and her co-author, Karen A. Rader, 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.
Cain and Rader 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.
Reviews:
"Focuses on the evolution of U.S. science and nature museums from the late 19th century to the early 21st century, stitching together a number of surprising insights into an excellent history."
(Kirk R. Johnson, Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, Science)
"The exquisite dioramas in New York’s American Museum of Natural History have wowed crowds since the early twentieth century. But as historians Karen Rader and Victoria Cain reveal in this cogent study, they were part of a broader revolution: the 'New Museum Idea,' which saw 'smell machines' and dynamic models supersede dusty cases. The behind-the-scene struggles between ‘edutainers’ and serious museum researchers were, they show, no less dynamic."
(Barbara Kiser, Nature)
"In lucid prose that's a real pleasure to read, Rader and Cain’s new book chronicles a revolution in modern American science education and culture. . . . Life on Display simultaneously develops an argument for a 'renegotiation of the relationship between display, research, and education in American museums of nature and science,' and opens up an archive of fascinating (and at times hilarious and moving) stories of members of the museum-going public (some of who gifted dog fleas and dead pets to their local museums), non-human inhabitants of interactive museum displays (including an owl with a penchant for riding in cars and 'trim, up-on-their-toes cockroaches'), and museum professionals who painted, debated, made dioramas, invented 'Exploratoria,' and occasionally wrote limericks. This is a book for anyone interested in American history, museum studies, visual culture, science studies, the history of education, grasshopper surgery, or Jurassic Park (among many, many other fields it contributes to). It’s a wonderfully engaging history."
(Carla Nappi, New Books in Science, Technology, and Society)
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Papers by Victoria Cain
Book Chapters by Victoria Cain
Recent Papers by Victoria Cain
shift for museums as both educational institutions and as institutions of research. Ultimately, it argues that debates over museums’ content and display strategies drew strength from and reinforced a profound transformation in the institutional
history of twentieth-century American science and technology: namely, the separation of research and public education. By the late 1960s, the American museum landscape had been transformed by this development. Older natural history museums competed for visitors and resources with ‘new’ style science
museums, and although both remained popular cultural institutions, neither had achieved a coherent new institutional identity because debates about the role of the museum in science continued. Thus, we suggest, in the mid-twentiethcentury natural history and science museums were more important in both the
history of biology and the history of science’s public culture than has previously been acknowledged.
Books by Victoria Cain
Cain and Rader 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.
Reviews:
"Focuses on the evolution of U.S. science and nature museums from the late 19th century to the early 21st century, stitching together a number of surprising insights into an excellent history."
(Kirk R. Johnson, Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, Science)
"The exquisite dioramas in New York’s American Museum of Natural History have wowed crowds since the early twentieth century. But as historians Karen Rader and Victoria Cain reveal in this cogent study, they were part of a broader revolution: the 'New Museum Idea,' which saw 'smell machines' and dynamic models supersede dusty cases. The behind-the-scene struggles between ‘edutainers’ and serious museum researchers were, they show, no less dynamic."
(Barbara Kiser, Nature)
"In lucid prose that's a real pleasure to read, Rader and Cain’s new book chronicles a revolution in modern American science education and culture. . . . Life on Display simultaneously develops an argument for a 'renegotiation of the relationship between display, research, and education in American museums of nature and science,' and opens up an archive of fascinating (and at times hilarious and moving) stories of members of the museum-going public (some of who gifted dog fleas and dead pets to their local museums), non-human inhabitants of interactive museum displays (including an owl with a penchant for riding in cars and 'trim, up-on-their-toes cockroaches'), and museum professionals who painted, debated, made dioramas, invented 'Exploratoria,' and occasionally wrote limericks. This is a book for anyone interested in American history, museum studies, visual culture, science studies, the history of education, grasshopper surgery, or Jurassic Park (among many, many other fields it contributes to). It’s a wonderfully engaging history."
(Carla Nappi, New Books in Science, Technology, and Society)
shift for museums as both educational institutions and as institutions of research. Ultimately, it argues that debates over museums’ content and display strategies drew strength from and reinforced a profound transformation in the institutional
history of twentieth-century American science and technology: namely, the separation of research and public education. By the late 1960s, the American museum landscape had been transformed by this development. Older natural history museums competed for visitors and resources with ‘new’ style science
museums, and although both remained popular cultural institutions, neither had achieved a coherent new institutional identity because debates about the role of the museum in science continued. Thus, we suggest, in the mid-twentiethcentury natural history and science museums were more important in both the
history of biology and the history of science’s public culture than has previously been acknowledged.
Cain and Rader 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.
Reviews:
"Focuses on the evolution of U.S. science and nature museums from the late 19th century to the early 21st century, stitching together a number of surprising insights into an excellent history."
(Kirk R. Johnson, Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, Science)
"The exquisite dioramas in New York’s American Museum of Natural History have wowed crowds since the early twentieth century. But as historians Karen Rader and Victoria Cain reveal in this cogent study, they were part of a broader revolution: the 'New Museum Idea,' which saw 'smell machines' and dynamic models supersede dusty cases. The behind-the-scene struggles between ‘edutainers’ and serious museum researchers were, they show, no less dynamic."
(Barbara Kiser, Nature)
"In lucid prose that's a real pleasure to read, Rader and Cain’s new book chronicles a revolution in modern American science education and culture. . . . Life on Display simultaneously develops an argument for a 'renegotiation of the relationship between display, research, and education in American museums of nature and science,' and opens up an archive of fascinating (and at times hilarious and moving) stories of members of the museum-going public (some of who gifted dog fleas and dead pets to their local museums), non-human inhabitants of interactive museum displays (including an owl with a penchant for riding in cars and 'trim, up-on-their-toes cockroaches'), and museum professionals who painted, debated, made dioramas, invented 'Exploratoria,' and occasionally wrote limericks. This is a book for anyone interested in American history, museum studies, visual culture, science studies, the history of education, grasshopper surgery, or Jurassic Park (among many, many other fields it contributes to). It’s a wonderfully engaging history."
(Carla Nappi, New Books in Science, Technology, and Society)