In a series of richly detailed case studies from Britian, Australia and North America, Tony Bennett investigates how nineteenth- and twentieth-century museums, fairs and exhibitions have organized their collections, and their visitors. Discussing the historical development of museums alongside that of the fair and the international exhibition, Bennett sheds new light upon the relationship between modern forms of official and popular culture. Using Foucaltian perspectives The Birth of the Museum explores how the public museum should be understood not just as a place of instruction, but as a reformatory of manners in which a wide range of regulated social routines and performances take place. This invigorating study enriches and challenges the understanding of the museum, and places it at the centre of modern relations between culture and government. For students of museum, cultural and sociology studies, this will be an asset to their reading list.

In a series of richly detailed case studies from Britian, Australia and North America, Tony Bennett investigates how nineteenth- and twentieth-century museums, fairs and exhibitions have organized their collections, and their visitors. Discussing the historical development of museums alongside that of the fair and the international exhibition, Bennett sheds new light upon the relationship between modern forms of official and popular culture. Using Foucaltian perspectives The Birth of the Museum explores how the public museum should be understood not just as a place of instruction, but as a reformatory of manners in which a wide range of regulated social routines and performances take place. This invigorating study enriches and challenges the understanding of the museum, and places it at the centre of modern relations between culture and government. For students of museum, cultural and sociology studies, this will be an asset to their reading list.

Giorgio Vasari and the Birth of the Museum offers the first dedicated and comprehensive study of Vasari?s original contributions to the making of museums, addressing the subject from the full range of aspects - collecting, installation, conceptual-historical - in which his influence is strongly felt. Uniting specialists of Giorgio Vasari with scholars of historical museology, this collection of essays presents a cross-disciplinary overview of Vasari?s approaches to the collecting and display of art, artifacts and memorabilia. Although the main focus of the book is on the mid-late 16th century, contributors also bring to light that Vasari?s museology enjoyed a substantial afterlife well into the modern museum era. This volume is a fundamental addition to the museum studies literature and a welcome enhancement to the scholarly industry on Giorgio Vasari.

Drawing on evidence from archaeology, art history, and textual sources to contextualize Greco-Scythian metalwork in ancient society, Meyer offers unique introductions to the archaeology of Scythia and its ties to Asia and classical Greece, modern museum and visual culture studies, and the intellectual history of classics in Russia and the West.

As indelible components of the history of the United States, race and racism have permeated nearly all aspects of life: cultural, economic, political, and social. In this first anthology on race in early cinema, fourteen scholars examine the origins, dynamics, and ramifications of racism and Eurocentrism and the resistance to both during the early years of American motion pictures. Any discussion of racial themes and practices in any arena inevitably begins with the definition of race. Is race an innate and biologically determined "essence" or is it a culturally constructed category? Is the question irrelevant? Perhaps race exists as an ever-changing historical and social formation that, regardless of any standard definition, involves exploitation, degradation, and struggle. In his introduction, Daniel Bernardi writes that "early cinema has been a clear partner in the hegemonic struggle over the meaning of race" and that it was steadfastly aligned with a Eurocentric world view at the expense of those who didn't count as white. The contributors to this work tackle these problems and address such subjects as biological determinism, miscegenation, Manifest Destiny, assimilation, and nativism and their impact on early cinema. Analyses of The Birth of a Nation, Romona, Nanook of the North and Madame Butterfly and the directorial styles of D. W. Griffith, Oscar Micheaux, and Edwin Porter are included in the volume.

An International Study of Film Museums examines how cinema has been transformed and strengthened through museological and archival activities since its origins and asks what paradoxes may be involved, if any, in putting cinema into a museum. Cere explores the ideas that were first proposed during the first half of the twentieth century around the need to establish national museums of cinema and how these have been adapted in the subsequent development of the five case studies presented here: four in Europe and one in the USA. The book traces the history of the five museums' foundation, exhibitions, collections, and festivals organised under their aegis and it asks how they resolve the tensions between cinema as an aesthetic artefact – now officially recognised as part of humanity's cultural heritage – and cinema as an entertainment and leisure activity. It also gives an account of recent developments around unifying collections, exhibition activities and archives in one national film centre that offers the general public a space totally devoted to film and cinematographic culture. An International Study of Film Museums provides a unique comparative study of museums of cinema in varying national contexts. The book will be of interest to academics and students around the world who are engaged in the study of museums, archives, heritage, film, history and visual culture.

Winner, Outstanding Academic Title 2017, Choice Magazine The nineteenth century witnessed a dramatic shift in the display and dissemination of natural knowledge across Britain and America, from private collections of miscellaneous artifacts and objects to public exhibitions and state-sponsored museums. The science museum as we know it—an institution of expert knowledge built to inform a lay public—was still very much in formation during this dynamic period. Science Museums in Transition provides a nuanced, comparative study of the diverse places and spaces in which science was displayed at a time when science and spectacle were still deeply intertwined; when leading naturalists, curators, and popular showmen were debating both how to display their knowledge and how and whether they should profit from scientific work; and when ideals of nationalism, class politics, and democracy were permeating the museum’s walls. Contributors examine a constellation of people, spaces, display practices, experiences, and politics that worked not only to define the museum, but to shape public science and scientific knowledge. Taken together, the chapters in this volume span the Atlantic, exploring private and public museums, short and long-term exhibitions, and museums built for entertainment, education, and research, and in turn raise a host of important questions, about expertise, and about who speaks for nature and for history.

Political satire has been a primary weapon of the press since the eighteenth century and is still intimately associated with one of the most important values of western democratic society: the right of individuals to free speech. This study documents one of the most important moments in the history of printed political imagery, when political print became what we would recognise as modern political satire. Contrary to conventional historical and art historical narratives, which place the emergence of political satire in the news-driven coffee-house culture of eighteenth-century London, Meredith M. Hale locates the birth of the genre in the late seventeenth-century Netherlands in the contentious political milieu surrounding William III's invasion of England known as the 'Glorious Revolution'. The satires produced between 1688 and 1690 by the Dutch printmaker Romeyn de Hooghe on the events surrounding William III's campaigns against James II and Louis XIV establish many of the qualities that define the genre to this day: the transgression of bodily boundaries; the interdependence of text and image; the centrality of dialogic text to the generation of meaning; serialized production; and the emergence of the satirist as a primary participant in political discourse. This study, the first in-depth analysis of De Hooghe's satires since the nineteenth century, considers these prints as sites of cultural influence and negotiation, works that both reflected and helped to construct a new relationship between the government and the governed.

Written from an international perspective, this account of the origins of the cinema begins in 1833 with the introduction of optical toys for reproducing movement and ends with a thorough examination of the first full year of projected moving pictures in 1896. Comprehensive and verifiable, with citations that support each individual entry, the book examines the events that culminated in the establishment of the moving picture world that was the dominant visual medium of the last century. Drawing on a range of international sources, this chronology is a readable, vivid account that corrects many longstanding errors in the story of moving pictures while at the same time recording the astounding diversity of ideas, apparatus, personalities, and exhibitions that turned a passing novelty into a major industry. Populated by dreamers, inventors, scientists, and entrepreneurs with widely different skills, interests, and backgrounds, the many origins of the cinema are all recorded here in a rich tapestry that has been woven with attention to the detailed shape and placement of each individual thread. The result is a fully- indexed reference that reflects the state of modern scholarship and should be useful over the long term as both a reference to the period of early cinema and as a starting point for further research.