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The article discusses the anthropological collecting habits and practices of the U.S. Exploring Expedition from 1838 to 1842, led by naval officer Charles Wilkes. Topics discussed include the mission of the expedition to map unchartered territories worldwide and collect cultural and natural specimens, officers and seamen's collection of cultural objects three times more than the scientific corps, and the anomaly of the collections from Niue or the Savage Islands.

Together with the Revd Daniel Tyerman, George Bennet formed part of a deputation sent out in 1821 by the London Missionary Society with the aim of undertaking a global inspection of the state of the mission. This paper aims to map the collection that Bennet assembled in Central Polynesia during that journey and to ask what the parties involved in the collecting encounters understood to be embodied in the material forms that were collected. By paying attention to how the various agents involved in the collecting process played a role, the Bennet collection offers an appropriate case-study to query the view of missionary collecting as merely trophy collecting. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The influence of Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill is traced in the little-known collections created in the 1830s and early 1840s at Rosamond’s Bower by the writer and antiquary Thomas Crofton Croker (joint author of the Gooseberry Hall satire of the Strawberry Hill sale of 1842) and by Thomas Baylis and Lechmere Whitmore at The Pryor’s Bank, both at Fulham. They were active purchasers at the sale (particularly Baylis), and Walpole’s Description of Strawberry Hill is a continuing presence behind Croker’s accounts of both collections. Both houses were social spaces, presented for antiquarian display, and in the case of The Pryor’s Bank in particular that display was played out in entertainments and Dickensian amateur theatricals. An under-explored element in this combination of collecting, antiquarianism, and jocularity is the Noviomagian Society, an antiquarian dining club of which Croker was a founder and which has connections to both houses. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The glass marine invertebrate models produced by Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka represent the most accurate museum artefacts ever made to represent cnidarians, nudibranchs and radiolarians. University College Dublin, originally the Royal College of Science for Ireland, holds a collection of these models, acquired in 1885, some of which continue to be used as teaching aids to the present day, but many with the passing of time have been damaged. A project has been initiated to recover and restore the collection as it was initially constituted. The first stage of this project, presented here, has involved compiling an account of the history of this collection, the recovery of most of the specimens in varying states of disrepair from different repositories, and their registration. Several lists have been retrieved, spanning nearly 150 years, as well as the original invoice indicating that the original purchase, by Professor A. C. Haddon, comprised 139 models, of which 114 have been retrieved in the course of this study. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The violence and vandalism of 1870-71 had a profound effect on stirring the conscience of private collectors in Paris. Taking their cue from the 1790s, they scrambled to safeguard the city's treasures, form new antiquarian associations, and indulge in forms of patriotic philanthropy. The 1870s and 1880s represent a crucial moment in the visibility of the rich collector, offering a new legitimating rhetoric for luxury consumption and marking a growing rapprochement between public service and private possessions. But under commercial pressures, these decades also witnessed a more chauvinist reaction, with fresh attempts to imagine social and ethnic restrictions on who was entitled to be a custodian of the French past. Focusing on the correspondence of bibliophile Baron Jérôme Pichon and on the memory palace of Léopold Double, this article seeks to retrieve an understanding of heritage and conservation radically distinct from the scientific and secular definitions elaborated by government agencies arising out of the French Revolution and the July Monarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interest in the history of colonized areas has always been existent. For utilitarian purposes colonizers wanted to know more about the past of the areas they started to trade with and where they settled themselves. This article is confined to the use of the sources for the writing of history in the Dutch East Indies in the 19th century. On a limited scale and for diverse purposes, colonial civil servants, scholars and amateur historians started to investigate the history of the colony. This article scrutinizes whether in the 19th-century Dutch East Indies the European tendency to base history writing on a systematic use of archival sources became in vogue. This question, however, raises immediately some epistemological and practical problems that will be discussed in this article. Was there a similar European concept of archives in the Dutch East Indies? How were indigenous archival sources valued and used? What infrastructure was available to study historical archives? This explorative case study shows how historical interest within a 19th-century colony got stuck into an almost obsessive collecting of historical archives and other source material as a prerequisite for historical research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The nineteenth-century Swiss entomologist Henri de Saussure is probably better known today as the father of linguist Férdinand de Saussure than as a scientist in his own right. In this context, it is his personality rather than his work that has attracted attention, encouraged by the availability of letters and diaries in which he expresses himself openly on personal matters. This paper presents an overview of his life that includes analysis of his scientific contribution in order to give a more balanced assessment. Examination of his publications confirms his importance as a taxonomist, and shows interesting trends in his approach. He was also notable for his cultivation of a wide network of collaborators and for the way he used his status to enhance the collections of the Muséum d'histoire naturelle de Genève. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the purchase of skulls, bones and a few archaeological objects by George Rolleston (1829–81), Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at Oxford, from Athanasios Rhousopoulos (1823–98), major collector, art dealer and Professor in the University of Athens. Numerous letters, hitherto unpublished, in the Rolleston archive in Oxford dated to 1871–4 give insights into the network, organization and operation of dealers in Greece at the time. The correspondence reveals the prices attracted by various objects, including antiquities and skeletal remains, providing also a means of assessing attitudes to the study and collection of ancient human remains around 1870. With this material it is possible to reconstruct the original assemblage of bones, skulls and antiquities sold by Rhousopoulos to Rolleston, now distributed among several museums in England. Online appendices provide respectively a catalogue of skulls and other material bought by Rolleston from Rhousopoulos and transcriptions and translations of their correspondence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the life of Scottish nobleman William Drummond Stewart, with a particular focus on his travels in the American West and on the western memorabilia which he collected at Murthly Castle, his ancestral home in Scotland. According to the author, Stewart saw parallels between Native American and ancient Scottish cultures and viewed his collection as reflective of his Scottish identity. Details on the history of Murthly Castle are also presented.

