ideas of what should be, so i think that gives an opportunity for everybody's voice to be heard. >> just fascinating. thank you so much, dr. thompson. really interesting talking to you and i'll pass it back to books & books. >> thank you both so much for this conversation. that you for moderating tonight's conversation and thank you again. thank you, everyone, who joined us tonight. don't forget you can purchase your copy of "smashing statues" online or in our stores. thank you again. i hope everyone has a great night. >> good night. c-span's new american presidents website is your one-stop guide to our nation's commanders in chief. from george washington to joe biden. find short biographies, video resources, live facts, and rich images that tell the stories of their lives and presidencies.

all in one easy-to-browse c-span website. visit c-span.org/presidents to begin exploring this catalog of presidents today. this evening we are joined by reed gochberg who will be presenting on her book. after a short introduction to the work, she'll be joined in conversation by mhs's own sara. "useful objects" examines the history of museums through the eyes of visitors, writers and collectors. museums held a wide range of objects from specimens to artifacts and technological models. they were intended to promote useful knowledge. these collections generated a broader discussion about how objects were selected, preserved and classified as well as who gets to decide their value.

these reflections continue to resonate today. ms. gochberg is the assistant director of studies and a lecturer on history and literature at harvard university. she's taught seminars and tutorials on museums in america, museums in material culture and science exploration. her research and teaching focused on 19th century literature and culture with particular interest in museum studies and the history of science and technology. she received her ph.d. in english from boston university. she'll be joined by mhs' sara georgeen. he is part of an editorial project based at the massachusetts historical sort. she is the author of "household gods" and frequently writes about early american thought and

culture. similar to ms. gochberg, she also received her ph.d. from boston university. so without further ado, please join me in welcoming ms. gochberg. >> well, great, thank you so much, gavin, for that introduction and thank you so much to all of you for being here tonight. i'm so grateful to the massachusetts historical society for hosting me and i am really looking forward to my conversation with sara. i also especially want to thank gavin and olivia for organizing this event. it's a pleasure to be here and have a chance to share my work on the history of museums with this community and i'm grateful to all of you for taking the time to listen in and join in on this conversation. so i'm just going to 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 peal, who was an entrepreneur in philadelphia in the late 18th century. peel established one of the earliest american museums in the 1780s and combind collections of his own works of part with natural history, demonstrations and other forms of popular entertainment. but in 1792, peel was hoping to get more funding for his museum and he issued a broad appeal to the citizens of philadelphia and addressed members of the american philosophical society, which is a learned scientific organization in the city in order to make the case for his museum and implicitly, of course, to attract some donations. so peel devotes most of his energy in this 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, including the costs of guild frames and glass cases that he's going to need to acquire. and it's a really fascinating document just for thinking about what it meant to start a museum during this time. but peel also takes this conversation a step further. as part of this proposal, he emphasizes his skill of taxidermy and talks about the process of preservation that he was using on mammals and birds. but the tone of his message shifts when he suggests extending these methods of preservation to the founding fathers themselves. he suggests there are other means to preserve and hand down to succeeding generation the relics of such great men whose labors have been crowned with success in the most distinguished benefits to mankind. preserving their bodies from corruption by the use of powerful antiseptics. he goes on to note he's pretty

sure benjamin franklin would be on board with this idea and is imagining how these specimens could add to the collections of natural history that he's assembling in his museum. so on the one hand the strange and radical proposal to taxidermy of benjamin franklin allows us to see some of the anxieties of the early republic, especially when there's a lot of fear of political instability as the luminaries, the most visible figures of the nation's founders, were no longer alive and in full view of american citizens. but it also allows us to see how peel and his contemporaries were imagining the role that museums and cultural institutions could play within 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 sight and value? so these kinds of questions were

really central to the early history of american you seems as i explore more broadly in my book and will say a little bit more about tonight. i want to emphasize a few larger ideas. so first just about the kind of shifts that were taking place during the late 18th and early 19th century and the scope and mission of museums. second, also about the broader challenges and debates that surrounded collections that we can see through the accounts of the writers and artists and visitors who were engaging with them. and finally i want to say a little bit about the contemporary stakes of these conversations for museums and cultural institutions today. i'll offer a few examples, just through some of these larger issues before turning back to one early example in a bit more detail. towards the end i'll say a little bit about how some of these ideas informed the early history of the collections here at the mhs. so museums have a fascinating, complicated and often troubling history. scholars commonly trace the history of museums back to early modern europe when individual

