Disrupted. This evening we are joined by reed gutchberg. Well be presenting on her book useful objects museums science and literature in 19th century america. After a short induction to the work, shell be joining conversation by mhss own sarah, georgie. Useful objects examines the history of American Museums during the 19th century through the eyes of visitors or writers and collectors museums of this period held a wide range of objects from botanical and zoological specimens to antiquarian artifacts and technological models. They were intended to promote useful knowledge these collections generated broader discussions about how objects were selected preserved in classified as well as who is to decide their value. These reflections shaped broader debate about the scope and purpose of museums in american culture. They continue to resonate today. Ms. Gotchburn is the assistant director is the assistant director of studies in an election on history and literature at harvard university. Shes taught seminars in tutorials on museums in america museums and material culture and science exploration and empire. A research and teaching focus on 19th century American Literature and culture with particular interest in material. Culture Museum Studies and the history of science and technology she received her phd in english from Boston University and her undergraduate degree from harvard. She will be joined by mhss own sarah georgie who is probably a familiar face to any many of our regulars. She is a series editor for the papers of john adams part of the adams papers editorial project based at the Massachusetts Historical Society. She is the author of household gods. The religious lives the Addams Family and frequently writes about early america early american thought and culture for the smithsonian. Um similar to whichberg. She also receives her phd from Boston University. So without further ado, please join me and welcoming miss kochberg well, great. Thank you so much gavin for that introduction and thank you so much to all of you for being here tonight. Im so grateful to the Massachusetts Historical Society for hosting me and im really looking forward to my conversation with sarah georgini, and i also especially want to thank gavin please fees and olivia saya for organizing this event. Its really just a pleasure to be here and have the chance to share my work on the history of museums with this community, and im really grateful to all of you for taking the time to listen in and join in this conversation. So im just gonna share my screen screen to get us started. And i want to start out with a strange and perhaps surprising story from the early history of American Museums. So some of you might be familiar with the work of Charles Wilson peale who was a portrait painter naturalist and museum entrepreneur in philadelphia in the late 18th century keel established one of the earliest American Museums during the 1780s, and he combined collections of his own portraits and works of art with Natural History and anthropology as well as lectures demonstrations and other forms of popular entertainment. But in 1792 peel was hoping to get some more funding for his museum and he issued a broad appeal to the citizens of philadelphia and addressed members of the American Philosophical Society, which is a learned Scientific Organization in the city in order to make the case for his museum and implicitly of course to attract some donations. So peel devotes most of his energy and this in this work to describing the range of his collections and their potential for educating citizens of the republic. He also emphasizes the practical and logistical aspects of running a museum, including you know, the costs of guilt frames and glass cases that hes going to need to acquire and its a really fascinating document just for thinking about what it meant to start a museum during this time. But keel also takes this conversation a step further so as part of this proposal he emphasizes his skill at taxidermy, and he talks his audience through the process of preservation that he was using on mammals and birds but the tone of his message shifts pretty dramatically when he suggests extending these methods of preservation to the Founding Fathers themselves he suggests quote. There are other means to preserve and hand down to succeeding generations the relics of such great men whose labors have been crowned with success in the most distinguished benefits to mankind the mode. I mean is the preserving their bodies from corruption by the use of powerful antiseptics. So feel goes on to note that hes pretty sure that Benjamin Franklin would be on board with this idea and hes imagining how these specimens could add to the collections of Natural History that hes assembling in his museum. So on the one hand the strange and radical proposal to taxidermy Benjamin Franklin allows us to see some of the anxieties of the early republic and especially at this moment where theres theres a lot of fear of political instability as you know, the the luminaries the most visible figures of found the nations founders would were no longer alive and in full view of american citizens. But it also allows us to see how keel and his contemporaries were imagining the role that museums and cultural institutions could play within the social and intellectual life of the nation. What should they collect preserve and display how might material objects be part of a process of constructing knowledge about history science and culture and who will participate in determining what we choose to hold in our site and value. So these kinds of questions, were really central to the early history of American Museums as i explore more broadly in my book and well say a little bit more about tonight. I want to emphasize a few larger ideas. So first just about the kinds of shifts that were taking place during the late 18th and early 19th century in the scope and mission of museums second also about the broader challenges and debates that surrounded collections that we can see through the accounts of the writers and artists and visitors who are engaging with them and finally i want to say a little bit about the contemporary stakes of these conversations for museums and cultural institutions today. Ill offer a few examples just to think through some of these larger issues before turning back to one early example in a bit more detail and towards the end. Im also going to say a little bit about how some of these ideas also informed the early history of the collections here at the mhs. So museums have a fascinating complicated and often troubling history. Scholars commonly trace the history of museums back to early modern europe when individual collectors created cabinets of curiosities filled with a wide range of Natural History specimens artifacts other objects returned from voyages around the world the rise of colonialism really shaped this idea of curiosity it often stood in for otherness for a euro centric view of the world as well as for this process of discovery and knowledge making to these collectors such objects were rare curiosity really was in the eye of the beholder as we see here in this image as time went on many collectors. Were increasingly looking to have representatives as well as rare objects as part of their collections in order to achieve what one called a world and miniature and encyclopedia encyclopedic collection that that could allow for the study. All branches of knowledge so during the 18th century these individual collections would form the basis of more public largescale institutions like the British Museum around the same time many Royal Collections of art were being turned into Public Institutions like the louvre and the National Gallery and these institutions were really important models for the kinds of museums that were established in the United States. It wasnt until later in the 19th century that we see the rise of museums that might be familiar to us today like the mfa here in boston the metropolitan museum of art the American Museum of Natural History. These were all founded around the 1870s following the civil war but ive been really interested in this kind of in between moment between the 18th century and and these later museums where we can really this kind of. Gradual