Animals on Display

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Making Animals Visible

Adam Dodd, Karen A. Rader, and Liv Emma Thorsen

Part I Preserving

1 Six Monstrous Pigs: Animal Monsters and Museum Practices in the Eighteenth-Century El Real Gabinete de Historia Natural

Lise Camilla Ruud

2 The Frames of Specimens: Glass Cases in Bergen Museum Around 1900

Brita Brenna

3 Preserving History: Collecting and Displaying in Carl Akeley’s In Brightest Africa

Nigel Rothfels

Part II Authenticating

4 The Pleasure of Describing: Art and Science in August Johann Rösel von Rosenhof’s Monthly Insect Entertainment

Brian W. Ogilvie

5 Images, Ideas, and Ideals: Thinking with and about Ross’s Gull

Henry A. McGhie

6 A Dog of Myth and Matter: Barry the Saint Bernard in Bern

Liv Emma Thorsen

Part III Interacting

7 Popular Entomology and Anthropomorphism in the Nineteenth Century: L. M. Budgen’s Episodes of Insect Life

Adam Dodd

8 Interacting with The Watchful Grasshopper; or, Why Live Animals Matter in Twentieth-Century Science Museums

Karen A. Rader

9 Polar Bear Knut and His Blog

Guro Flinterud

About the Contributors

Index

“[Animals on Display] demonstrates how our cultural imaginations are tethered to the material reality of animals, insisting that such representations can never fully escape the social and cultural contexts in which they were originally created and are now viewed. It also shows how powerful connections with animals on display, like those at the American Museum of Natural History, allow visitors an intimate, if fleeting, glimpse of previously living, breathing organisms.”

—Erika Lorraine Milam, Isis—Journal of the History of Science Society