During the last half of the nineteenth 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. In this original and daring study, Steven Conn argues that Americans built these institutions with the confidence that they could collect, organize, and display the sum of the world's knowledge. Examining various kinds of museums, Conn discovers how museums gave definition to different bodies of knowledge and how they presented that knowledge--the world in miniature--to the visiting public. Conn's study includes familiar places like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Academy of Natural Sciences, but he also draws attention to forgotten ones, like the Philadelphia Commercial Museum, once the repository for objects from many turn-of-the-century world's fairs. Copyright (C) Muze Inc. 2005. For personal use only. All rights reserved.