Read complete books and articles on: Museum History

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16 of the Best Books and Articles on: Museum History

as selected by Questia librarians

1.

Cannibal Tours and Glass Boxes: The Anthropology of Museums » Read Now
by Michael M. Ames. 216 pgs.

Collections: Entire Library

...poor one at that at writing a history of museums. To the contrary, it was intended...few incidents in the recent history of museums and refer to only a few...
2.

Museums and Modernity: Art Galleries and the Making of Modern Culture » Read Now
by Nick Prior. 258 pgs.

Collections: Entire Library

Short-listed for the Philip Abrams Memorial Prize 2003Museums have been the subject of intense debate in recent years and their history and development raise important questions. What was 'modern' about the art museum? Why did museums emerge when and where they did? How were museums involved with...
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Short-listed for the Philip Abrams Memorial Prize 2003Museums have been the subject of intense debate in recent years and their history and development raise important questions. What was 'modern' about the art museum? Why did museums emerge when and where they did? How were museums involved with the development of modern art worlds? What was the relationship between art galleries and their audiences and who were the key people involved with their inception?Focusing on the role of national art galleries in continental Europe, England and Scotland, this book explores in depth the interrelationship between artistic and exhibitionary forms, as well as between power and governance in those places where the roots of modern culture were being laid most visibly. Drawing upon debates concerning modernity, Prior investigates how the boundaries of art and culture have been determined within the museum world. In particular, he looks at the interface between the project of the nation and the gallery and how galleries were involved in making certain social groups or bodies feel 'at home' and others excluded.
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3.

Sons of Science: The Story of the Smithsonian Institution and Its Leaders » Read Now
by Paul H. Oehser. 224 pgs.

Collections: Entire Library

...26 Natural History Building 122...Paleontology, National Museum 122...and Peales Natural History Museum, and a number of...with rooms for a museum, library...
4.

The Smithsonian Institution, 1846-1896: The History of Its First Half Century » Read Now
by George Brown Goode. 860 pgs.

Collections: Entire Library

...establish a national museum of natural history," etc. Its constitution...and a museum. The museum clause of this bill...provision that the natural history objects, and...
5.

The Representation of the Past: Museums and Heritage in the Postmodern World » Read Now
by Kevin Walsh. 204 pgs.

Collections: Entire Library
6.

Scholars, Travellers, and Trade: The Pioneer Years of the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, 1818-1840 » Read Now
by R. B. Halbertsma. 186 pgs.

Collections: Entire Library

Today, the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden is internationally known for its outstanding archaeological collections.This book tells the dramatic story of Reuvens' struggle to establish the museum, with battles against rival scholars, red tape and the Dutch attitude of neglect towards...
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Today, the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden is internationally known for its outstanding archaeological collections.This book tells the dramatic story of Reuvens' struggle to establish the museum, with battles against rival scholars, red tape and the Dutch attitude of neglect towards archaeological monuments.The book throws new light on the process of creating a national museum, and the difficulties of convincing society of the value of the past, and introduces scholars of museum and cultural studies to this fascinating subject.
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7.

From Being about Something to Being for Somebody: The Ongoing Transformation of the American Museum, in Daedalus » Read Now
by Stephen Weil. 30 pgs.

Collections: Entire Library

...society, a campus-based natural history museum, and a small private art gallery...a reflection on the recent history of museums written for the fiftieth-anniversary...at...
8.

Marketing the Museum » Read Now
by Fiona Mclean. 258 pgs.

Collections: Entire Library

Marketing the Museum is the ideal guide to the ways in which museums can overcome the numerous hurdles on the route to truly achieving a marketing orientation.The history of the museum is one of shifting purposes and changing ideals and this volume asks if it is possible to define the 'product'...
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Marketing the Museum is the ideal guide to the ways in which museums can overcome the numerous hurdles on the route to truly achieving a marketing orientation.The history of the museum is one of shifting purposes and changing ideals and this volume asks if it is possible to define the 'product' which the modern museum can offer. This book explores the crucial question: Are the theories of marketing developed for manufactured goods in any way relevant to the experience of visiting a museum?In covering one of the most highly disputed issues in the field, this book is essential reading for museum professionals, students and anyone who has dealing in the many branches of the heritage industry around the world.
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9.

