Introduction

Museum and Society, vol 6(2), pp. 152-171, 2008

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.

museum + society, 2008

TDR/The Drama Review, 2003

2007

Ricardo Moratelli surveys several hundred dead bats — their wings neatly folded — in a room deep inside the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. He moves methodically among specimens arranged in ranks like a squadron of bombers on a mission. Attached to each animal's right ankle is a tag that tells Moratelli where and when the creature was collected, and by whom. Some of the tags have yellowed with age — they mark bats that were collected more than a century ago. Moratelli selects a small, compact individual with dark wings and a luxurious golden pelage. It fits easily in his cupped palm.

Australian Leisure Management, 1997

Georgetown University-Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, 2012

Science in Context, 2011

Isis, 2000

Reviewed Work(s): Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926 by Steven Conn Review by: Sharon Macdonald Source: Isis , Jun., 2000, Vol. 91, No. 2 (Jun., 2000), pp. 380-381