collectors had cabinets of curiosity with specimens, artifacts and objects from voyages around the world. the rise -- it stood in for otherness, for a euro centric view of the world as well as this process of discovery and knowledge making. to these collectors such objects were rare. curiosity really was in the eye of the beholder as we see here in this image. as time went on, many collectors were increasingly looking to have representative as well as rare objects as part of that if collections. in order to achieve what one called a world in miniature, an encyclopedic collection that could allow for the study of all branches of knowledge. during the 18th century these would form the basis of more public, large-scale institution like the british museum. around the same time many royal collections of art were being turned into public institutions

like the louvre and natural gallery and these were really important models for the kind of museums that were established in the united states. it wasn't until later in the 19th century that see we the rise of museums that might be familiar to us, like the mfa in boston, the american museum of natural history. these were all founded around the 1870s following the civil war. but i think 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, nonlinear transition between a cabinet of curiosities model where you have collections that are filled with all kinds of different objects together towards greater specialization and also between collections that were afternoon restricted for elite audiences or imagined to have a research purpose towards institutions that were

dedicated essentially to public education and access. so by examining this period in more detail, i also want to argue that we can see more clearly the idea of a 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 or gallery or museum that all mean an object collection and different purposes for it. these were often housed in different locations too. from libraries and historical societies to academies, lyceums and colleges. but across these different contexts we can see a lot of resonances and how their purpose is being imagined. the founders of these institutions often wrote down and shared their mission, whether through acts of incorporation or other written documents. they often emphasizes this idea of useful knowledge, suggesting how material objects themselves can make knowledge itself more tangible and concrete.

additionally they make lofty claims about a broader mission of research and education. museums were committing to preserves objects for posterity and promised access to knowledge even if things didn't play out this way. in order to look at this history, i have drawn on my own background as a literary scholar in order to trace accounts of museums across fictions, essays, guide books and periodicals and also to put these descriptions in conversation with the kinds of information that we can get from donation books, visual materials and even surviving objects in collections. one thing i want to say about this period is it really kind of demands this interdisciplinary approach. on the one hand, museums were bringing together so many different types of objects. and what today we consider to be different fields. botany, zoology, anthropology,

history, geography. and we can see crisscrossing intersecting paths of objects and institutions. but i also want to note 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 they were reflecting on what they were seeing and also considering potential alternatives. so one thing that we can see very clearly is how museums were creating different hierarchies and power dynamics that were linked to colonialism and elitism, about who would have access to the kinds of knowledge that were represented in their collections. so we can see this in the writings of jane johnston in school craft who was a native american poet who actually was married to a bureau of indian affairs agent. 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. we can see in her writings, though, how she's reflecting on the relationship between white and indigenous forms of knowledge. we can see william wells brown who was interpreting works of classical sculpture staking a claim to his right to an education and to his own expertise. but we can also see figures like orra white hitchcock who was a really talented artist and natural history el straighter who when visiting these collections was sometimes reflecting on the fact that her husband and son were likely to benefit more from them than she might. these accounts allow us to trace the people engaging and visiting collections to think beyond what institutions were promising to offer and how people are

reflecting on their own place within these institutions and really challenging the limits of what was being defined as useful knowledge during this period. the imaginative responses of writers also help us to illuminate the kinds of challenges and bigger questions that museums were raising. in the early republic the french-born writer and diplomat st. john de crevecoeur on materiality and loss and was really imagining the objects that were circulating and exchanged by institutions. in the galleries of the u.s. patent office surrounded by models of patented machines walt whitman confronted this strange and really horrific spectacle of a mum seem transformed into a civil war hospital. and he captures in his writings this eerie scene of these cases of objects interspersed.

