The American Museum of Natural History and How It Got That Way

Reviewed by Steven H. Jaffe

One of the privileges of growing up in New York City, or of visiting the city at a young age, is the opportunity to be exposed to the magic of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). Long before e-games, the internet, or even radio and television, the museum’s treasures brought to life the creatures and peoples of the world and the wonders of the universe. Admittedly, recent confrontations with activists protesting the racial politics of the museum’s Theodore Roosevelt Memorial statue on Central Park West and the outdated portrayal of Native Americans in its galleries, as well as critical assessments by scholars, point up just how profoundly AMNH and other museums founded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries nurtured some of our most toxic assumptions. The museum’s past trustees, directors, curators, and designers played pivotal roles in bringing to public life a referential framework that classified all non-European peoples as “other” and in some sense “primitive.” (Evidently, non-Europeans, no matter how complex or dynamic their cultures, fell under the rubric of “Natural History,” just like orangutans, jellyfish, or dinosaurs—a fate avoided by European societies and their offshoots, and a categorization that still burdens museums in this century.)

A Penny Earned is a Penny Saved: Pratt Institute’s “Thrift”

By Sandra Roff

There have been recent articles in the press concerning the fact that children do not save their money.

A recent New York Times article stated that the average weekly allowance is a whopping $30 a week but only 3% of parents reported that their children saved any of the money. Let’s turn back the clock one hundred and thirty-two years, to 1887 Brooklyn, New York, when Charles Pratt, a businessman turned philanthropist founded Pratt Institute to educate both men and women. On Founder’s Day at Pratt in 1889, Mr. Pratt announced, “that an association, to be called the Pratt Institute Thrift Association, which for convenience will be known as the Thrift, will be organized at once.” This new association was formed to help people in general, but particularly young people in saving and wisely investing their earnings.