Contributing to current debates on relationships between culture and the social, and the changing practices of modern museums, this important new work explores how evolutionary museums developed in the USA, UK, and Australia in the late 19th century.

Tony Bennett is Professor of Sociology at the Open University, UK and a Director of the ESRC Research Centre on Socio-cultural Change. His current interests focus on the sociology of culture, the history and theory of museums, and cultural policy. His recent publications include The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (Routledge 1995) and Culture: A Reformer's Science (1998).

Introduction 1. Dead Circuses: Expertise, Exhibition, Government 2. The Archaeological Gaze of the Historical Sciences 3. Reassembling the Museum 4. The Connective Tissue of Civilisation 5. Selective Memory: Racial Recall and Civic Renewal at the American Museum of Natural History 6. Evolutionary Ground Zero: Colonialism and the Fold of Memory 7. Words, Things and Vision: Evolution 'At a Glance' Postscript: Slow Modernism Endnotes References Index