This evening we are joined by reed gutchberg. Well be presenting on her book useful objects museums science and literature in 19th century america. This evening we are joined by Reed Gochberg, and were talking about her book after a short introduction to the works she will be joining conversation with Sarah Giorgione. This examines the history of American Museums in the 19th century to the eyes of visitors and collectors. Museums of this period held a wide range of objects from botanical and specimens to antiquarian artifacts and technological models. They were intended to promote useful knowledge. The collections create better discussions about how objects are selected, preserving classified and who gets to decide their value. These reflections shape broader discussions about museum in American Culture and continue to resonate today. I Reed Gochberg is the assistant director of studies in a lecture on history and literature in harvard university. She has seminars and museums and material culture and science exploration and empire. Her research in teaching focused on 19th century American Literature and culture with interest in material country culture and Museum Studies in the history of science and technology. C received her ph. D. In english from Boston University and her undergrad from harvard. She will be joined by mhss sara georgini, who is a familiar face to our regulars. She is the series editor for the papers of john adams and the editorial process based on the historical society. She is the author of the religious lives of the adams family. Smithsonian. Miss Reed Gochberg received a ph. D. From Boston University. Without further ado, please join me in welcoming miss Reed Gochberg. Thank you so, much, gavin for that introduction. 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 Giorgione i also want to thank david and olivia for organizing this event. Its a pleasure to be here and have the chance to share my work on the history of museums with this community. Im grateful to all of you for taking the time to i listen in and join in this conversation. Im just gonna share my screen to get us started. I want to start out with a strange and perhaps surprising story from the early history of American Museums. Some of you might be familiar with the work of Charles Wilson peele who was a portrait painter, naturalist and museum entrepreneur in philadelphia in the late 18th century. Peel established one of the earliest American Museums during the 1780s. He combined collections of his own portraits, works of art, with Natural History and anthropology as well as, lectures demonstrations and other forms of popular entertainment. In 1792, he was hoping to get more funding for his museum. He issued a broad appeal to the citizens of philadelphia and address members of the American Philosophical Society which is a Scientific Organization in the city in order to make the case for his museum and implicitly to attract donations. He devotes most of his energy and 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. The costs of frames, glass cases that hes going to need to acquire. Its a really fascinating document just for thinking about what it meant to start a museum during this time. People also takes this conversation further. As part of this proposal he talks his audience through the process of preservation that he was using on mammals and birds. The tone of his message shifts pretty dramatically when he suggested extending these methods of preservation to the Founding Fathers themselves. There are other means to preserve and hand down to succeeding generations the relics of such great men who have been crowned with success in the most preserving their bodies from corruption and he used powerful antiseptics. He 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 the museum. On the one hand, the strange and radical proposal to taxidermy Benjamin Franklin and allows us to see the anxieties of the early republic. Especially this moment where there is a lot of fear of political instability. The luminaries, that most visible figures of the nations founders, were no longer alive and in full view of american citizens. It also allows us to see how peel, and his contemporaries, were imagining the world of museums and cultural institutions and what they could play in 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. These kinds of questions were really central to the early history of American Museums. As i explore more broadly in my book, and we will say a little bit more about tonight. I want to emphasize a few larger ideas. First, just about the kinds of shifts that we are taking place during the late 18th and early 19th century. The scope and mission of museums. Second, also 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. Finally, i want to Say Something about the contemporary states of these conversations for museums and cultural institutions today. Ill offer a few examples just to think through these issues before turning back to one early example with more detail. Towards the end i will say a little bit about how some of these idea also informed the early history and the collections of the nhs. Museums have a fascinating, complicated and troubling history. Scholars cabinet of curiosities filled with a wide range of National History specimens, artifacts, other objects returned from voyages around the world. The ride of colonialism shape this idea of curiosity. It stood in for otherness for a eurocentric view of the world as well as for this process of discovery and knowledge making. So these collectors said object robert, curiosity was the eye of the beholder as we see in this image. As time went, henry collectors were increasingly looking to have representative as well as rare objects as part of their collections. In order to achieve what one called a world in miniature. And encyclopedia collection that could allow for the study of all branches of knowledge. During the 18th century, these individual collections would form mazes 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. These institutions 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 in boston, the metropolitan museum of art, the American Museum of Natural History. These were all founded around the 1870s, following the civil war. Ive been really interested in this in between moment between the 18th century and these later museums, where we can really see this kind of gradual, messy, non linear transition between a cabinet of curiosities model where you have collections that are filled with all kinds of different objects together, towards greater specialization. Also, between collections that were often restricted for elite audiences or imagine to have a research purpose, towards institutions that were dedicated at least ostensibly to Public Education and access. By examining this period in more detail, i also want to argue that we can see more clearly that the idea of the museum itself was in flux. You can see this in the