History in the Making: An Absorbing Look at How American History Has Changed in the Telling over the Last 200 Years


Kyle Ward - 2006
    history textbooks of different eras to compare how the same event or historical figure has been portrayed differently at different times in our nation's history.From the Boston Massacre to antebellum slavery, the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor to the stock market crash of 1929, Ward uncovers unexpected and often dramatic shifts of interpretation corresponding to prevailing attitudes at the time each textbook was written. History in the Making is the history of history—a stark reminder that even history itself changes over time.For anyone whose view of history was turned on its ear by James Loewen's bestselling Lies My Teacher Told Me, here is striking, firsthand evidence of the shifting biases, politics, and cultural preferences in both our understanding of our own history and in what we teach our children about the past.

Kingdom Under Glass: A Tale of Obsession, Adventure, and One Man's Quest to Preserve the World's Great Animals


Jay Kirk - 2010
    In this epic account of an extraordinary life lived during remarkable times, Jay Kirk follows the adventures of the brooding genius who revolutionized taxidermy and created the famed African Hall we visit today at New York's Museum of Natural History. The Gilded Age was drawing to a close, and with it came the realization that men may have hunted certain species into oblivion. Renowned taxidermist Carl Akeley joined the hunters rushing to Africa, where he risked death time and again as he stalked animals for his dioramas and hobnobbed with outsized personalities of the era such as Theodore Roosevelt and P. T. Barnum. In a tale of art, science, courage, and romance, Jay Kirk resurrects a legend and illuminates a fateful turning point when Americans had to decide whether to save nature, to destroy it, or to just stare at it under glass.

Sex in the Museum: My Unlikely Career at New York's Most Provocative Museum


Sarah Forbes - 2016
    . . sex. The anthropology student hesitated when her boyfriend suggested she apply for a job, but apply she did, and it wasn’t long before a part-time position at New York’s MUSEUM OF SEX lead to a gig as the museum's curator. That was over twelve years ago. Now Sarah—a married mother of two—proudly sports her title as Curator of Sex. In SEX IN THE MUSEUM, Sarah invites readers to travel from suburban garages where men and women build sex machines, to factories that make sex toys, to labyrinthine archives of erotica collectors. Escorting us in to the hidden world of sex, illuminating the never-talked-about communities and eccentricities of our sexual subcultures, and telling her own personal story of a decade at The Museum of Sex, Sarah asks readers to grapple with the same questions she did: when it comes to sex, what is good, bad, deviant, normal? Do such terms even apply? If everyone has sexual secrets, is it possible to really know another person and be known by them? And importantly, in our hyper-sexualized world, is it still possible to fall in love?

Stealing the Show: A History of Art and Crime in Six Thefts


John Barelli - 2019
    For the first time, John Barelli shares his experiences of the crimes that occurred on his watch; the investigations that captured thieves and recovered artwork; the lessons he learned and shared with law enforcement professionals in the United States and abroad; the accidents and near misses; and a few mysteries that were sadly never solved. He takes readers behind the scenes at the Met, introduces curators and administrators, walks the empty corridors after hours, and shares what it's like to get the call that an ancient masterpiece has gone missing. The Metropolitan Museum covers twelve acres in the heart of Manhattan and is filled with five thousand years of work by history's great artists known and unknown: Goya, da Vinci, Rembrandt, Warhol, Pollack, Egyptian mummies, Babylonian treasures, Colonial crafts, and Greek vases. John and a small staff of security professionals housed within the Museum were responsible for all of it. Over the years, John helped make the museum the state-of-the-art facility it is today and created a legacy in art security for decades to come. Focusing on six thefts but filled with countless stories that span the late 1970s on into the 21st century, John opens the files on thefts, shows how museum personnel along with local and sometimes Federal Agents opened investigations and more often than not caught the thief. But of ultimate importance was the recovery of the artwork, including Celtic and Egyptian gold, French tapestries, Greek sculpture, and more. At the heart of this book there will always be art--those who love it and those who take it, two groups of people that are far from mutually exclusive.