In the Past Lane: Historical Perspectives on American Culture (Chap. 5 "The Enduring Changing Role of Cultural Institutions") » Read Now
by Michael Kammen. 279 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his People of Paradox (1973), and the Francis Parkman Prize for A Machine That Would Go of Itself (1987), Michael Kammen is widely regarded as one of our most important, and most diversely talented, cultural historians. David Brion Davis has said of him that "no other...
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Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his People of Paradox (1973), and the Francis Parkman Prize for A Machine That Would Go of Itself (1987), Michael Kammen is widely regarded as one of our most important, and most diversely talented, cultural historians. David Brion Davis has said of him that "no other historian of Michael's generation has such a broad and concrete grasp of 'American culture' in all its manifestations from constitutional law to formal painting and popular culture." Now, In The Past Lane brings together writings from a span of more than a decade, covering the broad spectrum of Kammen's recent interests, including the role of the historian, the relationship between culture and the State, uses of tradition in American commercial culture, American historical art, memory distortion in American history, and the contested uses of history in American education, and much more. Here are major contributions to Kammen's work and to American cultural history. In the previously unpublished "Personal Identity and the Historian's Vocation," Kammen considers the complex interplay between historians' personal lives--their religion, ideology, race, gender, sexual orientation--and the history they write. Drawing on prominent historians' own self-reflections, in fascinating letters and memoirs, Kammen takes us inside the process of doing history and traces the movement away from delusions of objectivity to a more engaged and personal approach to the past. We find a lively exchange between David M. Potter and Richard Hofstadter, a personal account of a highly dramatic public debate between Arnold J. Toynbee and Allan Nevins, as well as delightful quotes from many important historians about their work, their beliefs, and their colleagues. We have, for example, Lewis Mumford at Christmas time informing a friend that he was using "the season of peace and cheer and goodwill to begin a murderous attack upon Mr. Bernard DeVoto, and Allan Nevins wryly recommending his multi-volume Civil War history, The Ordeal of the Union, as an ideal wedding present. In "Culture and the State in America," Kammen gives us an illuminating history of government funding for the arts which provides a surprising perspective on the current crises involving the NEA and NEH. He marshals his deep historical knowledge to argue that an elimination of public support will lead to an even greater loss of private support for the arts and humanities, and that the results will impoverish us all. Kammen addresses a range of other concerns in these essays, including the distinction between heritage and history, how multicultural art exhibits are developed, memory distortion in American history. Whether he's warning against historical amnesia, analyzing the iconography of judgment in American courthouses, considering American diversity, or reconsidering the issue of American exceptionalism, Kammen's remarkable essays show us the many ways the past informs, eludes, and yet gives birth to the present.
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10.

Re-Imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum » Read Now
by Andrea Witcomb. 198 pgs.

Collections: Philosophy, Entire Library

Re-Imagining the Museum presents new interpretations of museum history and contemporary museum practices.Through a range of case studies from the UK, North America and Australia, Andrea Witcomb moves away from the idea that museums are always 'conservative' to suggest they have a long history of...
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Re-Imagining the Museum presents new interpretations of museum history and contemporary museum practices.Through a range of case studies from the UK, North America and Australia, Andrea Witcomb moves away from the idea that museums are always 'conservative' to suggest they have a long history of engaging with popular culture and addressing a variety of audiences. She argues that museums are key mediators between high and popular culture and between government, media practitioners, cultural policy-makers and museums professionals.Analyzing links between museums and the media, looking at the role of museums in cities and discussing the effects on museums of cultural policies, Re-Imagining the Museum presents a vital tool in the study of museum practice.
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11.