and the writer and naturalist henry david thorau donated to harvard's natural history museum even as he recognized its value to scientific research. so the founders of museums often envisioned order, right, they pictured these collections neatly arranged in cases and cabinets, but the reality was much more disorderly process that sudden dynamic conversations within and beyond institutions. about what we choose to preserve and value, about whose 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 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 some of the larger issues in

mind i want to come back to an early example of how museums were defining and redefining the purpose of collections. i mentioned peel's 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 associate. so the aps was founded by benjamin franklin with the goal of preserving and promoting useful knowledge. the american fill cough sal society promoted useful knowledge much like other learned societies and institutions, especially the royal society of london it was modeling a lot of its activities. they had a few ways they thought to do that. so first they planned to meet regularly and gather information from a network of correspondents around the atlantic world and publish scholarly articles about their research. they planned to form a library

and, finally, they established a cabinet. so like other early cabinets of curiosity, the aps cabinet held a wide variety of objects, pressed plants, artifacts and other objects sent from around the atlantic world. the aps was not alone in developing this kind of collection alongside its library. here in the greater boston area there were numerous examples of this pattern. so the american academy of arts and sciences, of course the mhs, all of these institutions also had cabinets that looked very similar to the one at the aps. around this time harvard college had a philosophy chamber that included a range of different objects such as artifacts but scientific instruments and this was the subject of a really great exhibit a few years ago so you can still access a virtual version through their website. so these collections don't get discussed as often as something

like peel's museum. they were more short-lived and less popular with visitors and definitely more tied to elite scientific communities, but they're 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. on the one hand you have the drama, the spectacle of the self-portrait, lifting the velvet curtain to show the mammoth skeleton and collections that were 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. they reveal the twinned purposes of museums as they were evolving during this very transitional moment. so the aps cabinet was explicitly wide ranging in the kinds of objects they collected. sometimes this is the result of a haphazard collecting process,

objects were often sent to the society by what were called corresponding members. these were people who did not live in philadelphia but lived elsewhere and would 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 often were loaned out to the members who lived in philadelphia. as they were scattered, they were circulating and were not necessarily held in one place as a term like cabinet might suggest. this posed fairly obvious organizational challenges. at one point the curators announced that objects had been, quote, entrusted to the care of members but never yet delivered to the society, so things got lost. i think this speaks to a

different, imagined purpose for a museum than what we think of today. at this point, the point was using and handling and observing these objects rather than trying to keep them perfectly preserved. they were also entrusted to people who were known to be interested in that field to be working on related projects and the goal was to use the collection to really contribute to knowledge through this research. preservation and longevity were not major concerns even if it means the collections did not survive that long. i also want to note some of the issues of loss and preservation were especially significant during the period of time that this collection was being formed, which overlapped with the american revolution and early republic. during the war the curators' reported the decay of many specimens of the collection. their attention was obviously elsewhere. some collections dried out, due to running out of alcohol to

fill jars with specimens or to preserve things properly. following the war things stayed fairly chaotic. the aps was looking to build a more permanent space, and the collections continued to move around. so here is where we come back to peel and his museum and his promise to be really good at preserving things. peel was a member of the aps, and he had begun his own museum out of his own house. but by the early 1790s he was looking for more space. his proposal to taxidermy ben franklin was part of this broad er self-promotion. he was really outlining the work he was done that he had been able to achieve at his museum so far and looking for additional funds. he was also the curator of the aps cabinet and at this moment he applied for permission to rent space from the society in philosophical hall in order to open up his museum there.

so given his dual roles, it's highly likely that he was also displaying some of the aps cabinet's collections alongside and within his own museum. here we see the learned society and the public museum really coming into contact. so this was not without some anxieties especially on the side of the aps. one of the largest specimens, a skeleton of an indian elephant, was placed on display at peel's museum, but the society was very careful to note that they preferred, quote, a handsome and suitable inscription to show that it was placed there as best calculated to answer the purpose for which it was desired. a little scuffle in the minutes. someone felt the need to note that this decision was reached after maturely weighing all circumstances, which is never a good sign, and this collaboration was just clearly an uneasy one, largely due to competing ideas about the purpose of these collections. so the museum would continue to expand.

he would move across the street to the larger rooms of independence hall. achieving at least temporarily his goal of developing a national museum. meanwhile the cabinet of the aps would continue to kind of fizzle. their descriptions of the elephant skeleton and mammoth bones collecting dust in the cellar and other accounts of the society being crowded with articles. the later history of this cabinet was shaped by the rise of disciplinary specialization. so museums became more specialized, to break into institutions dedicated to art, natural miss tore, technology and so forth and to be separated off from libraries. most of the objects that remained were sent to the pen museum or to the academy of natural sciences. and here in the greater boston area we see a similar pattern

