| This dissertation investigates the evolution of visual culture, the influence of consumer capitalism and Progressive educational reform and the contests over a changing scientific landscape in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century United States by exploring the transformation of American museums of natural history during this period. Though most natural history museums served as research libraries of natural objects in the 1870s and 1880s, by the 1940s they had become popular attractions that merged scientific research and elementary science education, environmental advocacy, vocational training, artistic spectacle and public entertainment. Nature Under Glass explains how and why social, scientific and cultural pressures caused museum workers to abandon the nineteenth-century conception of the museum as a laissez-faire province of independent research and transform their institutions into palaces of popular entertainment and education instead.;Three overlapping epistemological paradigms contributed to this institutional evolution. The elaborate taxonomic arrangements of nineteenth century natural history museums embodied the era's object-based knowledge systems, but the early twentieth century demand for emotion-based interest in natural history eventually superseded this form of display and resulted in more frequent use of spectacular illusion. An interactive and sense-based approach to natural history, inspired by contemporary Progressive educational theory, soon entered museum halls as well.;This dissertation details how these epistemologies informed the curatorial practices and politics of natural history museums in the United States, and demonstrates that consumer capitalism and Progressive education radically changed how museums represented natural history to the public. New forms of exhibition deepened the impending schism between research scientists and those engaged in the popularization and amateur study of the natural world, augmented image-makers' power to shape popular conceptions of science and nature, and revolutionized museums and their social roles. |
