Museum History

Catherine the Great ushered in the Russian Enlightenment. She had an unmatched passion for the arts, and she began a private art collection that would eventually evolve into galleries upon galleries of historical treasures shipped in from all over the world. This fabled museum was none other than the Hermitage, located in the heart of Saint Petersburg, a city founded by the imperial empire's very own Peter the Great.

Booker Taliaferro Washington (1856-1915) was an educator, author, intellectual and orator, who founded Tuskegee University in 1881. Between 1890 and 1915, Washington was the most prominent leader in the African American community.

From July to September 1940 the British people watched the From July to September 1940, the British people watched the Battle of Britain play out in the skies above them, aware that the eventual outcome would decide their fate. From September through to the following May, Hitler attempted to "blitz" London and other major cities into submission. For a year, the citizens of Britain were effectively front-line soldiers in a battle that united the country against a hated enemy.

At the same time Adolf Hitler was attempting to take over the Western world, his armies were seeking and hoarding the finest art treasures in Europe. He had begun cataloguing the art he planned to collect as well as the art he would destroy: "degenerate" works he despised. A special force of American and British museum directors, curators, art historians, and others, called the Monuments Men, risked their lives scouring Europe to prevent the destruction of thousands of years of culture.

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.

The British Museum devoted itself to acquiring historical artifacts that showcased the influence and prestige of the British Empire, as well as the facilities in which to house them, surviving wars, financial challenges, controversies, and political pressures. In the process, it became one of the British Empire’s greatest cultural jewels, and to this day, it holds the distinctions of being the world’s first national public museum and the most venerated museum of its kind in Britain.

Abolitionism was the movement that strove to end slavery in the United States. The abolitionists saw slavery as a stain and an affliction on the United States and made it their goal to eradicate slave ownership. Abolitionists produced anti-slavery literature, sent petitions to Congress, and ran for political office.

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.

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.

This practical and action-oriented beginner’s guide will show you how to create a great podcast on a budget, from choosing a topic to reaching the right audience. Each chapter is tailored to the needs of cultural nonprofits, giving you a detailed roadmap for producing a podcast that supports your institutional mission. Inside, you’ll find simple, concise advice and instruction that gives you just what you need to get started, without any treatises on sound engineering or editing.

One of the most studied and written about episodes in US history, the American Civil War remains the subject of cultural and historiographical debate. The conflict was one of the earliest industrial wars in which mass-produced weapons were employed. The mobilization of civilian factories, shipyards, transportation, and food supplies all foreshadowed the impact of industrialization in World War I, World War II, and subsequent conflicts.

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) had a profound influence on the shape of 19th-century thought and political discourse. His view of liberty justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to the unrestricted state. Mill favoured decentralised forms of socialism because he thought that a centralised model would discourage competition, neglect talent, and disregard freedom.

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.

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....

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.

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.

Today, nearly one million books are published each year. But is the era of the book as we know it - a codex of bound pages - coming to an end? And if it is, should we celebrate its demise and the creation of a democratic digital future, or mourn an irreplaceable loss?

En este clásico ensayo el filósofo Eugenio d´Ors realiza un recorrido por la que es considerada una de las pinacotecas más importantes del mundo, el Museo del Prado. A través de la visita por las diferentes salas del museo, d´Ors nos guía a través de una selección de obras y a través de ellas nos ofrece su particular visión sobre los fundamentos estéticos del arte dentro de la Historia.

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.

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.