Our first stop will be in Philadelphia. The American Philosophical Society and Peale’s Museum of Natural History were both founded around a basic Enlightenment premise: that humans could and should understand the natural world. Both understood that the natural world behaved according to fixed laws that people could deduce through careful empirical study. These laws were not just important for inventing things or explaining the inner workings of natural phenomena; laws governed human behavior as well. The survival of America’s great political experiment hinged on the proper understanding of the laws of nature.
The American Philosophical Society addressed these imperatives by creating a library and inviting intellectuals to gather there to exchange insights. It was, perhaps, the first American think tank.
Peale’s Museum did it differently. Unlike the APS, Peale’s Museum was geared for a broader and less cerebral audience. The museum offered a history of nature written in objects, organized in glass cases, for anyone with the price of admission to view. Peale’s Museum was meant to be a money-making enterprise, and so some of the thinking behind the displays had to do with what people would pay money to see. But Peale’s Museum offered an interpretation of the natural world along with its curiosities. Charles Wilson Peale laid out his museum so that visitors would see interesting things (birds, animals, plants etc.) laid out to illustrate the hierarchies among nature’s creatures, giving his visitors a glimpse of the order that ruled the natural world. Embodied in Peale’s displays was the reassuring belief that the world was an orderly place.
Peale’s was the first in a long line of popular natural history museums. People continue to be fascinated by the opportunity to view a natural world frozen behind glass. By the end of the 19th century, museums had done their best to distance themselves from the baser aspects of earlier museums: the display of freakish birth defects, the Barnumesque invitation to fall for clever scams. By the 1870s, natural history museums, like our second stop, in New York, claimed high moral ground. They were educational facilities, open to trained scientists as well as curious members of the public. While the entertainment piece of Peale’s mission fell away, the idea of object lessons remained. The new museums, of which the American Museum of Natural History in New York is a good example, carefully arranged their exhibits to make manifest the “correct” order of beings in the world. But now it wasn’t just plants, birds, animals and mastodon (or dinosaur) bones; people, too, were part of the story.
But not all people. In Peale’s Museum, humanity was represented by classical busts of great western thinkers. In New York, great explorers grace the outside of the building (added in the 1920s), but inside, the humans on display were those museum designers considered as yet uncivilized. There is a Darwinian subtext there; the world you visit is the world before humans reached their pinnacle. This is humankind still in the process of evolution, not humankind evolved. In a very intentional sense, the American Museum of Natural History represented the world white Americans and their white European peers had conquered.
In the museum, man (and the founders of the museum would have understood it to be man) demonstrates his control over the natural world, a control that is his right and his duty. The museum itself is a map of that world. Within its walls, one can view comprehensive galleries of flora and fauna, including a whale suspended from the ceiling. On can visit Africa and Asia, Native America and the Middle East. The only Euro-Americans on display are historic New Yorkers – notably Peter Stuyvesant—and a few naturalists and scientists whose busts are hidden in odd corners. For the most part, this museum invites patrons to gaze triumphant on a world conquered and ordered by other people.
It is important to note that current curators at the American Museum do not share the attitudes and assumptions that permeate the halls. And yet those attitudes and assumptions are still there.
What does that mean to the thousands of children who visit every year?
Curators are actively rethinking museums, confronting the racist, imperialist and patriarchal meanings embedded in the old exhibits, and even in the arrangement of halls. Our last stop in our investigation into museum practice will be at the Penn Museum, in Philadelphia. This is an anthropology and archaeology museum, not a museum of natural history, so it is devoted to human beings and their cultures. Here we will think about whether museums can represent cultures respectfully. It will be a good way to round out our exploration of the ways in which museums create meanings out of the objects they display.
Schedule:
Friday, March 23: American Philosophical Society Museum, Philadelphia
Monday, March 26: On campus; reading up for our visit to New York; thinking about dioramas; enjoying Night at the Museum.
Tuesday, March 27: American Museum of Natural History, New York (home late!)
Wednesday, March 28: On campus: more reading and discussion; working on dioramas; brainstorming questions for our program at the Penn Museum
Thursday, March 29: Penn Museum, Philadelphia