Nature's Registry
Documenting Natural History in Prussia, 1770-1850
Format:Hardback
Publisher:University of Pittsburgh Press
Published:31st May '25
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How Paper Tools Transformed the Infrastructure of Modern Research in Prussia at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century
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.
A new addition to the University of Pittsburgh Press's Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century serIt 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–MadisonToday, 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 CambridgeThis 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 CambrISBN: 9780822948278
Dimensions: unknown
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368 pages