where many of the art fkts that were donated are now at the peabody museum at harvard. although the collections are now separate, they were once housed together. i really want to emphasize how important it is to recognize that early history. we can see the better concerns that were hugely influential in shaping the trajectory of museums through the present day. we can imagine and put in conversation the different points of view among founders and visitors and we can also recognize the shared history of collections dedicated to science and history and art even if today they're in separate institutions. this can allow us to imagine different ways of interpreting these objects and understanding how they were valued and used, who collected them and how they ended up at different institutions. it also can allow us to acknowledge the forms of loss

and eraise -- erasure that occurred in the founding of these institutions and to find new ways to highlight the voices of figures who were excluded from these conversations and to think about ways to connect collections from across a wide range of fields. so in that way perhaps there are opportunities for us to build on and expand the opportunities for engaging with museum collections today. the founders of 19th century museums had metaphors they used to talk about their goals. they often liked to imagine the spark that could result from placing different objects and fields of knowledge in conversation, and they sometimes described this process of ideas and collision between different objects and among the different minds and perspectives of those engaging with them. throughout this period, a range of objects that were housed in museum collections really spurred many visitors to imagine continued possibilities for drawing new kinds of connections. but the founding of museums also set in motion larger and still

unresolved conversations about how we determine what to value, study and preserve. so my hope is this history can help us understand the role these collections can play today much like the transitional moment of the 19th century museums and cultural institutions have been in a fairly long moment of crisis and transition especially over the past two years. but this is also a dynamic moment for thinking about how the priorities of institutions can continue to evolve and change and how museums, libraries and archives can continue to be creative about interdisciplinary and inclusive forms of interpretation and education, and imagine how they can find new opportunities for making collections more useful. so, with that, i'd like to invite sara to join me and to continue the conversation. thank you so much. >> thank you so much, reed, and thanks to all of you for joining us here tonight. please, if you have a question, drop it in the q&a and we'll get

to as many as we can. reed, your book struck a chord with me from page one, talking about circulating objects and how we use them to respond and reflect. it made me think particularly of a new exhibit that we have launched here in the building, an online view of our favorite things, and that really helped us connect during the pandemic, sharing some of our favorites in the collections. but we also thought about how to make it accessible. and that leads to my first question, which is what were the nuts and bolts of actually accessing these collections? were there tickets? admission fees? experts on hand to answer questions? what was it like? >> that is such a great question. one thing i would emphasize it varied so much depending on the museum and depending on the collection. you have something like peel's museum that is really geared towards a broader public and there were tickets, and you can

actually see those in the archives. there were guide books and peel and his son would be on hand to answer questions, to do demonstrations, visitors could have a silhouette drawn as a souvenir. but it really varied a lot. another museum i talk about is the u.s. patent office gallery, and i think this museum is such a strange mix of different purposes because, you know, the patent office was, of course, like a federal bureaucratic office but they created this gallery in order to house and display these miniature models that inventors submitted along with their patent applications. so by the mid-19th century they had thousands of these. they built what's now the smithsonian american art museum in order to put these on display for the public. but if you imagine people visiting this gallery, they could purchase a guide book. there would be a lot of different people interacting with the objects at once. you would have patent office

clerks and examiners who are using these to adjudicate competing claims to the novelty of an invention but you also would have visitors to this gallery alongside each other. finally, i mentioned at the beginning, a number of these museums were attached to different kinds of educational institutions so whether that's an academy or a college and university and so at harvard, the museum of zoology founded in 1859, there were numerous students who worked there spending hours and hours comparing specimens in the collection. you also had these women assistants who were working closely with the collections to catalog and classify these objects, so it really ranged. i think the guide books are really important to how we can imagine what the experience might have been like visiting the museum.

there's so much you can glean even from newspaper accounts and descriptions of visits to these spaces as well. so i think they would have learned about these in a number of different ways. >> something that comes through throughout the book is this idea that curatorial work is an art and a science. something you mentioned, this technique that early curators had of placing ideas in collision, that somehow this sparked useful knowledge. can you give us some examples of that? >> yeah, i mean, i think that's such an interesting idea because in some ways it is this lofty promise. it's this idea that by putting together works of art alongside natural history or alongside anthropology you'll be able to kind of generate new kinds of ideas, new kinds of knowledge that will be somehow useful. but i think part of why i was drawn to that term, especially

