Open up this treasure trove of wonders to visit 43 museums and 50 exhibits! Discover the most fascinating and mysterious objects found in museums, from star attractions to unsung exhibits. With Molly Oldfield, research elf of hit television show QI, unearth the astonishing stories of how these treasures were created, found and finally displayed.
Open up this treasure trove of wonders to visit 43 museums and 50 exhibits! Discover the most fascinating and mysterious objects found in museums, from star attractions to unsung exhibits. With Molly Oldfield, research elf of hit television show QI, unearth the astonishing stories of how these treasures were created, found and finally displayed. Travel back in time to discover an ancient Egyptian pharaoh, encounter China's mysterious Terracotta Army, sail the seas in a Viking ship, take flight in the world's first aeroplane, defend World War Two Britain in Churchill's siren suit, journey to the Moon with Neil Armstrong in the Apollo 11 Command Module and even play in a World Cup Final wearing Pelé's victory shirt. Through stunning photography and glorious illustration, these wonders and many more will bring history, science and culture to life for readers aged 10+, as well as the whole family!
Take an exclusive backstage tour of the world's most exciting museums and discover their hidden treasures. This behind-the-scenes guide showcases a huge range of incredible artefacts from history and reveals the hard work, care, and effort that goes into collecting, preserving, and storing them. Ever wondered what happens to an astronaut's space suit after it's been worn on the Moon? Or how the world's most valuable diamond is looked after? Find out all about how museums work and the people that make it happen - from how historians preserve and care for Anne Frank's diary to what it takes for an archaeologist and curator to excavate and exhibit an enormous wooly mammoth skeleton. You'll even find out about the bugs and pests that museum workers have to guard against to protect the future of history's most precious artefacts. Behind the Scenes at the Museum gives the reader exclusive access to hidden objects that aren't normally on public display. It lets you into a world of animal specimens pickled and preserved in jars, priceless gems and jewellery too valuable to be on display, and fragile documents and fabrics that must be kept in carefully controlled conditions. Along the way, you'll learn about the techniques and processes that keep these objects in good condition, preserved and safe for future generations. Filled with incredible images, step-by-step explanations of exciting techniques, and job profiles of the people that make it happen, Behind the Scenes at the Museum offers unique, behind-the-curtain access to the secret delights of the world's most interesting museums.
A shipwreck is a time capsule. When a maritime archaeologist picks up an item from the seabed, it is a direct connection with history. The last time the object was touched was sometimes centuries before; now, it’s starting a new life. The millions of vessels that lie under the sea tell the human history of the world. Mensun Bound is the renowned marine archaeologist who was the Director of Exploration on the team that discovered Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance. With journalist Mark Frary, here Bound uses the many treasures he has discovered, from Nazi eagles to cannonballs, to write a maritime history of the world from 3000 BCE. Interwoven throughout with beautiful photographs, Wonders in the Deep is a riveting story of human ambition, defeat and ingenuity.
This book explores the histories and functions of museums while also looking at the current standing of museums and their ongoing efforts toward relevance, resiliency, and future-proofing. Section I examines the beginnings of museums with chapters dedicated to art and design museums; natural history and anthropological museums; science museums; museums focused history and the past; and gardens, zoos, and children’s museums. Emphasis is on museums in the United States, with some historical framing beyond the U.S. Section II explores the primary functions of museums, including conservation, exhibition, interpretation, engagement, and service. Section III examines museums from within by exploring critical issues and contemporary movements facing museums and our society: transparency and openness, labor and equity, belonging and coalition-building, risk-taking and risk aversion, and sustainability and empathy. Advocating for change rather than “death to museums,” Museums in Motion demonstrates the very premise that museums have been in motion all along, as they have shifted from their rather simple form of a treasury, storehouse, and tomb to something much more complex by deeply considering where museums have come from, where they are today, and where they are going. Entirely new to this edition, Section III (Museum Aspirations) features five new chapters, each centered around topics, rather than a museum type or museum function. Each topic is meant to be a micro-narrative and springboard for a conversation about museums today and their sustainability in the future. The chapters examine museums from the inside (museum workers and their voices, especially, as well as power held by people and institutions) and DEIA without using those individual words as chapter headings. On their own, or in conjunction with the chapters in the previous sections of this book, these chapters serve as vignettes that can help readers to understand where, how, and why we need to apply critical lenses to institutions and articulate how doing so helps us to understand this historical moment and, ultimately how we can realize resiliency and sustainability for museums and those who make their existence possible.
