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A major part of the collection of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo (EMC) was transported recently into a new home at Giza. The journey which is considered a birth of a new museum called the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM). It is important to draw on the multiple chapters of the museum’s story and its collection from Asbakeya to Boulaq and to Giza up to its current location in Tahrir Square. This paper sheds light on its first journey and the story of its birth in Asbakeya. Although retrieving the history of the Asbakeya Museum and its collection has not been possible due to the lack of documentation or any description of its arrangement, the scattered pieces of information help in illustrating it. This paper aims at illustrating the history of this museum and its collection as an important chapter in the history of the EMC and the story of Egypt’s museums.

Copyright of International Journal of Canadian Studies is the property of University of Toronto Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The Provincial Museum of Fine Arts of Valladolid has a long history that its conversion into National Museum of Sculpture in 1933 has obscured. Through this study, we analyse its history up to this moment. We use various sources for this. First, there are the testimonies that some visitors left in their travel books, especially during the 19th century. In order to find out more about the people who visited the museum, we have also made use of the museum's signature books for the period between 1915 and 1933. Reading the news published in the local newspaper El Norte de Castilla throughout this period, the available data are completed. All this allows us to know how the museum was like then, who came to visit it and in many instances the consideration it deserved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Además de is the property of Ademas de: Revista on line de artes decorativas y diseno and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Scholarship on the impact of museums on the public has reiterated the importance of museums as educational institutions. Modern museums are a form of educational entertainment to draw in a wider audience. The paradigm between the private and public sectors and the educational vis-à-vis entertainment goals created a shift in curatorial standards during the last half of the twentieth century. This change accorded the curator a multi-purpose mandate because the museum itself has a multi-purpose mandate that grew to include itself as part of popular culture. After some museums shifted away from a static, monodisciplinary model to a dynamic interdisciplinary model starting in the 1960s, museums became an integral part of American popular culture. This paper explores this process in the product of the interdisciplinary museum as a component of American popular culture to encourage the public to engage more with anthropology and history. This discussion of museums with the research literature in comparison with portrayals of museums in American popular culture emphasizes the case studies of the "Enola Gay" exhibit controversy of the mid-1990s, the "Night at the Museum" movies, the movie "Black Panther," and examples of a museums in television shows such as "Stargate-SG1." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The series of conferences ‘Natural History Museology in Ukraine’, launched in the autumn of 2009, celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2019. Ten years after its beginning, the fifth meeting of the conference cycle was held. The series of conferences was initiated by the Natural History Section of the Ukrainian branch of ICOM, and the main organizers of the first and all subsequent meetings were scientists from two academic museums — the State Museum of Natural History NAS of Ukraine (Lviv) and the National Museum of Natural History NAS of Ukraine (Kyiv). During these 10 years, five full-scale conferences were held: three in Kyiv, one in Kaniv, and one in Kamianets-Podilskyi. Traditionally, the conference is organized in autumn with an average interval of two years on topics related to scientific and educational activities and to the past of natural history museums. An overview of these conferences, their topics, dates, venues, and proceedings is presented. A detailed description of the events of the fifth conference held in Kyiv at the National Museum of Natural History of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine is given. Thirty-nine participants took part in this conference during the two full days of its work (the 7th and 8th of October), of which 20 made oral presentations, and a total of 80 articles were published. The most important events of the conference included a solemn session on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Zoological Museum of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (1919/1921–1934), which became one of the predecessor museums of the modern NMNH, a scientific session themed ‘Study and preservation of collections’, a session on ‘exhibition activities’, and a round table on the topic ‘Databases as tool for working with natural history collections’. The proceedings of the fifth conference were published as part of a series of publications titled ‘Natural History Museology’, which was initiated on the occasion of the fifth meeting and in order to link all previous editions with different (albeit similar) titles into one cycle. The edition is registered in the NAS of Ukraine as both printed and electronic publication with respective ISBNs for the entire series and the current fifth issue.