for the book's title, it raises all these questions of useful to whom and for whom and also what about useless knowledge? what do you do with that? and so i think what i've been especially interested in the kind of unexpected nature of that process of collision that you're asking about, right, like where you can glimpse how people are resisting some of these categories of usefulness. you can see a figure like henry david thoreau writing in his journals, i hate museums. they are dead nature collected by dead men, right, that they're beyond what the founders of these museums are saying about what they're trying to do. we can really access the thoughts and experiences of people who might be thinking in other ways about what knowledge looks like and what should be included or not. and i guess, like, the last thing i would say about that, curators might imagine this kind

of official route to creating knowledge within a museum collection, but, of course, we know there would be things left out, stories not told, and i think those kinds of issues and questions really resonate across a lot of different institutions during this period. >> i think the idea museum making as a cultural process is so integral to those first years of the early republic. what are some of the ways that these institutions buttress or shape american federal growth and even american identity? >> absolutely. museums were tied to national expansion. often the idea of useful knowledge was really part of this idea of learning more about some field that would enable greater economic development or expand information about newly annexed territories as the united states is evolving into

an empire very quickly especially in the first half of the 19th century. you see this a lot with geology. i've noticed that that often is tied to u.s. geological surveys, cartography expeditions in the great lakes region and the west. the other thing i would say is museum founders were predominantly white, elite, educated men but there are these stories and figures that complicate this pattern. i mentioned schoolcraft. he was a bureau of indian affairs agent and author of numerous books. he was an eary anthropologist, and he was especially interested in geology but was interested in

collecting what he called specimens of going lower, so he was looking to write down and record legends and worked with his wife who was of native american descent and her family to collect information and a lot of his writings became major sources for longfellow and for cooper. one thing that is really important you can see this dynamic process. if you read some of his writings you can glimpse her voice coming through because she's a poet herself. she is sometimes writing about and reflecting on this relationship but ideas of expertise and sovereignty. this collaboration is a really interesting one both for how it overlaps with the rhetoric used to talk about museum collections and knowledge gathering during this period but also for how it really maps on to national expansion, especially during the 1820s and 1830s. >> one of the great contributions and challenges of

writing a book that stretches for a century is thinking how the turning points change. i'm thinking since you have a 19th century story of the civil war, and how museums and their makers are shaped by or shape our memory of the civil war. what did you find there? >> yeah, i mean, so it was interesting that part of the book was my starting point when i began researching this project. i mentioned earlier this really amazing sketch by walt whitman when he's a civil war nurse. he visits the patent museum and describes it as this strange and fascinating site where you can see cases of models and wounded soldiers. i think when i started with this moment, i was kind of imagining that i would then lean forward in time and kind of start here

and look at some of the large-scale museums that were founded following the civil war. the corporate tycoon funded institutions like many art museums and many history museums that exist today. but one thing i found was that i ended up continuing to read backwards and starting to kind of dig deeper into its earlier history and, you know, this transformation of this institution from the 1830s on ward and then from there i ended up working backwards in a way because i realized that just as i kept working this story just continued to kind of evolve out of my research of this transitional period that in order to get a sense of how we moved from these institutions that were so varied in the kinds of things they were collecting and this mix of so many

different objects and purposes together to these institutions that actually looked similar to the museums we might visit today, i did kind of notice this overall turning point as you are saying in the first half of the century. i think your question about the civil war is a really interesting one because i think it is the kind of next shift in that turn and i think in the book i explore it primarily through whitman's experience within the patent office, but i think that it is this really significant moment in terms of how we then think about where these institutions go next. >> in thinking about how you constructed your chronology, i have to stay on craft for just a minute here. so if we can just talk about historical process and research, because we love to geek out and do that here at the mhs.

can you talk a little bit about researching and representing some of the rich cast of characters you cover in "useful objects." i'm thinking of people who are, perhaps, very well-known like william wells brown and people who are less well known like orra white hitchcock. how do you find them in the archives, and how do you situate their story within all of these amazing, different networks, cultural, political, and the museums that they roam through? >> that's such a great question. i'm sure you and i could talk about this for hours. i think one of the challenges of writing a story like this one is that i do think the voices that tend to dominate the history will be those of white men, the ones founding the institutions, having the most access to visiting them, to being part of these societies and organizations and so forth. so that was something i was

thinking about a lot in my own work, and i think that, the short answer to your question, i really prioritized looking for some of these voices. but, i mean, i think that one thing i would say about the source materials is that i also think it's really important to be putting a lot of different kinds of materials in conversation with each other, because that's the way you can really access these stories. i talk a lot about hitchcock's diaries and her writings in this piece. but really what she's best known for are his drawings and illustrations. she was the wife of edward hitchcock, who was a geologist. but she did the illustrations for his published writings and these amazing classroom drawings. i think when i was able to look at her diary, a fascinating account of their visit together.

