Book Alert / The Temple and the Forum

The Temple and the Forum -- The American Museum and Cultural Authority by Les Harrison, Alabama UP '07, 272 pages, ISBN #0817315632. Index, works cited, source notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

Most people take museums for granted, as if they've always been here. In fact, most such modern institutions came to be in the 19th century, and their creation was often attended by a good deal of sturm und drang over what they should incorporate and what ideals they should represent.

Les Harrison, who teaches English at Virginia Commonwealth, focuses in on three leading museums -- Charles Wilson Peale's Philadelphia Museum (1785-1843), P.T. Barnum's American Museum (1841-1865), and Washington's Smithsonian Museum (1879--present), in advancing the thesis that museums usually chose from one of two dominant models: "the temple, an institution for the projection and protection of official culture, and the forum, its populist, marketplace counterpart."

In so doing, Harrison explores how these models manifested themselves in the literary works of some of the foremost writers of the day -- Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Walt Whitman.