Description: During the last half of the 19th century, Americans built many of the country's most celebrated museums, such as the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Chicago's Field Museum. This title argues that Americans built these institutions with the confidence that they could collect, organize, and display the sum of the world's knowledge. Museums of the late 19th century were on the cutting edge of American intellectual life; by the first quarter of the 20th century, however, museums had largely been replaced by research-oriented universities as places where new knowledge was produced. This changed both the way knowledge was conceived, and also who had access to it.

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