This paper summarises an analysis of university museums, pinpointing the debates that have framed these institutions both as objects that can be studied and as a field of research that continues to evolve. Twenty years after the first conference held by UMAC in 2001, it is time to reflect upon what has been a fruitful period of research and attempt to map out future directions. The results of this study are founded on a comprehensive analysis of published works, primarily in English and Spanish, and take a thematic approach. Analysis of the academic debates reveals a core theme concerning the historical links of university museums with disciplinary knowledge and the crises these institutions have experienced because of changes that have occurred, especially within scientific disciplines. In addition to discussing how to best manage them, much attention has been given to the dichotomy between university museums and their parent institutions, epitomised by the challenge of reconciling differing roles in outreach, research, and teaching. It is argued here that there is a need for more intensive study of university museums, both in terms of their history and their current circumstances. Such an approach offers the possibility of gaining insights into their practices by combining transdisciplinary perspectives. It could also underpin the proposal that university museums have the potential to take a lead role in combatting denialism and the abandonment of humanistic thinking by articulating the importance of interdisciplinary knowledge to a wide range of audiences inside and outside the university. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goldsmith and autodidact Johann Nepomuk Tinkhauser (1787–1844) left numerous traces in the small town of Bruneck in the Puster Valley in South Tyrol, not least in the city archives. Above all, he is remembered as a collector, who collected numerous objects of art and folk handicrafts as well as manuscripts and printed books. Tinkhauser kept a “record book” in which he documented information about family assets and family events. This book also contains inventories that refer in part to the current household, in part to the collection. In 1910, the collection was purchased by the city of Bruneck and provided the basis for a local museum. In the course of the founding of a museum association in 1912, inventories of the holdings were produced, which differ from Tinkhauser’s listings. In 1990, after several relocations and losses, new inventories were compiled. The paper compares the inventories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, their purposes and types as part of initially private and subsequently public art collections.

On Queen Victoria’s eightieth birthday, 24 May 1899, the State Apartments at Kensington Palace, the Queen’s childhood home, opened to public visitors. As the nineteenth century drew towards its end, and aware of her own mortality, the restoration of the palace and the representation of the State Apartments provided an opportunity for the Queen, as a proactive curator, to construct a visual narrative of her reign and signal the relationship she sought between monarch and subject within spaces redolent with and conditioned by her life narrative. With the Queen’s encouragement, and under the aegis of Liberal politician and courtier Lord Esher, paintings and other artefacts were gathered to position her within the royal lineage and international dynastic networks. They celebrate her reign as the culmination of nineteenth-century British imperial ambition, and reflect and recast her personal history. The nature of the re-presentation of the State Apartments at Kensington Palace and the impact they had on early visitors is compared to the visitor experience at Osborne House, another royal home closely associated with the Queen’s history, which opened to public visitors following a state-managed restoration shortly after the Queen’s death.

During the Japanese colonial period (1910-1945) in Korea, the Japanese constructed new architecturally modern buildings in Korea, applying Japanese style-architecture and elements of Western architectural derivations. Under the political strategy of cultural ruling (bunka seiji) in 1920, the new Korean style of architectural forms and styles interestingly burgeoned, boosted by ideas of progress and modernity in Korea. The artistic forms and the contained meanings of institutional buildings and museum architectures of the colonial period, however, have yet to be explored in modern scholarship, even though most major museums in Korea were built during the colonial period. In this article, the National Museum of Art, Deoksugung is examined to seek the progressive transition and transformation to art museum buildings during the Japanese colonial period. The contemporary exhibits, exhibition spaces, and architectural forms of collaborative expositions in Japan and Korea, such as the Keijō Exhibition of 1907, and the Colonial Expositions held in 1915 and 1929 in Korea, which defined the conversion of display and the perception of art during the colonial period, will also be analyzed. Finally, how Korea realized modernization based on traditional art and culture under Japan's colonial rule is hoped to be explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the history of the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle, Cornwall, England and examines the contribution of its collection to the establishment of modern Pagan witchcraft in Great Britain. Topics discussed include the definition of witchcraft, the emergence of witchcraft in Great Britain in the 1950s, a history of the Museum's personnel, the gathering of the Museum's collection, and the promotion for the Museum.

