Nature’s Mirror
How Taxidermists Shaped America’s Natural History Museums and Saved Endangered Species
Publication supported by the Neil Harris Endowment Fund
264 pages
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60 halftones
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6 x 9
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© 2020
- Contents
- Review Quotes
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction
1 “A Gathering Place for Amateur Naturalists”: Ward’s and the Birth of the Habitat Group
2 “Breathing New Life into Stuffed Animals”: The Society of American Taxidermists
3 “The Destruction Wrought by Man”: Smithsonian Taxidermy and the Birth of Wildlife Conservation
4 Competing Ideas, Competing Institutions: Decorative versus Scientific Taxidermy at the Carnegie and Field Museums
5 “The Duty to Conserve”: Museums and the Fight to Save Endangered Marine Mammals
6 “Brightest Africa”: Carl Akeley and the American Museum’s Race to Bring Africa to America
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
1 “A Gathering Place for Amateur Naturalists”: Ward’s and the Birth of the Habitat Group
2 “Breathing New Life into Stuffed Animals”: The Society of American Taxidermists
3 “The Destruction Wrought by Man”: Smithsonian Taxidermy and the Birth of Wildlife Conservation
4 Competing Ideas, Competing Institutions: Decorative versus Scientific Taxidermy at the Carnegie and Field Museums
5 “The Duty to Conserve”: Museums and the Fight to Save Endangered Marine Mammals
6 “Brightest Africa”: Carl Akeley and the American Museum’s Race to Bring Africa to America
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Review Quotes
Well-read Naturalist
"Most welcome and much needed. . . . Andrei's book presents the complex and admittedly sometimes contradictory personalities of, and motivations behind, the people who brought to life some of the most well known natural history museum displays ever seen in the United States. In it she also examines how the creation of these displays brought to light the rapidly declining populations of some of the animals presented in them, as well as their visual power to influence public interest in their conservation."
Dan Flores, New York Times bestselling author of American Serengeti and Coyote America
"Nature’s Mirror has rearranged the furniture in my head. Its author has rescued a group of turn-of-the-twentieth-century taxidermists/naturalists who in fact were crucial players in stopping the wholesale extinction of some of America’s most cherished animals. Read this book and you’re never going to stand before a natural history exhibit in one of America’s great museums and think of it in the same way again."
Dan O’Brien, author of Great Plains Bison
"Andrei has written an important book that fills the gape in our understanding of the modern conservation movement. Nature’s Mirror celebrates the unsung heroes who used the tools of taxidermy and museum design to ensure that humans retained their connection to wildlife as they transitioned from people of the land to urban dwellers. At the turn of the last century, before efficient field photography, they created artistic renderings of animals that few would have an opportunity to see, and they embedded, in our minds, accurate images of the creatures with whom we share this world. In the process, they saved many species and showed us that extinction is not inevitable."
Heather Ewing, author of The Lost World of James Smithson: Science, Revolution, and the Birth of the Smithsonian
"Deeply researched and beautifully written, Nature’s Mirror is a fascinating account of the development of an American school of taxidermy and the transformation that movement wrought on natural history museums at the turn of the twentieth century. Andrei charts how the men of Ward’s Natural Science Establishment revolutionized animal displays and in the process redefined the public work of natural history museums, awakened Americans to humanity’s impact on the natural world, and pioneered wildlife conservation practices that saved dozens of species from extinction."
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Biological Sciences: Natural History
History: American History | Environmental History
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