The article examines souvenirs collected by George M. Turner, a soldier who served in the Third Rhode Island Regiment of Heavy Artillery (Third RIHA) during the U.S. Civil War, and held in the collections of the Rhode Island Historical Society. According to the author, the collection reflects Turner's attempt to curate and memorialize his experience of the war. Details on several items in the collection, including a baby sock acquired by Turner during a raid on a Confederate camp, a fragment of a palmetto tree, and several fragments from cotton plants, are presented. The emotional significance of souvenir objects is also discussed.

In 1883, the great showman P. T. Barnum agreed to build an eponymous museum of natural history on the campus of Tufts University, which he had served as a founding trustee. After a long career managing dime museums and a travelling circus, Barnum hoped to secure a positive legacy through the creation of an unambiguously serious institution. In addition to building and collections funds, Barnum supplied the Tufts museum – as well as the Smithsonian and American Museum of Natural History in New York – with exotic and valuable dead animals from his circus. Barnum brought his influence to bear on the latter two in order to develop his museum at Tufts. His greatest prize was Jumbo the Elephant, whose skin and bones were involved in a contentious tug-of-war among the three museums following his death in a train accident in 1885. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As proto-ethnologists, missionaries represented an important source of ethnographical material, collecting for many museums and displays. It is contended here that European missions affected the collecting habits of their missionaries through actively encouraging or discouraging collecting on behalf of certain institutions. The motivation behind the endorsement of certain collecting habits and not others was linked to the missionary societies’ perceptions of themselves. This paper examines both religious and secular ethnographical collections, in Herrnhut, Paris, and Berlin, to which missionaries of the Moravian Church were asked to contribute from the mid-nineteenth century; it evinces the tensions between the Church's collecting habits and the religious goals established for missions. Moreover, the examination of this one group leads to broader conclusions about the motivation behind the ethnographical collections of missionaries and of museums in the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the Quaker family known as the Barringtons of Fassaroe, County Wicklow, Ireland, focusing particularly on natural history collector Richard Manliffe Barrington (1849-1915), lawyer and gentleman farmer. His father was landowner Edward Barrington (1796-1877) who fathered nineteen children with two wives, Sarah Leadbetter (1798-1843) and Huldah Strangman (1820-1895). The family's bequests to the National Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin are considered.