From Ego-Documents to Museum Catalogues: Changing Functions of Inventories in the Context of the History of Collecting. The goldsmith and autodidact Johann Nepomuk Tinkhauser (1787-1844) left numerous traces in the small town of Bruneck in the Puster Valley in South Tyrol, not least in the city archives. Above all, he is remembered as a collector, who collected numerous objects of art and folk handicrafts as well as manuscripts and printed books. Tinkhauser kept a "record book" in which he documented information about family assets and family events. This book also contains inventories that refer in part to the current household, in part to the collection. In 1910, the collection was purchased by the city of Bruneck and provided the basis for a local museum. In the course of the founding of a museum association in 1912, inventories of the holdings were produced, which differ from Tinkhauser's listings. In 1990, after several relocations and losses, new inventories were compiled. The paper compares the inventories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, their purposes and types as part of initially private and subsequently public art collections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In accordance with the history of museums as Western institutions linked to particular economic and political processes, in this article I concentrate on discussing the situation of these venues in the contemporary world, thus opening up a reflection on their definition, and a necessary redefinition, consistent with new post-Colonialist demands. Specifically, I address the context of the pandemic caused by the Covid-19 disease which, throughout 2020, has marked a juncture for museums and their future articulation; I discuss the pandemic as a liminal moment, identifying the crisis in a context of questions, the climax as a scenario full of alternatives and possible answers, and the resolution as a period of transformation. The clock stopped for everyone, including museums which, suddenly, had to be closed for around a year. However, time goes on, and I feel it is now worth asking ourselves how, and, above all, why we should reopen the doors of our exhibitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

History in times of crisis is practical: future action depends on historical framing. Moving beyond "human scales" to include the evolutionary and the geological, and beyond humans to include other species, demands different approaches and new "archives" like ice-cores. This paper considers history in the Long Now, and particularly how museums and big public arts institutions develop new sorts of history through practical story-telling, taking seriously the notion that "the central role of museums [is] both an expression of cultural identity and ... a powerful force for human development and education." The museum has a particular value as "slow media", deepening news stories in times of rapid change. The new epoch of Earth, the Anthropocene, where humans have become a geological force, poses challenges for exhibitions, but also reshapes museums themselves. Crucial to managing stories, collections and objects in Anthropocene times is the capacity to change course, to remain open to new developments, using performances, events and "pop-up" exhibitions alongside traditional museum offerings. New Museology regards stories as the fundamental unit of museums. Thus, the curation of stories is central work. No longer are museums defined solely by objects: the artistic and the ephemeral are all part of story-telling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article tests the limits of cosmopolitan memory. It spotlights a unique case study, the permanent exhibition in Schindler's Factory in Kraków, shaped by a group of local curators and politicians, as well as representatives of foreign memorial institutions and supranational NGOs. The thrust to create a cosmopolitan narrative came from Polish curators, but their vision was curbed by both a local politician and the head of a global NGO. The version of cosmopolitanism offered in Kraków engaged with contemporary Polish problems. However, it ignored Polish anti- Semitism and perpetration. The article reveals how in practice the cosmopolitan message is shaped, what propels it forward and what limits its horizons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author offers insights on how the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium portrayed the colonial past of Belgium. Topics discussed include the way the museum's exhibition of African artefacts contributed to its reputation as a colonial institution in Europe, the Congolese cultural heritage and natural resources displayed at the museum, and the Museum in Motion gallery of the institution which highlights its commitment to decolonization.

