Museum

E

The 19th Century

The concept of the public museum began to flourish in the 19th century. In Western Europe, beginning in the mid-1800s, nearly every nation formed an encyclopedic national museum of art, science, or natural history on a grand scale. In Canada, the Geological Survey of Canada, started in 1842, began collecting natural history specimens that would form the basis of National Museum of Canada (later renamed the National Museum of Natural Sciences and now called the Canadian Museum of Nature); and in 1880 the government launched the National Gallery of Canada. A burst of museum-making in the United States in the last half of the century gave rise to the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut (1842); the Smithsonian Institution (1846) in Washington, D.C.; the American Museum of Natural History (1869) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1870) in New York City; the Museum of Fine Arts (1870) in Boston, Massachusetts; the Pennsylvania Museum (1877) in Philadelphia, now the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and the Field Museum (1893) in Chicago, Illinois. The first historic-house museum, Hasbrouck House in Newburgh, New Jersey, opened to the public in 1850. The house served as the headquarters for American general George Washington in 1782 and 1783, during the American Revolution.

A dominant force in the change that permeated European and American institutions was the popular success of the world expositions, which spawned important museums, revolutionized exhibition techniques, and signaled a new trend in public participation. The profits from the Great Exhibition of 1851 in the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, London, were used to acquire land on which to build museums, including the South Kensington Museum of Industrial Art (later the Victoria and Albert Museum). Cultural exhibits were included in the Paris Exhibition of 1867, and the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876 presented an exhibit on mammal and fish resources developed by the Smithsonian Institution. In 1881 the exhibit formed the nucleus of the Smithsonian’s new National Museum. The introduction of a complete electric-lighting system, as first demonstrated to the public in the Paris Electrical Exhibition of 1881, advanced museum displays and made possible a stagelike setting for exhibits. In Chicago, the Field Museum resulted from the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893.

The dramatic growth in the number and scope of museums during the 19th century stimulated active discussion about their role in society. This discussion persisted through the 20th century, as changes in museums continued to parallel global political, economic, and social changes.

F

The 20th Century

After World War I (1914-1918), museums in the United States, Great Britain, France, and northern Europe began to shape more and more of their programs to satisfy the increasing need for public education. However, political changes retarded the development of many central, southern, and eastern European museums. World War II (1939-1945) devastated many museums, both physically and philosophically. It was not until after the war that the museums of Europe were able to free themselves from the monolithic state supervisory structure and begin to develop into cultural institutions vital to their own communities.

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Museums were not immune from late 20th-century politics. Chinese museums felt their first repression in the 1960s, when they stagnated or even closed as they were forced to serve a political mission during the Cultural Revolution. In post-Communist Eastern Europe, museums have experienced the benefits of increased scholarly independence while struggling to survive in a free-market economy. Museums have also felt the physical impact of political conflict. During the Persian Gulf War in 1991, museums and archaeological sites throughout Iraq and Kuwait suffered serious damage. Many museums and historic structures in Croatia were severely damaged or destroyed in 1992 and 1993 in the war between the Croats and the Serbs (see Wars of Yugoslav Succession).

During the last half of the 20th century, museums throughout the world grew tremendously in number and in diversity. Europe, for example, now has four museums for every one that existed in 1950. In the United States, the bicentennial celebration in 1976 rekindled interest in local and regional history, and there was an explosion of small museums devoted to this topic. In other parts of the world, museums were in earlier stages of development. Everywhere, however, new types of institutions joined the more traditional art, history, and natural history museums. Museums that focused more on concepts and ideas than on collections of objects—such as children’s museums, science-technology centers, art centers, and outdoor history museums—became popular throughout the world.

In the United States in particular, the social activism of the 1960s led museums to reexamine the effectiveness of their public service. To combat the perception that they were ivory towers designed for the enjoyment and participation of the privileged few, they reached out to new audiences through special programs, often held outside the museum in community centers, schools, or other nontraditional venues. Large special exhibitions, termed blockbusters, appealed to a general audience, and museums began to adopt marketing techniques to promote their many offerings. Museums also expanded the range of topics they addressed to include significant contemporary social issues and controversial historical questions.

During the late 20th century museums continued to assess the limits to collections growth. Natural history museums faced a particular dilemma as the number of endangered plant and animal species increased and the need for museums to preserve and care for examples of these species grew more urgent. Art museums found it difficult to compete for major works of art in the art market, as prices rose beyond the means of most museums. Meanwhile, advances in preservation technology dramatically improved the care of collections. A major collections-related issue among the world’s museums became the repatriation of sacred and funerary objects, human remains, and other culturally significant objects, as well as the restitution of objects stolen from their owners by the government of Nazi Germany before and during World War II.

At the beginning of the 21st century, museums throughout the world enjoy unquestioned popularity and public respect. Millions of people visit museums each year to see, enjoy, participate in, and learn from their collections, exhibitions, and programs. Millions more visit museums’ Web sites on the Internet, which has allowed museums to expand beyond their physical walls and reach out to vast audiences. Museums continue to be challenged by the diversity—ethnic, economic, educational, and generational—of the public they serve. They are responding by striving to be accessible cultural and educational centers that engage the public as part of their traditional missions to collect, preserve, and interpret the world’s heritage.

X

Museums of the World

Almost every country and most cities have museums. This section highlights significant museums outside of the United States and Canada. Major museums in those countries are described in the Types of Museums section of this article.

A

Africa

Museums in Africa focus on protecting, preserving, and promoting the continent’s cultural heritage. In recent years African museums have collaborated on development of professional practices that help combat the illicit traffic in cultural property, a major concern of museums on the continent.

A

1

North Africa

In North Africa, the Bardo National Museum (founded 1888) outside of Tunis, Tunisia, has artifacts from every period of the country’s history, including a well-known Roman mosaic collection. The Egyptian Museum (1858) in Cairo, Egypt, has an unsurpassed collection of Egyptian antiquities. Among the artifacts are pharaohs’ mummies discovered on the site of the ancient Egyptian capital of Thebes as well as artifacts from royal tombs, including objects from the tomb of Tutankhamun, discovered in 1922.

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