Ordering Wonder: Collections, Curators, and Showmen in Antebellum America

Abstract

This dissertation explores the development and execution of five museum collections established between the 1793 opening of Charles Willson Peale’s museum in Philadelphia and the opening of the Smithsonian Institution as America’s National Museum in 1855. The Smithsonian Institution and, later, the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art seem to many like the beginning of "real" museums in America, but what this research demonstrates is that they are the result of decades of trial and error by many previous, equally real, museums. Through generations of changes not only of the nation but of the people and culture of that nation, museums’ content and displays reflected changes in government, cultural shifts, and new populations with leisure time and extra money to spend. They at once reveal something uniquely American in content while tying themselves to existing European models, providing excellent avenues to study the early exercise of American science with international comparisons to older, more established institutions, professionals, and audiences.