This article focuses on curators' frustrations with (what we call) 'the profusion struggle'. Curators express the difficulty of collecting the material culture of everyday life when faced with vast existing collections. They explain that these were assembled, partly, from anxiety to gather up what was anticipated at risk of being lost. Unlimited accumulation, and keeping everything forever, are being called into question, especially through the disposal debate which has gained in intensity over the past three decades. While often with some reluctance, setting limits by slowing collecting or even reducing collections through targeted letting go, or what is variously called 'deaccessioning', 'disposing', and 'refining' collections, are undertaken to facilitate ongoing collecting, amongst other goals. To respond to curatorial interest in strategies for addressing profusion, we draw on ethnographic fieldwork looking predominantly at social history museums in the United Kingdom, to consider whether ideas borrowed from beyond museums might be of use. We explore the possible implications of economic concepts of 'de-growth' – partly by seeing the ways that these ideas are already practiced, but also by examining curators' own enthusiasms and reservations. To develop more sustainable collecting practices, we argue that ideas of collections 'growth' might be usefully reframed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rosalind E. Krauss discusses the origins and argument of Douglas Crimp's "On the Museum's Ruins," celebrating it as embodying the epistemê of cultural rebellion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John MacKenzie in his Museums and Empire (2010) sets out an evolutionary framework of museum development in the British settler colonies. The formation years of the Auckland Museum in New Zealand both align and misalign with this progressive imperial model. In contrast to the establishment of the first Australian museums, which were essentially state sponsored enterprises, the Auckland Museum experience of the second half of the nineteenth century is one of curatorial agency, civic action and identity building in New Zealand's second capital city. In addition, the tentative reciprocal relationships with Māori in the rapid growth of the indigenous cultural collections are a defining feature of this phase of intensive acquisition and expansion. Imperial aspirations only came with WW1 when the future Auckland Museum was re-imagined as being 'essential to complete the equipment of men and women who are to lead the work of progressive civilisation' and a new museum architecture of Empire was conceived. Whilst referencing the prevailing museological framework for the study of early museums in British settler colonies, this article concentrates less on the theory of Empire and more on local biography, collecting impulses and archival histories of the Auckland Museum during its formative years, now one of New Zealand's most extensive cultural assets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Colonial collections played an important dual role: they were key sites from which ideas about cultural difference were theorised and they were also the foundations of public institutions that were central in shaping civic culture. This article explores these dynamics through the history of the Otago Museum and, in particular, the very different types of collecting engaged in by the colonial bookman T. M. Hocken, the anthropologist H. D. Skinner, and the historian J. H. Beattie. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The archives of the Australian Museum and the Macleay Museum are deployed to analyse the global trading networks of two important Australian natural history collectors in the mid-nineteenth century. The evidence reveals much about the challenges they faced transacting in heterogeneous specimens over long distances. It also uncovers some of the solutions they pursued, particularly in choosing the appropriate type of transaction, forging trust-based trading networks, obtaining up-to-date scientific information, and drawing on the infrastructure of existing, regular commodity trades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite their reputation for stasis and fixity, museums are about change and transformation. What can we learn from the history of New Zealand museums about the study of museum history? This article considers the lessons we can glean from New Zealand museums in the colonial period. It surveys recent theories about history, social change and museums, including historical sociology, which throw much light on this topic and open up new future paths to explore. The aim is not the compiling of an institutional history but to propose a refined analytical framework for museum history which can deal with the constant change which characterises the history of museums. It argues that we need to move beyond both the conventional idea of a linear history, and also the reliance on commemoration, in order to do 'museum history', rather than just 'histories of museums'. This approach is explicitly interdisciplinary, explores historical and theoretical perspectives on museums, and considers their implications for current museum practice. By historicising museums, both their internal practices and their external social relations, we may move beyond the commemorative histories of museums to develop a critical museum history. This new museum history needs to interrogate the past, not describe, commemorate and celebrate it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first three curators at the Otago University Museum, Dunedin, NZ had much in common. They were zoologists, all evolutionists, all part-time curators (they held professorial posts in the University), all Englishmen, and all professed an Anglican faith, qualities that brought them unexpected conflict in the largely Presbyterian Scottish settler town. The men struggled to complete their time-constrained research in more-or-less isolation amongst unfamiliar and peculiar New Zealand fauna. Spanning the years 1873 when