Among the Wonderful


Stacy Carlson - 2011
    Barnum is a young man, freshly arrived in New York and still unknown to the world. With uncanny confidence and impeccable timing, he transforms a dusty natural history museum into a great ark for public imagination. Barnum's museum, with its human wonders and extraordinary live animal menagerie, rises to become not only the nation's most popular attraction, but also a catalyst that ushers America out of a culture of glassed-in exhibits and into the modern age of entertainment.In this kaleidoscopic setting, the stories of two compelling characters are brought to life. Emile Guillaudeu is the museum's grumpy taxidermist, who is horrified by the chaotic change Barnum brings to his beloved institution. Ana Swift is a professional giantess plagued by chronic pain and jaded by a world of gawkers. The differences between these two are many: one is isolated and spends his working hours making dead things look alive, while the other has people pushing against her, and reacting to her, every day. But they both move toward change, one against his will, propelled by a paradigm shift happening whether he likes it or not, and the other because she is struggling to survive. In many shapes and forms, metamorphosis is at the core of Among the Wonderful. Pursuing this theme, the book weaves a world where upper Manhattan is still untrammeled wilderness, the Five Points is at the height of its bloody glory, and within the walls of Barnum's museum, ancient tribal feuds play out in the midst of an unlikely community of marvels.

How Art Can Make You Happy


Bridget Watson Payne - 2017
    This easy, breezy handbook is full of insight that will help regular people begin a more inspiring and less stressful relationship with art. With tips on how to visit museums, how to talk about art at cocktail parties, and how to let art wake you up to the world around you, this little guide makes it possible for anyone to fall in love with art, whether for the first time or all over again.

Cabinets of Curiosities


Patrick Mauriès - 2002
    Its 300-year history apparently came to an end with the eccentric collectors of the baroque age, when scientific thinking and rationalism took over. But in recent years the cabinet of curiosities has reappeared in exhibitions in Europe and America and in international colloquia on university campuses, while reemerging as a source of inspiration for interior decorators and contemporary artists.This spectacular and ingenious book traces the history of these "rooms of wonders, " from their first appearance in the inventories and engravings commissioned by Renaissance nobles such as the Medici and the Hapsburgs, via those of the Dane Ole Wurm and the Italian polymath Athanasius Kircher, to the cabinets of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scientists Elias Ashmole and Levinas Vincent.Much was genuinely scientific: minerals, fossils, stuffed and preserved animals and plants. Some items were merely curious, or even grotesque -- freaks of nature, monstrous births, insects in amber. The artificial or man-made was equally prominent -- wax effigies, death masks, specimens of almost incredible ingenuity (such as carvings on cherry-stones), or mechanical automata that imitated living things. The fascination of curiosities lies in their combination: they represent a stage of human inquiry in which imagination had not been divorced from reason.Patrick Mauries reconstructs these rooms of wonders as they were in their heyday and illustrates many of the most exotic items they contained, as well as the fewcomplete interiors that survive. He begins with the totality of the collection, the "theater of the world, " the whole sum of human knowledge gathered together in one room. He then examines the cabinets that contained and categorized the objects. Next he opens them to reveal the extraordinary melange of curiosities, specimens, and works of art. He looks at the personalities of the collectors themselves, from great princes to humble scholars, and finally at the modern revival of the cabinet of curiosity.

Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong


James W. Loewen - 1999
    Loewen continues his mission, begun in the award-winning "Lies My Teacher Told Me," of overturning the myths and misinformation that too often pass for American history. "Lies Across America" is a one-of-a-kind examination of sites all over the country where history is literally written on the landscape, including historical markers, monuments, historic houses, forts, and ships. With one hundred entries, drawn from every state, Loewen reveals that: The USS Intrepid, the "feel-good" war museum, celebrates its glorious service in World War II but nowhere mentions the three tours it served in Vietnam.The Jefferson Memorial misquotes from the Declaration of Independence and skews Thomas Jefferson's writings to present this conflicted slaveowner as an outright abolitionist.Abraham Lincoln had been dead for thirty years when his birthplace cabin was built!"Lies Across America" is a reality check for anyone who has ever sought to learn about America through our public sites and markers. Entertaining and enlightening, it is destined to change the way we see our country.

The Van Gogh Deception


Deron R. Hicks - 2017
    As the stakes continue to rise, the boy must piece together the disjointed clues of his origins while using his limited knowledge to stop one of the greatest art frauds ever attempted. Digitally interactive, this museum mystery offers QR codes woven throughout the book that bring renowned paintings to readers’ fingertips.