A lively account of the dinosaur’s role in Gilded Age America, examining the connection between business, paleontology, and museums. Although dinosaur fossils were first found in England, a series of dramatic discoveries during the late 1800s turned North America into a world center for vertebrate paleontology. At the same time, the United States emerged as the world’s largest industrial economy, and creatures like Tyrannosaurus, Brontosaurus, and Triceratops became emblems of American capitalism. Large, fierce, and spectacular, American dinosaurs dominated the popular imagination, making front-page headlines and appearing in feature films. Assembling the Dinosaur follows dinosaur fossils from the field to the museum and into the commercial culture of North America’s Gilded Age. Business tycoons like Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan made common cause with vertebrate paleontologists to capitalize on the widespread appeal of dinosaurs, using them to project American exceptionalism back into prehistory. Learning from the show-stopping techniques of P. T. Barnum, museums exhibited dinosaurs to attract, entertain, and educate the public. By assembling the skeletons of dinosaurs into eye-catching displays, wealthy industrialists sought to cement their own reputations as generous benefactors of science, showing that modern capitalism could produce public goods in addition to profits. Behind the scenes, museums adopted corporate management practices to control the movement of dinosaur bones, restricting their circulation to influence their meaning and value in popular culture. Tracing the entwined relationship of dinosaurs, capitalism, and culture during the Gilded Age, Lukas Rieppel reveals the outsized role these giant reptiles played during one of the most consequential periods in American history. Praise for Assembling the Dinosaur “A penetrating study of legitimacy and capitalism in the realm of fossils.” —Verlyn Klinkenborg, The New York Review of Books “A solid entry into the growing body of literature on Gilded Age American paleontology, but it is particularly valuable for its contribution to enhancing our understanding of how science and its representation during that period were influenced by, and in turn affected, society as a whole. By incorporating cultural, economic, and scientific developments, Rieppel shines new light on the history of both American paleontology and museum exhibition practice.” —Ilja Nieuwland, Science
Victorian culture was characterized by a proliferation of shows and exhibitions. These were encouraged by the development of new sciences and technologies, together with changes in transportation, education and leisure patterns. The essays in this collection look at exhibitions and their influence in terms of location, technology and ideology.
Winner of the 2022-2023 New York City Book Awards! SPECIAL MENTION, 2023 IASPM Book Prize, given by the International Association for the Study of Popular Music SHORTLISTED, 2023 Ralph J. Gleason Book Award, given by the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame/Clive Davis Institute Unearths the queer aesthetic origins of NYC hip hop Hip Hop Heresies centers New York City as a space where vibrant queer, Black, and hip hop worlds collide and bond in dance clubs, schools, roller rinks, basketball courts, subways, and movie houses. Using this cultural nexus as the stage, Shanté Paradigm Smalls attends to the ways that hip hop cultural production in New York City from the 1970s through the early twenty-first century produced film, visual art, and music that offer queer articulations of race, gender, and sexuality. To illustrate New York City as a place of experimental aesthetic collaboration, Smalls brings four cultural moments to the forefront: the life and work of the gay Chinese American visual and graffiti artist Martin Wong, who brokered the relationship between New York City graffiti artists and gallery and museum spaces; the Brooklyn-based rapper-singer-writer-producer Jean Grae, one of the most prolific and underrated emcees of the last two decades; the iconic 1980s film The Last Dragon, which exemplifies the experimental and queer Black masculinity possible in early formal hip hop culture; and finally queer- and trans-identified hip hop artists and groups like BQE, Deepdickollective, and Hanifah Walidah, and the documentary Pick Up the Mic. Hip Hop Heresies transforms the landscape of hip hop scholarship, Black studies, and queer studies by bringing together these fields through the hermeneutic of aesthetics. Providing a guidepost for future scholarship on queer, trans, and feminist hip hop studies, Hip Hop Heresies takes seriously the work that New York City hip hop cultural production has done and will do, and advocates a form of hip hop that eschews authenticity in favor of performativity, bricolage, and pastiche.
