The American Museum of Natural History

Founded in New York in 1869, the American Museum of Natural History set out to make the natural world visible and comprehensible to the public. It grew into one of the largest natural-history museums on earth, its cavernous halls filled with towering dinosaur skeletons, a life-size model of a blue whale, and the meticulously painted dioramas of wildlife that fixed the shapes of distant animals in the imaginations of generations of visitors.

The museum was a place of research as much as display. It mounted scientific expeditions across the globe — hunting fossils in the Gobi Desert, studying peoples and animals on distant continents — and its scientists advanced the understanding of evolution, anthropology, and the cosmos, the last through its famous planetarium. Behind the public halls lay one of the great scientific collections in the world.

The institution was bound up with the Roosevelt family; Theodore Roosevelt's father was a founder, and a grand memorial to the conservationist president long stood at its entrance. Like other museums of its era, it later confronted hard questions about the colonial assumptions embedded in some of its older exhibits, even as its dinosaurs and dioramas continued to draw millions of schoolchildren and families each year.

From its dinosaur halls to its planetarium, the American Museum of Natural History shaped how Americans understood the deep history of life and the workings of nature. Its history reflects the nineteenth-century faith that a great public museum could both advance science and awaken wonder in the ordinary visitor.