Pasts Beyond Memory by Bennett Tony;

Author:Bennett, Tony;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 200037
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

Nature's many lessons

When taking issue with the characterisation of the AMNH as a ‘dead circus’, George Sherwood stressed the extent to which its links with the education system had made the Museum a vital and living force throughout the city: ‘the Museum messengers penetrate all boroughs of the city and deliver our visual instruction material free to any school anywhere in the Greater City’ (Sherwood, 1927: 323). A similar sense of the Museum's potential as an adjunct to the school system had formed a part of its public discourse from the early years of its development. When the AMNH's cornerstone was laid in 1874, H. G. Stebbins, the President of the Department of Parks, expressed the wish that ‘the museums on the Park will become valuable auxiliaries of that great free public educational system which is already the pride of our city’ (5th/6th Annual Report, 1875: 42).

Yet such views had relatively little direct influence on the Museum's early years owing to the trustees’ determination to insulate the AMNH as much as possible from the political controversies which characterised the affairs of the Park Commissioners. The directions the Museum would initially follow were more clearly indicated by the speaker who followed Stebbins: Joseph Henry, the first secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, who used the occasion to advise his audience that his long struggle to limit the Smithsonian's role to the increase rather than the diffusion of knowledge looked like bearing fruit (Goode, 1897; Molella, 1983). While both of these functions had been stipulated in James Smithson's will, Henry had constantly sought to privilege the former over the latter, and was pleased to tell his audience that his efforts had born fruit in Congress's recent agreement that the Institution should ‘devote its whole energies to the advance of science, the evident design of the testator’ (5th/6th Annual Report, 1875: 47–8). His implication was that the AMNH should follow suit, appealing to New York's philanthropists to provide funding for ‘a series of men capable not only of expounding established truths but of interrogating nature and of discovering new facts, new phenomena, and new principles’ (47). The balance that was struck between the Museum's research and public education functions varied at different moments in the Museum's development. 11 Joel Orosz (1990), however, is generally correct in interpreting the AMNH's motto – ‘For the people, for education, for science’ – as the expression of a compromise between the stress on scientific functions that had characterised the mid-century development of American museums of natural history and the increasing requirement, as the century progressed, that museums should join in the task of public education. This shift of emphasis was partly a response to democratic criticisms of the earlier forms of social, scientific or professional exclusiveness that had formed one aspect of the American museum tradition. Just as important, however, was the increasing perception of an urgent need to enlist natural history in aid of new forms of social and civic management.

In falling in with this general trend,

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