The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany (Chap. 1 "Art Museum Directors") » Read Now
by Jonathan Petropoulos. 398 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

Nazi art looting has been the subject of enormous international attention in recent years, and the topic of two history bestsellers, Hector Feliciano's The Lost Museum and Lynn Nicholas's The Rape of Europa. But such books leave us wondering: What made thoughtful, educated, artistic men and women...
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Nazi art looting has been the subject of enormous international attention in recent years, and the topic of two history bestsellers, Hector Feliciano's The Lost Museum and Lynn Nicholas's The Rape of Europa. But such books leave us wondering: What made thoughtful, educated, artistic men and women decide to put their talents in the service of a brutal and inhuman regime? This question is the starting point for The Faustian Bargain, Jonathan Petropoulos's study of the key figures in the art world of Nazi Germany. Petropoulos follows the careers of these prominent individuals who like Faust, that German archetype, chose to pursue artistic ends through collaboration with diabolical forces. Readers meet Ernst Buchner, the distinguished museum director and expert on Old Master paintings who "repatriated" the Van Eyck brother's Ghent altarpiece to Germany, and Karl Haberstock, an art dealer who filled German museums with works bought virtually at gunpoint from Jewish collectors. Robert Scholz, the leading art critic in the Third Reich, became an officer in the chief art looting unit in France and Kajetan Muhlmann--a leading art historian--was probably the single most prolific art plunderer in the war (and arguably in history). Finally, there is Arno Breker, a gifted artist who exchanged his modernist style for monumental realism and became Hitler's favorite sculptor. If it is striking that these educated men became part of the Nazi machine, it is more remarkable that most of them rehabilitated their careers and lived comfortably after the war. Petropoulos has discovered a network of these rehabilitated experts that flourished in the postwar period, and he argues that this is a key to the tens of thousands of looted artworks that are still "missing" today. Based on previously unreleased information and recently declassified documents, The Faustian Bargain is a gripping read about the art world during this period, and a fascinating examination of the intense relationship between culture and politics in the Third Reich.
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12.

Museums in the German Art World from the End of the Old Regime to the Rise of Modernism » Read Now
by James J. Sheehan. 260 pgs.

Collections: Entire Library

Combining the history of ideas, institutions, and architecture, this study shows how the museum both reflected and shaped the place of art in German culture from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. On a broader level, it illuminates the origin and character of the museum's...
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Combining the history of ideas, institutions, and architecture, this study shows how the museum both reflected and shaped the place of art in German culture from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. On a broader level, it illuminates the origin and character of the museum's central role in modern culture. James Sheehan begins by describing the establishment of the first public galleries during the last decades of Germany's old regime. He then examines the revolutionary upheaval that swept Germany between 1789 and 1815, arguing that the first great German museums reflected the nation's revolutionary aspirations. By the mid-nineteenth century, the climate had changed; museums constructed in this period affirmed historical continuities and celebrated political accomplishments. During the next several years, however, Germans became disillusioned with conventional definitions of art and lost interest in monumental museums. By the turn of the century, the museum had become a site for the political and cultural controversies caused by the rise of artistic modernism. In this context, Sheehan argues, we can see the first signs of what would become the modern style of museum architecture and modes of display. The first study of its kind, this highly accessible book will appeal to historians, museum professionals, and anyone interested in the relationship between art, politics, and culture.
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13.

The Politics of Display or the Display of Politics, in The Art Bulletin » Read Now
by Francoise Forster-Hahn. 6 pgs.

Collections: Entire Library

...collecting and display, the history of museums, and the nature and role...the narration of national history in the museum with that of modern art...work of an artist whose...
14.

Possessors and Possessed: Museums, Archaeology, and the Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire » Read Now
by Wendy M. K. Shaw. 269 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

A history of the creation of museums in Ottoman Turkey, which demonstrates that museum-building was both a product of and a response to European imperialism. Having learned to value their antiquities, the Ottomans proceeded to use them as visual manifestations of emerging nationalism.
15.

Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge » Read Now
by Eilean Hooper-Greenhill. 232 pgs.

Collections: Education, Entire Library

Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge presents a critical survey of major changes in current assumptions about the nature of museums. In four case studies, the author reveals a variety of different roles for museums in the production and shaping of knowledge.
16.

Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles » Read Now
by Daniel J. Sherman, Irit Rogoff. 302 pgs.

Collections: Education, Entire Library