the first curator was appointed, to 1936 when the third retired, this paper sets their achievements against their individual evolutionary stances that subtly guided the layout in the museum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reconstructs the history of the Museum of Tropical Medicine of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, created by Giuseppe Franchini, professor of Colonial Pathology, who moved from Bologna to Modena in 1930. At the University of Modena, thanks to the financial support of the city authorities, Franchini was able to give adequate accommodation to the Museum, unique in Italy1 and of great international importance, which was expanding and acquiring specimens from various parts of the world.2 The history of the Museum is related to their transfers and rearrangements: the reconstruction of its history is an indispensable first step of a modern and engaging setting up which should mainly valorize the scientific and multidisciplinary context of the collections, with specific reference to the studies and researches on tropical medicine, parasitology and also on the infectious diseases that the Covid pandemic has made very topical all over the world. Secondly, the rearrangement of the Museum should be an opportunity to critically present the historical context that was decisive for the realization and progressive expansion of this museum which, alongside the laboratories, was part of the educational infrastructure available to doctors, veterinarians, nurses, and missionaries active in the Italian colonies during the Fascist regime as well as in the Modena University Clinic. Another aspect that should not be overlooked is that the Museum also served the propaganda of the Fascist colonial policy, supported by the leader Benito Mussolini, in particularly to safeguard the health of the people who worked in the African continent. Lastly, the Museum's reorganization should aid a reinterpretation of the multicultural contexts, by giving a voice to new citizens and to heterogeneous communities by facilitating their social inclusion through direct dialogues and common initiatives. The Museum's redevelopment project could be part of a larger endeavor, Ago Modena Fabbriche Culturali (www.agomodena.it), funded by the Modena Foundation, which envisages the redevelopment for cultural purposes of the entire large area of the complex of buildings called Sant' Agostino and in particular the relocation of some University Museums to the buildings overlooking Berengario street built by the University of Modena between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to house University Medical Institutes Clinics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Cuadernos de Estudios del Siglo XVIII is the property of Instituto Feijoo de Estudios del Siglo XVIII (Universidad de Oviedo) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The attempt to found a museum in Geneva faced many challenges, but the nature of the city also provided some unusual opportunities. Against a background of the French Revolution, political upheaval, war and the creation of a new Swiss state, a few members of the academic and scientific community, led by Henri Boissier and Augustin-Pyramus de Candolle, created an institution in 1818 that was to become famous. Harnessing the patriotism of the population, the presence of eminent scientists, the interest of wealthy patrons, and local and international networks, they began to build a collection. The aim was to establish an educational resource, both for the formal teaching at the Académie de Genève and for public instruction. To attract the public, the donation of spectacular objects was of great help, and many individuals and institutions gave specimens in an early form of crowdsourcing. The academic ambitions required a more systematic effort and detailed collection data to augment the value of the specimens. To achieve this, the friendship and kinship networks of Geneva were brought into play; a comparison of the letters from the museum administration preserved by Léonard Revilliod (1786–1867) and entries in the museum's acquisition register provides a case study of how this interaction worked in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article serves as an introduction to the issue which focuses on museums dedicated to the American West. The author reflects on the diminishing of "truth" in American society, partly due to the advent of the Internet, and emphasizes the importance of the concrete, participatory experience provided by museums. A historical overview of museums pertaining to the history of the American West is subsequently presented.

The article briefly studies the way of perceiving of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence by Polish travellers during the period when the museum was subject to the so-called Enlightenment order. The analysis of memoirs from diaries of the Polish Grand Tour indicates that they were considerably influenced by Italian guidebooks and texts by French travellers, among which the most popular was Voyage d’un français en Italie fait dans années 1765–1766 by Joseph- Jérôme Lalande, who was eagerly referred to and his passages quoted. Realising the scheme of the Uffizi Gallery’s descriptions by Polish travellers, one should not hastily assume they lacked the sense of observation, taste or aesthetic sensitivity, and finally the ability to assess a work of art. An in-depth analysis of Polish notes indicated that enlightened arrivals from the Vistula River could critically relate not only to the text of the guide or the French description mentioned, directly ascertaining: You were not right, Mr Lalande!, but also that they came to Florence prepared for the reception of an artwork and the museum itself. They were primarily interested in newly acquired objects or changes in the exhibition. The picture of a Polish traveller, as it is seen through Polish 18th-century accounts, who notes – frequently remotely – fleeting impressions, but without a doubt, they are perfectly aware of what they are looking at.

