Product Description: Contributing to current debates on relationships between culture and the social, and the the rapidly changing practices of modern museums as they seek to shed the legacies of both evolutionary conceptions and colonial science, this important new work explores how evolutionary museums developed in the USA, UK, and Australia in the late nineteenth century...read more

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Product Description: In the rush to modernize, this book argues, some museums have replaced almost all their collections with interactive exhibits and computers, while others have put everything they can on display, turning their museums into pastiche cabinets of curiosity...read more

Museums today are more than familiar cultural institutions and showplaces of accumulated objects; they are the sites of interaction between personal and collective identities, between memory and history. The essays in this volume consider museums from personal experience and historical study, and from the memories of museum visitors, curators, and scholars.Representing a variety of fields—history, anthropology, art history, and museum scholarship—the contributors discuss museums across disciplinary boundaries that have separated art museums from natural history museums or local history museums from national galleries. The essays range widely over time (from the Renaissance to the second half of the twentieth century), and place (China, Japan, the United States, and Germany), in exhibitions explored (photography, Native American history, and “Jurassic technology”), and institution (the Chinese Imperial Collection, Renaissance curiosity cabinets, and modern art museums).Memory operates thematically among the essays in diverse and provocative ways. The papers are organized according to three suggestive themes: experimental ways of theorizing and designing contemporary museums with an explicit interest in history and memory; discussions of personal encounters with historical exhibits; and the professional risks at stake for collectors and curators who shape the institutional presentation of history and memory.The contributors are Susan A. Crane, Wolfgang Ernst, Michael Fehr, Paula Findlen, Tamara Hamlish, Alexis Joachimides, Suzanne Marchand, Julia A. Thomas, and Diana Drake Wilson.

Product Description: This text examines the debate about interpretation and making history in the context of archaeological museums. the reliance of those working on the early periods of the past on the fragmentary information provided by archaeology, as well as an imperfect documentary record, brings its own interpretative challenges...read more

Product Description: Antiquarianism, which had its roots in Renaissance thought, was a popular intellectual and cultural pursuit throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. The antiquarian work of collecting, compiling and presenting material which exposed the past was seminal to the formation of social and national identities...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: From its inception in the early nineteenth century, the museum has been more than a mere historical object; it has manufactured an image of history. In collecting past artifacts, the museum gives shape and presence to history, defining the space of a ritual encounter with the past...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)