messy nonlinear transition between a kind of cabinet of curiositys model where you have collections that are filled with all kinds of different objects together towards greater specialization and also between collections that were often restricted for elite audiences or imagined to have a Research Purpose towards institutions that were dedicated at least a sensibly to Public Education and access so by examining this period in more detail. I also want to argue that we can see also more clearly that the idea of a museum itself was in flux. You can see this actually in the different terms that were used to describe collections during this period you often see terms like cabinet or gallery or museum that all mean and object collection and different purposes for it. These were often housed in different locations too from libraries and historical societies to academies lyceums and colleges but across these different context we can see a lot of resonances and how their purpose is being imagined the founders of these institutions often wrote down and shared their mission whether through acts of incorporation or other written documents and they often emphasize this idea of useful knowledge suggesting how material objects themselves can make knowledge itself more tangible and concrete and additionally they make lofty claims about a Broader Mission of research and education museums were committing to preserving objects for posterity and they promise to kind of democratic access to knowledge even if things didnt always play out this way as ill say more about in a few minutes. So in order to look at this history, ive drawn on my own background as a literary scholar in order to trace accounts of museums across fiction essays guidebooks and periodicals and also to put these these descriptions in conversation with the kinds of information that we can get from donation books visual materials and even surviving objects and collections one thing i want to say about this period is that it really kind of demands this this interdisciplinary approach on the one hand museums where were bringing together so many different types of objects and what we today would consider to be different fields, you know botany geologies zoology anthropology history geography and we can see in these collections a kind of crisscrossing intersecting paths of objects and individuals and institutions, but i also want to note that if we look at this history through the eyes of the people who were engaging with these collections we can also see how they were inviting different. Kinds of creative imaginative responses as visitors were reflecting on what they were seeing and also sometimes considering potential alternatives. So one thing that we can see very clearly is how museums were creating different hierarchies and Power Dynamics that were linked to colonialism and elitism about who would have access to the kinds of knowledge that were represented in their collections so we can see this in the writings of Jane Johnston schoolcraft. Who was a native american poet who actually was married to a bureau of Indian Affairs agent and they they collaborated together in in his case. He appropriated many of her writings as part of a larger project on early anthropology in the United States and we can see in her writings though how shes reflecting on the relationship between white and indigenous forms of knowledge making and we can also see figures like the black abolitionist and activist William Wells brown who was interpreting works of classical sculpture in the galleries of the British Museum and really staking a claim to his right to an education and to his own expertise, but we can also see theres like or a white hitchcock who was a really talented artist and Natural History illustrator who you know when visiting these collections was was sometimes reflecting on the fact that you know her husband and son were likely to to benefit more from them than she might so count allow us to really trace the the people who were who were engaging and visiting Museum Collections to think beyond what institutions were promising or claiming to offer but also to see how people are reflecting on their own place within within these institutions and really kind of challenging the the limits of what was being defined as as useful during this period um the imaginative responses of writers also help us to illuminate the kinds of challenges and bigger questions that the museums were raising in the early republic the frenchborn writer and diplomat hectors engine decrevker really reflected on these challenges of materiality. Loss and was really imagining the precarity of the objects that were circulating and being exchanged by institutions in the galleries of the Us Patent Office surrounded by models of pat patented machines the poet walt whitman confronted the strange and really horrific spectacle of a Museum Transformed into a civil war hospital and he captures and his writings this eerie scene of these cases of objects interspersed with Wounded Soldiers and the writer and naturalist Henry David Thoreau mourned his decision to kill a turtle in order to donate it to harvards Natural History museum, even as he recognized its potential value to scientific research. So the founders of museums often envisioned order, right . They pictured these collections neatly arranged in cases and cabinets, but the reality was a much more disorderly processed that spurred really dynamic conversations both within and beyond institutions about what we choose to preserve and value about whose knowledge and expertise is celebrated or erased and about who has access to the knowledge and education represented by cultural institutions these questions continue to resonate in discussions about these institutions today and my hope is that understanding the longer history of these issues can help us think creatively about how to interpret objects that were collected collected during this time and also can inform how we think about making cultural institutions more interdisciplinary inclusive and communityoriented spaces today. So with some of these larger issues in mind, i just want to come back to an early example of how museums were defining and redefining the purpose of collections. I mentioned peels museum at the beginning and i want to put that museum in conversation with another extremely nearby collection, which was the cabinet of the American Philosophical Society. So the aps was founded in the mid 18th century by Benjamin Franklin with the goal of preserving and promoting useful knowledge much like other learned societies and institutions, especially the Royal Society in london on which it was modeling a lot of its activities the aps had a few ways that they thought to do that so first they plan to meet regularly and gather information from a network of correspondence around the Atlantic World and published scholarly articles about their research. They plan to form a library and finally they established a cabinet. So like other early cabinets of curiosity the aps cabinet held a wide variety of objects and herbarium of pressed plants natural specimens anthropological artifacts and other objects that were sent from around the Atlantic World. The aps was not alone in developing this kind of collection alongside its library. So here in the Greater Boston area. There were numerous examples of this pattern. So the American Academy of arts and sciences the boston fnan the american Antiquarian Society. And of course the nhs all of these institutions also had cabinets that looked very similar to the one at the aps around this time Harvard College also had what was called the Philosophy Chamber and this was a kind of teaching collection that similarly included, you know, a range of different kinds of objects as such as natural specimens artifacts, but also scientific instruments and this was the subject of a really great exhibit a few years ago at the harvard art museums and you can actually still access a virtual version of that through their website if youre interested. So these collections dont get discussed as often as Something Like peels museum. They were more shortlived. They were less popular with visitors and they were definitely more tied to elite scientific communities. But theyre nonethele