This article draws upon ecocritical, visual, and affect theories to analyze how public education projects like the colonial natural history museum promoted what I call "visual gratification" and "visual unity" among citizens of the early Republic. Focused around the ways that vision is evoked in the textual and physical spaces of the Philadelphia Museum (established in July 1786), this analysis interprets how naturalist and museum curator Charles Willson Peale carefully framed scientific experiences in terms of aesthetic and social harmony. As Peale rhetorically turns natural objects toward forms of feeling, early American happiness emerges as not only an objective, or "pursuit," but also a thing to be collected, displayed, and beheld. Peale's enthusiasm for scientific study generally, and his specimen collection specifically, thus reflects an early American view of natural history as producing the kinds of social bonds and public affects generated by experience with close visual observation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Upper-Hungarian Museum of Kassa/Kaschau/Košice was established in 1872 as one of the many ambitious but severely underfunded regional museums coming into being in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. This article examines how the museum negotiated the delicate balance between maintaining good relations with the capital, necessary for the sake of survival, and following its own local agenda. It discusses the history of the institution in the context of the complex political and administrative structure of Austria-Hungary, as an example of the dynamics between the Monarchy's "centers" and "peripheries." After 1867, Hungary's governments took the course of centralization, curtailing the political agency of the counties, while increasingly forcing non-Hungarian speakers in multi-ethnic regions such as Upper Hungary to adopt the Hungarian language. The article examines the museum's place in these processes, arguing that, rather than simply disseminating the narratives of the center, the museum conceptualized its own role in a more autonomous and multi-faceted way. Finally, it seeks to use the museum as an example of the "periphery" as an autonomous entity, and to question the usefulness of a simple binary of center and periphery in researching Austro-Hungarian culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses on the small town or commune of Juniville in the Rethelois, France. It also states that this town has no public transport, and show itself well to the baseness of its time. Topics discussed few spot in the village including detonations of the tank battle in June 1940, systematic destruction of the village by the German army and improbable Verlaine museum.

Carlos Berg (1843–1902) was one of the most important zoologists in South America, and a key figure in the development of the collections and organisation of the former Museo Nacional de Buenos Aires (macn). Responsible for the creation of the Ichthyology Division there (1895), his name is also forever linked to Argentinian fish studies. In addition to being valuable scientific references, Berg's preserved specimens can today provide historical and technical evidence about the collection, preparation and management of collections at the end of the nineteenth century. This new historical value acquired from the scientific object is not without consequences for its use, its treatment and its conservation-restoration. In this study, we analyse Berg's ichthyologic specimens from historical and museological perspectives, with the twin objectives of locating and identifying those specimens in the ichthyologic collection, and of implementing a meticulous record of their state of conservation so that a system of 'Berg markers' may be formed to recognise 'silent specimens'. Comparison of the information collected with a variety of archival and published sources allowed us to reconnect the specimens of Berg with the cultural and epistemological values of their time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to highlight the scientific practices of a range of 'invisible technicians' in order to provide a more complete understanding of the history of the National Archaeological Museum, in Portugal. At the meeting point of people, objects and knowledge, the history of its collections reveals the existence of local contexts and hitherto unknown individuals who were part of global communication networks. Thus there is a need for reassessing what is currently seen as the dominant role of a small number of actors at the national level. In the process of the construction of collections of archaeological objects, we argue that the scientific practices of local landowners, information providers and the many private collectors should be taken into account and their knowledge assigned due importance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of History in Africa: A Journal of Method is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of History in Africa: A Journal of Method is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This essay reads writings by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, including Letters from an American Farmer (1782) and Journey into Northern Pennsylvania and the State of New-York (1801) against Crèvecoeur's participation in transatlantic scientific exchange and the early history of the cabinet of the American Philosophical Society. Crèvecoeur's donation of a "curious book" of plant-based paper samples to the APS cabinet illuminates his consistent comparisons of his writings to specimens and lost manuscripts. By reading his work alongside the challenges faced by the APS to preserve and maintain its collections, this essay reveals how the instability of collections generated wider preoccupations about loss and longevity. Crèvecoeur's writings demonstrate the intersections between literary and institutional histories of collecting in the eighteenth century and suggest how various kinds of collections shaped literary production in early America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]