it's a tour of england and scotland. she tagged along when he was going to an academic conference. and she -- you know, she talks about her visits to these galleries, but there's this moment where she's talking about this really amazing natural history collection. she writes i thought of edward and how much he would benefit from it. and it's this kind of -- i don't know, she is being timid in a way about acknowledging her own expertise. she's this talented illustrator, had so much knowledge herself, but it's also in some ways a realistic admission how she understood her own place within these communities and it's a sad moment. i also think just looking at her writings, also in relation to the kinds of stories and anecdotes that you can find in newspapers and periodicals, one that comes to mind, there's this

story that got reprinted a lot in the first few decades of the 19th century. it was called "female character, a lesson." and it tells the story of a young woman visiting the british museum and how she's misbehaving when you read that alongside hitchcock's diary or alongside the writings of something like william brown you can see how they're participating in this broader conversation and what it means to be someone trying to claim an equal right to be part of this conversation and to assert their own knowledge and expertise. this has been a long digression probably from your original question. it was important to me to think about how we could put these different sources together, how they are circulating across

fiction and poetry but also through visual and written sources because i think that's also an opportunity in terms of future projects to think how we expand history who is collecting and donating to museums and visiting, too. >> and it seems like american victorians who began in love with the british model of museums have changed their minds by the end of the century. they travel, go abroad, and the british museum isn't exactly what they expected. how does that shift happen? >> i think the british museum especially is a really interesting contrast to what americans are seeing here in the united states. there's this contrast between a museum dedicated. seeing the fragments and a

national museum of the patent office displaying these shiny model machines. there are different ways some of the national museums are cultivating their own rendition that in the u.s. to have a museum like the patent office is to emphasize american ingenuity. but, you know, i think for all that americans are critical of the british museum in the mid-19th century, i still think it's a very important example because it is just protesting so much, right, that there's a kind of anxiety of, oh, they have so

much here. how can we ever have as much in our own museums. and i think that carries over as well to science museums. you see the natural history museums modeling themselves on institutions in europe and really seeking to be part of this larger process of exchange and these that can compete with well established institutions. that pattern really carries on and i think it continues especially with the founding of studies later more specialized museums, too. >> well, in the spirit of history and dialogue, i think we should open it up to our brilliant audience. we have a number of questions bubbling away. please add yours in the next couple of minutes.

and, reed, we're just going to dive in. >> sounds great. >> first up, do you have a favorite old cabinet or museum that still exists in some form today for visiting? >> oh, that's such an interesting question. i would say -- you know, i would say that i've appreciated a lot of recent territorial projects that are kind of thinking explicitly about the history. they have their enlightenment gallery they've brought collections from the 18th century. when i was there several years ago i spent a lot of time wandering that gallery. i am really intrigued by more recent works, contemporary artists like mark dion's work, a

lot of his work is engaging explicitly in the history of science and he creates reimagined cabinets of curiosity, some of these spaces that i think allow us to think about some of these questions. i recommend that to anyone who is interested. >> you've introduced me to a new artist, thank you. another audience member would like to know to what extent was research an objective in the founding of the early museums, and was there any public funding of the early institutions? >> i think research really was a primary objective for a lot of these institutions. i think you see that across the different fields, the american philosophical society, true at the nhs as well.

i think this idea of publishing work, promoting it in that way was really important to any of these institution that is were trying to collect and record information whether that was about natural history or american history. in terms of funding, i think many of these institutions tended to be privately funded so really until you get to the smithsonian. and even that was the result of the bequest by james smithson. the question of funding has been really a tricky one within the united states for a lot of these museums, and you see a lot of them evolving as private institutions. lots to say on that question. >> i think that is such an interesting question. i have to add, because it's something i've been thinking about a lot as we annotate, john

adams is the president of the american academy of arts and sciences at the same time thomas jefferson is president of the american philosophical society. i would love someone to go forth and write about the two and what is generated to researchers. >> jefferson is president of the american philosophical society at the same time as president of the u.s. he's commissioning the lewis and clark expedition and has members of the aps work with william clark to help train them in surveying and botany and so forth. >> it's fascinating. if you look at the election, jefferson is hedging. so i think looking at the scientific pursuits is a rich topic to explore. okay, back to our chat, our wonderful questions. was there a museum or cabinet that particularly surprised you in the course of your research?

