Nature on Paper - (Sci & Culture in the Nineteenth Century) by Anne Greenwood Mackinney (Hardcover)

About the Book

How Paper Tools Transformed the Infrastructure of Modern Research in Prussia at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century

Book Synopsis

Over the past two decades, natural things--especially those collected, exchanged, studied, and displayed in museums, such as animals, plants, minerals, and rocks--have emerged as fascinating protagonists for historical research. Nature on Paper follows a different, humbler set of objects that make it possible to trace the global routes and shifting meanings of those natural things: the catalogs, inventories, and other paper tools of information management that form the backbone of collection institutions. Anne Greenwood MacKinney focuses on Prussia from the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century, a place and time that witnessed the dramatic restructuring of research, government, and public collections toward a closer integration of science, state, and a proto-civil society. The documents at the heart of her study are mediators actively shaping the historical trajectories, values, and meanings of the objects they record, and with pasts and paths of their own. MacKinney also reveals how various stakeholders--in the research community, museum sector, government, and general public--can interact with these documents and thereby shape the world of natural science. By centering the history of natural historical collection paperwork and the agents involved in its production, circulation, and safekeeping, Nature on Paper tells a largely neglected story of a form of scientific labor that transformed the infrastructure of modern research at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Review Quotes

This magnificent study of the early history of the Zoological Museum in Berlin effortlessly brings to life the intimate and transformative entanglement of natural history with Prussian bureaucracy. Theoretically informed, archivally grounded, and good storytelling--science history at its best!--Staffan Müller-Wille, University of Cambridge

It is a joy to follow Anne MacKinney's lively mind at work as she insightfully teases out an expansive world of dynamic relationships hidden in Berlin's nineteenth-century natural history museum lists and registers. A must-read for historians interested in museums, science, bureaucracy, and the public as they codeveloped in the crucial but underresearched era before 1850.--Lynn K. Nyhart, professor emerita, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Today, our interactions with museum exhibits are mediated through labels, catalogs, archival records, and endless reams of correspondence. In Nature on Paper, Anne Greenwood MacKinney offers readers a captivating and masterful guided tour of natural history in nineteenth-century Berlin to explain how these mundane paper technologies came to play such a key role in the modern museum experience.--Daniel Margocsy, University of Cambridge

About the Author

Anne Greenwood MacKinney is a historian of science and museums. Her research on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cultures of natural history and collecting is based on extensive practical experience working in museums, including the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, the Centrum für Naturkunde in Hamburg, and the Goethe-Nationalmuseum in Weimar.