Interpreting Our Heritage


Freeman Tilden - 1957
    By means of guided tours, exhibits, and signs, visitors to these areas receive a very special kind of education through their interpretation of informative materials.For over thirty-five years, Interpreting Our Heritage has been a source book for those who are responsible for and who respond to such interpretive materials. Whether the problem is to make a prehistoric site come to life or to explain the geological theory behind a particular rock formation, Freeman Tilden provides helpful principles to follow. For anyone interested in our natural and man-made heritage, this book offers guidance for exploring educational and recreational resources.

The Sixty-Eight Rooms


Marianne Malone - 2010
    Housed in the Children's Galleries of the Chicago Art Institute, they are a collection of 68 exquisitely crafted miniature rooms made in the 1930s by Mrs. James Ward Thorne. Each of the 68 rooms is designed in the style of a different historic period, and every detail is perfect, from the knobs on the doors to the candles in the candlesticks. Some might even say, the rooms are magic. Imagine--what if you discovered a key that allowed you to shrink so that you were small enough to sneak inside and explore the rooms' secrets? What if you discovered that others had done so before you? And that someone had left something important behind?Fans of Chasing Vermeer, The Doll People, and From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler will be swept up in the magic of this exciting art adventure!

Learning to Improve: How America’s Schools Can Get Better at Getting Better


Anthony S. Bryk - 2015
    Time after time, promising education reforms fall short of their goals and are abandoned as other promising ideas take their place. In Learning to Improve, the authors argue for a new approach. Rather than “implementing fast and learning slow,” they believe educators should adopt a more rigorous approach to improvement that allows the field to “learn fast to implement well.”   Using ideas borrowed from improvement science, the authors show how a process of disciplined inquiry can be combined with the use of networks to identify, adapt, and successfully scale up promising interventions in education. Organized around six core principles, the book shows how “networked improvement communities” can bring together researchers and practitioners to accelerate learning in key areas of education. Examples include efforts to address the high rates of failure among students in community college remedial math courses and strategies for improving feedback to novice teachers.  Learning to Improve offers a new paradigm for research and development in education that promises to be a powerful driver of improvement for the nation’s schools and colleges.

100 Artists' Manifestos: From the Futurists to the Stuckists


Alex Danchev - 2011
    Artists' manifestos are nothing if not revolutionary. They are outlandish, outrageous, and frequently offensive. They combine wit, wisdom, and world-shaking demands. This collection gathers together an international array of artists of every stripe, including Kandinsky, Mayakovsky, Rodchenko, Le Corbusier, Picabia, Dali, Oldenburg, Vertov, Baselitz, Kitaj, Murakami, Gilbert and George, together with their allies and collaborators - such figures as Marinetti, Apollinaire, Breton, Trotsky, Guy Debord and Rem Koolhaas. This title is edited with an Introduction by Alex Danchev.

200 Projects to Strengthen Your Art Skills


Valerie Colston - 2008
    This profusely illustrated book teaches serious beginners the fundamental skills of graphic design as an introduction to their formal study in fine art, illustration, computer game design, interior design, animation, and virtually all other avenues in the visual arts. The author advises on setting up a proper workspace and assembling the needed materials--everything from sketchpads and paints to affordable computer software. Chapters that follow present themes and related projects that instruct readers in The basics of line art for illustration and lettering Understanding color and tone and using color media Texture in art Spatial relationships and perspective Creating shapes and relating them to other elements of composition More than 200 color illustrations demonstrate art principles and practical techniques, and show students how to apply what they are learning in a wide range of media.

A Short Life of Trouble: Forty Years in the New York Art World


Marcia Tucker - 2008
    Tucker came of age in the 1960s, and this spirited account of her life draws the reader directly into the burgeoning feminist movement and the excitement of the New York art world during that time. Her own new ways of thinking led her to take principled stands that have changed the way art museums consider contemporary art. As curator of painting and sculpture at the Whitney, she organized major exhibitions of the work of Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, and Richard Tuttle, among others. As founder of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, she organized and curated groundbreaking exhibitions that often focused on the nexus of art and politics. The book highlights Tucker's commitment to forging a new system when the prevailing one proved too narrow for her expansive vision.