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Life on Display: Revolutionising US Museums of Science and Natural History in the Twentieth Century
Henry McGhie
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Karen Rader and Victoria Cain explore the transformations, conflicts and fundamental shifts that took place in US museums of science and natural history over the course of the 20th century.

What was the place of scholarship, entertainment and education in these institutions, and how could museums accommodate changing social roles?

These questions form the basis of the book, as an exploration of the shifting tides of museums as places for knowledge production and consumption, and the changing roles of staff in line with, and often against, the tides of museum change.

The drama of the diorama

The influential “new museum idea”, brought in by museum reformers who self-consciously described themselves as “museum men” (and they were all men), aimed to transform collections from “a cemetery of bric-a-brac into a nursery of living thoughts”.

Instead of boring rows of closely related (but poorly displayed) specimens, they threw their confidence into that most American of museum innovations, the natural history diorama, even if it was an idea borrowed from northern Europe.

Many of the “museum men” were also influential in the emerging US conservation movement, and they sought to imbue a conservation ethic among their visitors in the face of declining wildlife, with sentiments that have a resonance today.

The more entrepreneurial directors used science education, as opposed to nature education, as a lever for funding for their museums.

Curators, meanwhile, often adapted well to roles based around public exhibitions rather than around their own research. Some successfully combined the two, and made their own research available through exhibitions they curated, but others struggled to balance the competing demands of varied work programmes.

Diorama-making became an art of its own, with ever-increasing refinement, but it was a heavy drain on resources, usually drawn from research programmes. As the science of biology replaced the more amateur natural history, museums needed to adapt to reflect new visions of the living world through their exhibitions.

Growing interest in physiology, genetics and animal behaviour saw living displays grow in importance (in place of static dioramas) and many “living museums” were installed along the side of nature trails. The net result was that the visitor’s eye was increasingly drawn away from the older dioramas.

Natural history curators found themselves unable to keep pace with either exhibition-making innovations or with research in their specialist fields. Whole museums of dioramas themselves fell behind the times, forcing museums to experiment with interactivity, including push-button rattlesnakes (stuffed, not live) that rattled on command.

Science as innovation

After 1945, natural history museums in the US sought to reinvigorate research programmes, while museums of science and technology overtook them in terms of their ability to interpret and present innovations in science, including biology.

Policymakers and science museums took science literacy as an essential ingredient for social and industrial progression in the postwar US.

Increasingly bold exhibits included live insects in experiments that visitors manipulated to demonstrate physiological responses. One example was the observation of electrical impulses in a grasshopper’s visual system transmitted to a screen by an electrode implanted into its central nervous system.

Rader and Cain conclude with a review of transformations in science centres and natural history museums in the last quarter of the 20th century. Following a period when new types of museums sought to establish their own credentials, this period saw museums become increasingly standardised in their approaches to public engagement and education.

The influence of tax breaks and corporate sponsorship are discussed ahead of the emergence of edutainment and blockbusters as crowd- pullers and income-generators.

This book is a deft review of a vast subject and draws out some key themes that cut across museum types. It should be read by anyone interested in understanding where our museums came from, and how we can use that understanding to shape where they might be heading in the future.

Henry McGhie is the head of collections and the curator of zoology at the Manchester Museum


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