Introduction: Thinking about Museums
Chapter 1. Do Museums Still Need Objects?
Chapter 2.Whose Objects? Whose Culture? The Contexts of
Repatriation
Chapter 3. Where Is the East?
Chapter 4. Where Have All the Grown-Ups Gone?
Chapter 5. The Birth and the Death of a Museum
Chapter 6. Museums, Public Space, and Civic Identity
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
Steven Conn is the author of Metropolitan Philadelphia: Living with the Presence of the Past, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.
"Steven Conn provides an eclectic, provocative, and extremely
readable tour of the history of museums in the twentieth-century
United States. . . . The easy erudition and wit of Do Museums Still
Need Objects? Will appeal to lay readers and museum practitioners,
and its hardheaded historical approach and bold opinions will raise
debate among scholars in the field of museum studies and cultural
history."—Journal of American History
"Steven Conn offers a refreshing look at museums and many of the
debates surrounding their development and practices over the past
forty years. He is right to frame his inquiry by asking if museums
still need objects. Too often these debates have ignored the very
characteristic that defines museums and distinguishes them from all
other cultural institutions: they collect, preserve, and present
things. This is an important, timely book."—James Cuno, President
and Director, Art Institute of Chicago
"In this provocative and engaging book, Steven Conn considers the
continuing role museums play in contemporary American society.
Despite recent shifts in their priorities, Conn argues that museums
and their collections possess tremendous potential as sites of
learning and places where civic identity is shaped and sustained.
Do Museums Still Need Objects? is a must-read for anyone thinking
about the social and cultural significance of museums at the
beginning of the twenty-first century."—Raymond Silverman,
University of Michigan
"Conn's well-written essays centralize objects as the defining
feature of museums as they shifted (albeit incompletely) from being
places of public instruction to being places of private
consumption, from taxonomic exhibits to narrative ones, influenced
by the development of the academic disciplines of science,
anthropology, and art history. . . . An interesting and significant
contribution to the literatures of museum studies and public
history."—American Historical Review
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