>> yeah. i think all of them did, it would be quite honest. that was part of the pleasure of this project to a great extent was how many unexpected moments were part of the research. i think the example i spoke at most length about, that's what really stayed with me because i do think that the idea of this collection that doesn't have a space or a gallery where the objects are scattered, things were getting lost, that's one that really stayed with me as part of how we even think about the narrative of what it means to be a museum and the goals are because i think we think so much about preservation and what is recorded but i think that these histories of loss are just as important to how we think of

museums and related to that within peel's museum one story that i really tried to track down in that -- as part of that history. there are accounts of american native delegations which i think is not something we necessarily expect for around 1800, but during visits, negotiations with the government, there were moments where these groups took a tour and we can see that in -- i mentioned early on if you visited peel's museum you could get a silhouette and he made

silhouettes of this group of visitors except as part of this group he wrote down he's labeling each with the name of the visitor but a couple he just writes a number and i think just even in that process, even in the record keeping of who was visiting you see a different kind of loss, how there's this larger loss that's taking place in terms of what we know, who is being respected and regarded within this space and i think those moments within the project have really stayed with me in terms of just thinking about how we understand the history and what it means for institutions today, too. >> an audience member wants to know can you talk more about the early ties between the

massachusetts historical society and other harvard collections and what happened to the barnham collection? >> that's a great question. that's something i've been interested in diving into further in some of my future research, too, because i do think each of these institutions has its own really interesting, fascinating history and deciding what to keep and what to pass on to another institution varied from place to place but here is what i know.

i think that if you look, if you spend some time, as i have done, looking through the peabody museum catalog at harvard today you can actually search in their advanced search for the massachusetts historical society, for some of these other still operating institutions for objects that once belonged to these institutions and how they ended up at the peabody. i think this story of how things moved from institution to institution is a really fascinating one. in some ways it's similar to this question of loss versus preservation. this process is a really interesting one, too, because i think it speaks to shifting

values within these institutions and a lot of practical challenges. do you have space to keep storing and holding on to some of these objects? are they better? i think there's the practical element there. there's the rise of disciplinary specialization, so there's this sense that some of these collections have greater value as part of a larger collection that's focused on anthropology or interpreted by the experts. but there are often these personal networks, right, so i think the ties between different institutions often would sometimes come down to individual figures, who they knew, who they were in conversation with. but, yeah, i would say that -- i think this is something i'm hoping to dig into a little bit more myself, too, especially with some of these local institutions. i think the process is one that

i'm really interested in, too. >> so we have time for one last question from our audience. i love this question because it's about a moment of creation. we'll end on that. we acquired a home built during the revolutionary war and many of the relics the family used until the mid-1900s. the property was the town's first meeting house, tavern, store, school and stage coach is to be. we are novices with a gold mine. how to start and what to avoid? so go back in time and tell peel how to do it but for the 21st century. >> that's amazing. there could be so many possible stories there. i guess what i would say is that -- you know, i think my own work in addition to working on this book has involved teaching with collections, curating different projects. i think there are so many exciting ways to think about these objects and relics that you've acquired as part of your house, and i think for me it really comes down to thinking about who are the people and the stories and what are the stories you could potentially tell through the objects? how might you use a single one of these relics to maybe open up thinking about labor, anything about how people ate, what they wore and what that meant for their everyday life. there are so many different and exciting ways to think about

that. so much interesting work done by historians as well. i really think that sounds like a wonderful project. i think about this collection but also to really think of the possibilities for illuminating some of these people who might be part of that story. i hope this person will report back at some point. >> yes. a very useful beginning. so thank you, reed, and thanks to all of you. >> i want to say thank you to both of you, both dr. georgini and dr. gochberg and thank you to the audience for joining us. as always we hope if you found this program interesting you'll consider buying a copy of the book. it is available widely. we, of course, always encourage

people to support locally owned bookstores. thank you all for joining us and without any more i think we can wish everyone a good evening. i hope everyone stays warm in the cold weather. contact information for state governors and the biden administration cabinet. preorder your copied to at c-spanshop.org. every purchase helps support c-span's nonprofit operations.