Museum History

Scandal, shock, and rivalry all have negative connotations, don't they? They can be catastrophic to businesses and individual careers. A whiff of scandal can turn a politician into a smoking ruin. But these potentially disastrous "negatives" can and have spurred the world of fine art to new heights. A look at the history of art tells us that rivalries have, in fact, not only benefited the course of art, from ancient times to the present, but have also helped shape our narrative of art, lending it a sense of drama that it might otherwise lack.

Book 1: Jane Eyre is a novel by English writer Charlotte Brontë from 1847. Book 2: Little Women is a novel by Louisa May Alcott who was also an abolitionist and a feminist. Book 3: The Odd Women is an 1893 novel by the English novelist George Gissing. Book 4: Anna Howard Shaw (1847-1919) was a leader in the campaign for women’s suffrage. Book 5: Sojourner Truth’s autobiographical Narrative chronicles her life as a slave, and her transformation into an abolitionist, women’s rights activist, orator, and preacher. Book 6: "The Crisis" is a speech....

Today, hundreds of tribes use the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act to help them recover their looted heritage from museums across the country. As senior curator of anthropology, Chip Colwell navigated firsthand the questions of how to weigh the religious freedom of Native Americans against the academic freedom of scientists and whether the emptying of museum shelves elevates human rights or destroys a common heritage. His book reveals a dramatic process that involves negotiating the blurry lines between identity and morality, spirituality and politics.

Art looting is commonly recognized as a central feature of Nazi expropriation. After the war, the famed Monuments Men (and women) recovered several hundred thousand pieces from the Germans' makeshift repositories. Well-publicized restitution cases, such as that of Gustav Klimt's luminous painting featured in the film Woman in Gold, illustrate the legacy of Nazi looting in the art world today. But what happened to looted art that was never returned to its rightful owners?

Pandemics have afflicted human civilizations throughout history, yet these health crises have also led to progress in medicine and society that improved people’s lives. History shows that scientific innovation often proceeds from the collaboration of researchers across disciplines, nations, and institutions.

A never-before-published Dr. Seuss work about creating and looking at art! Based on a manuscript and sketches discovered in 2013, this audiobook is like a visit to a museum - with a horse as your guide! Explore how different artists - including Picasso, George Stubbs, Rosa Bonheur, Alexander Calder, Jacob Lawrence, Deborah Butterfield, Franz Marc, Jackson Pollock - have seen horses and maybe even find a new way of looking at them yourself.

Charles Alexander Eastman (1858 -1939), also known as “Ohiyesa”, was an author, physician, and lecturer of Santee Sioux and Anglo-American heritage. As a passionate advocate for the rights of American Indians, he took an active role in national politics. Indian Boyhood is a memoir that chronicles the first 15 years of his life with fascinating portrayals of Sioux culture, including training as a hunter and warrior, religious beliefs and practices, and the role of the medicine man.

In its first four months of operation, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture surpassed one million visits and quickly became a cherished, vital monument to the African American experience. And yet this accomplishment was never assured. In A Fool's Errand, founding director Lonnie Bunch tells his story of bringing his clear vision and leadership to realize this shared dream of many generations of Americans.

Most of us take for granted that our books are vertical on our shelves with the spines facing out, but Henry Petroski, inveterately curious engineer, didn’t. As a result, listeners are guided along the astonishing evolution from papyrus scrolls boxed at Alexandria to upright books shelved at the Library of Congress. Petroski takes us into the pre-Gutenberg world, when books were so scarce they were chained to lecterns for security.

The Texas Rangers were created by Stephen F. Austin in 1823. The Rangers have taken part in many of the most important events of Texas history, such as preventing the assassination of presidents William Howard Taft and Porfirio Díaz in El Paso, and in some of the best-known criminal cases in the history of the Old West, like those of gunfighter John Wesley Hardin, bank robber Sam Bass, and the outlaws Bonnie and Clyde.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art: The History and Legacy of America’s Largest Art Museum chronicles the remarkable history of the museum and highlights some of its most important pieces. You will learn about the Met like never before.

As a material, wood has no equal in strength, resilience, adaptability and availability. It has been our partner in the cultural evolution from woodland foragers to engineers of our own destiny. Tracing that partnership through tools, devices, construction and artistic expression, Max Adams explores the role that wood has played in our own history as an imaginative, curious and resourceful species.

Horace Everett Hooper - a volatile, self-assured, impulsive, and optimistic American, an autodidact and natural-born salesman - got into the book business at age 16, moved to the Western frontier and on to Chicago, and became hugely successful. With a brilliant adman named Henry Haxton as his partner, he went about buying publishing rights to the Encyclopedia Britannica, a work incredibly distinguished by entries from Charles Darwin, Thomas Malthus, Sir Walter Scott, and more.

In Long Road to Hard Truth: The 100 Year Mission to Create the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Robert L. Wilkins tells the story of how his curiosity about why there wasn't a national museum dedicated to African American history and culture became an obsession - eventually leading him to quit his job as an attorney when his wife was seven months pregnant with their second child, and make it his mission to help the museum become a reality.

Hamburg gewann nicht durch Fürsten Bedeutung und auch nicht durch den Klerus. Die Hansestadt wuchs allein durch den Handel und galt für Reisende und Auswanderer lange als Tor zur Welt. Im Schatten seines riesigen Hafens wurde Hamburg besonders in den vergangenen 150 Jahren zum Schmelztiegel der Kulturen. Dabei wird sein vielfältiges künstlerisches Leben oft übersehen. Mit den städtischen Bahnlinien als Orientierungshilfe erkundet Jan Bürger Hamburgs einzigartige Geschichte, vom Grindel bis zur Mönckebergstraße, von der Elbphilharmonie bis nach Blankenese.

The day Japan bombs Pearl Harbor, four 13-year-olds converge at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where an eccentric curator is seeking four uncommonly brave souls to track down the hidden pages of the Kelmsbury Manuscript, an ancient book of Arthurian legends that lies scattered within the museum's collection and that holds the key to preventing a second attack on American soil.

In 1959, at the age of 21, Max Starkloff was in a car accident that left him paralyzed from the neck down. His doctors doubted he would live longer than a few days, and, if he survived, the hope for his quality of life would be minimal. How did this young man with barely a high school education become the leader of a powerful disability rights movement and the founder of the Starkloff Disability Institute? This is his remarkable story.

Freedom, Land & Community: A History of McLean County Illinois, 1730-1900 tells the story of the diverse peoples and events of this county. Using sources contemporary with the events described, it relates the struggles to build communities and secure freedom - or a freedom as each community defined it. Native peoples, women and men, African Americans, Irish and German immigrants all sought and contested for their freedom. People whose voices have not been heard in previous works about central Illinois are included here.

The Louvre. The very name conjures up scenes of art and elegance, and of long halls filled with beauty and people strolling through them whispering quietly among themselves about the glories they are witnessing. Even those who have never been to the Louvre know some of its most prized possessions, from ancient statues to Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa. As the world's largest museum, the Louvre is the cultural highpoint of Paris, a city that has long been considered the cultural center of Europe.

Shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, the Metropolitan Museum of Art began an ambitious program of collection building and physical expansion that transformed it into one of the world’s foremost museums, an eminence that it has maintained ever since. Two men of singular qualities and accomplishments played key roles in the Met’s transformation—J. P. Morgan, America’s leading financier and a prominent art collector, and Roger Fry, the headstrong English expert in art history who served as the Met’s curator of painting.