Nature on Paper: Documenting Science in Prussia, 1770-1850

Anne Greenwood MacKinney

Dec 2024 · University of Pittsburgh Press

About this ebook

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. Nature on Paper follows a different, humbler set of objects that make it possible to trace the global routes and shifting meanings of those natural things: the catalogs, inventories, and other paper tools of information management that form the backbone of collection institutions. Anne Greenwood MacKinney focuses on Prussia from the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century, a place and time that witnessed the dramatic restructuring of research, government, and public collections toward a closer integration of science, state, and a proto-civil society. The documents at the heart of her study are mediators actively shaping the historical trajectories, values, and meanings of the objects they record, and with pasts and paths of their own. MacKinney also reveals how various stakeholders—in the research community, museum sector, government, and general public—can interact with these documents and thereby shape the world of natural science. By centering the history of natural historical collection paperwork and the agents involved in its production, circulation, and safekeeping, Nature on Paper tells a largely neglected story of a form of scientific labor that transformed the infrastructure of modern research at the turn of the nineteenth century.

About the author

Anne Greenwood MacKinney is a historian of science and museums. Her research on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cultures of natural history and collecting is based on extensive practical experience working in museums, including the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, the Centrum für Naturkunde in Hamburg, and the Goethe-Nationalmuseum in Weimar.