different terms that were used to describe collections during this period. You often see terms like cabinet, gallery, museum, they all mean objects collection different purposes for this. These were often housed in different locations too, from libraries, historical societies, academies, and colleges. And how their purpose was being imagined. The founders of these institutions often wrote down and shared their missions, whether through acts of incorporation, or other written documents. And they often emphasized this idea of useful knowledge. Suggesting how material objects can make knowledge itself more tangible and concrete. Additionally, they make lofty claims about a broader missionof research and education. Museums were committed to preserving things for posterity and a key democratic commitment to knowledge, either things in play out this way, as i say more about a few minutes. So in order to look at this history, i have drawn on my own background as a literary scholar in order to trace account of museums across fiction, guidebooks, periodicals. Also, these descriptions in conversation with the kinds of information that we kick out from donation books, visual materials, and even surviving objects in collections. One thing i want to say about this period is that it really kind of demands this inner disciplinary approach. On the one hand, museums were bringing together so many different types of objects, and what we today we consider to be different fields. Botany, geology, zoology. Anthropology, history, geography. And we can see, and in these collections a kind of crisscrossing intersecting paths of objects and individuals and institutions. But i also want to know 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, and 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 as how museums were creating different hierarchies and Power Dynamics that were linked to colonialismand elitism. And about who would have access to the kinds of knowledge overrepresented in their collections. So, we can see this in the writings of jane Johnson School craft to was a native american poet who actually was married to a bureau of Indian Affairs agent. And they collaborated together, 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, how she was 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 is interpreting works of classical sculpture in the galleries of the British Museum, and really staking a claim to his right tune and education into his our own expertise. But we can also see figures like or hitchcock, who was a really talented artist and Natural History illustrator who, when visiting these collections, with sometimes reflecting on the fact that her husband and son were likely to benefit more from them than she might. So these accounts allow us to really trace the people who were engaging, visiting Museum Collections, to think beyond what institutions were promising are claiming to offer. But also to see how on eir own place within these institutions, and really challenging the limits of whats was being defined as useful knowledge during this period. The imaginative responses of writers also helps us to illuminate the kinds of challenges and bigger questions that museums were raising. In the early republic, the french born writer and diplomat really reflected on these challenges of materiality and loss. And it was really imagining the prepare to be up the objects that were circulating and being exchanged by institutions. But in the galleries of the u. S. Patent office, surrounded by models of patented machines, the poet wang whitman confronted this strange and really horrific spectacle of a Museum Transformed into a civil war hospital. And he captures in his writing, the eerie scene of these cases of objects interspersed with wounded soldiers. And the writer and naturalist, Henry David Thoreau mourneds decision to kill each hurdle 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. They picture these collections arranged in cases and cabinets. But the reality was a much more disorderly process that spurred really dynamic conversations about within a day beyond institutions about what we choose to preserve, and value, about whos 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 during this time, and also can inform how we think about making cultural institutions more interdisciplinary, inclusive, and Community Oriented 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 redefining the purpose of conscience. 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 a plan to meet regularly and gather information from a network of correspondents around the atlantic world. And probably scholarly articles about the research. They planned to form a library, and finally, they established a cabinet. So, like other early cabinets of curiosity, the aps cabinet healthy wide variety of types of objects. And are barium of trust plants, natural specimens, anthropological artifacts, and other objects that were sent from around the atlantic world. The aps was not alone in developing those 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 the american a society and of course the nhs. All these institutions had patents it looks very similar to the one at the abs. Around this time, Harvard College also had what was called of loss of the chamber. And this is a teaching collection that similarly included a range of different kinds of objects 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 museum. So we can actually still access a virtual version of that through their website if you are 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 the elite scientific communities. But they are nonetheless really important to how we understand the kinds of museums that were being founded during this period, and how people were understanding the point of developing a collection like this. So on the one hand, you have the drama of the spectacle of appeals self portrait. Lifting the velvet curtain to show the men in the skeleton. On the other hand, you have these elections that were explicitly intended for research and designed to function in some ways like a library. These kinds of institutions were really evolving alongside each other and, even overlapped at times. And they revealed a kind of twinge purpose of museums actually were evolving during this very transitional moment. So, aps cabinet was explicitly wide ranging in the kinds of objects that collected. And some way is this was the result of haphazard collecting process. Objects were often sent to the society by what were called corresponding members. These are people who did not live in philadelphia but lived elsewhere and with send objects and letters and other information to contribute to this larger enterprise. The term cabinet was also something of a misnomer. The society frequently struggled to find space to house its collections, and objects were often loaned out to the members that lived in philadelphia. As a result they were scattered, they were circulating,