Abstract By the 1980s and 1990s, Reagan-era budget cuts and the ongoing professionalization of museum education combined to encourage natural museums, science museums and science centers to share shows, sources of funding, and pedagogical strategies. More and more of the nation's varied institutions remade themselves into streamlined sites of family "edutainment," a term contemporaries now used to describe a potent, often commercially-motivated blend of education and entertainment. Although tensions between museums' public and scientific missions persisted, at the outset of the twenty-first century, the displays of American natural history and science museums no longer functioned as active battlegrounds for competing ideas about what defined a museum and its work. Museums of science and nature had become culturally important sites for informal science, engaging diverse audiences in scientific ideas and ideas about scientific practice and awakening new investment in museums as institutions. As such, they collectively embodied museum professionals' new vision of effective public science, as well as their shared goal of defending it.
Rich with archival detail and compelling characters, Life on Display uses the history of biological exhibitions to analyze museums' shifting roles in twentieth-century American science and society. Karen A. Rader and Victoria E. M. Cain chronicle profound changes in these exhibitions - and the institutions that housed them - between 1910 and 1990, ultimately offering new perspectives on the history of museums, science, and science education. Rader and Cain explain why science and natural history museums began to welcome new audiences between the 1900s and the 1920s and chronicle the turmoil that resulted from the introduction of new kinds of biological displays. They describe how these displays of life changed dramatically once again in the 1930s and 1940s, as museums negotiated changing, often conflicting interests of scientists, educators, and visitors. The authors then reveal how museum staffs, facing intense public and scientific scrutiny, experimented with wildly different definitions of life science and life science education from the 1950s through the 1980s. The book concludes with a discussion of the influence that corporate sponsorship and blockbuster economics wielded over science and natural history museums in the century's last decades. A vivid, entertaining study of the ways science and natural history museums shaped and were shaped by understandings of science and public education in the twentieth-century United States, Life on Display will appeal to historians, sociologists, and ethnographers of American science and culture, as well as museum practitioners and general readers.
Journal Article Alan Mikhail. The Animal in Ottoman Egypt. Get access Alan Mikhail. The Animal in Ottoman Egypt. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xiv, 315. $49.95. Karen A. Rader Karen A. Rader Virginia Commonwealth University karader@vcu.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 119, Issue 5, December 2014, Pages 1821–1822, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/119.5.1821 Published: 01 December 2014
My first book, Making Mice,1 chronicled the development of the genetically standardized mouse – and in its title, the use of the word ‘making’ was deliberate. Not only did it fulfill my publisher’s...
