Science museums in transition : cultures of display in nineteenth-century Britain and America /

The history of museums is generating significant new and important scholarship that explores what constitutes a museum. This diverse set of essays, part of this new scholarship, focuses on the change in scientifically focused museums in the 19th-century United States and Great Britain, and the role that expertise had in defining these changes. The volume's essays are derived from a 2015 conference that explored "the purpose of museums" and the individuals these institutions serve. In this volume, editors Lightman (humanities, York Univ., Canada) and Berkowitz, director of the Beckman Center for the History of Chemistry at the Chemical Heritage Foundation, combine the work of many leading museum scholars and practitioners. The ten essays are separated into five broad topics in which the editors demonstrate the many "cultures of display" in the 19th century. As a result, this important book demonstrates the variety of means in which people engaged with scientific knowledge in the public sphere and complicates the idea of what constituted 19th-century scientific knowledge. Thus, this work offers scholars novel and important ways to contemplate the role of science and museums when they explore social, political, and cultural history. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above; faculty and professionals. --George D. Oberle, George Mason University