Curators and Culture: The Museum Movement in America, 1740-1870 (History of American Science and Technology Series)

For this book, the author researched ten museums founded prior to 1870, using primary sources. Those chosen comprised a geographically diverse sample of pre-1870 American museums and covered a range of disciplines, among them art, history and natural science. Orosz demonstrates that the early museum curators had worked out the basic form of the American museum by 1870 - that is, institutions that simultaneously promote scholarly research and deliver popular education. He also shows that many innovations in museum practice that have been thought to be developments of later years - such as habitat groups and school tours - were actually devised in the pre-1870 era.

This volume argues that a small, loosely connected group of men constituted an informal museum movement in America from about 1740 to 1870.

As they formed their pioneer museums, these men were guided not so much by European examples, but rather by the imperatives of the American democratic culture, including the Enlightenment, the simultaneous decline of the respectability and rise of the middle classes, the Age of Egalitarianism, and the advent of professionalism in the sciences. Thus the pre-1870 American museum was neither the frivolous sideshow some critics have imagined, nor the enclave for elitists that others have charged. Instead, the proprietors displayed serious motives and egalitarian aspirations.

The conflicting demands for popular education on the one hand and professionalism on the other were a continuing source of tension in American museums after about 1835, but by 1870 the two claims had synthesized into a rough parity. This synthesis, the "American Compromise," has remained the basic model of museums in America down to the present. Thus, by 1870, the form of the modern American museum as an institution which simultaneously provides popular education and promotes scholarly research was completely developed.