Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926
During the last half of the nineteenth century, many of the country's most celebrated museums were built. In this impressive study, Steven Conn argues that Americans, endowed with the belief that knowledge resided in objects themselves, built these institutions with the confidence that they could collect, organize, and display the sum of the world's knowledge. Conn describes how museums gave definition to different areas of scholarship, and how they occupied a central place in America's intellectual life.