Scrimshaw on spermwhale teeth, showing Hawaiian women on one side and New England women on the reverse, in the Kendall collection of the New Bedford Whaling Museum.
Tlingit mask incorporating Chinese coins probably brought on American ships in the nineteenth century. In the collection of the Smithsonian Institution.
Levinus Vincent’s “Wonder Theatre of Nature” from 1706.
The Denver Art Museum’s Hamilton Building, built in 2006, shows how dramatically the look of museums changed in 300 years.
The Devastating Wake: Environmental and Social Impacts of Americans in the Pacific Ocean in the Nineteenth Century (Due in 2021 from Leapfrog Press)
Seeking raw materials to trade in China, and whales to provide oil and baleen for the home market, more than 13,000 voyages left New England ports to travel to the Pacific Ocean in the nineteenth century. By 1830, there were more ships from Massachusetts in the Pacific than from all the countries in Europe combined. These voyages exploited many resources to the point of extinction, and introduced diseases, plants, animals and technology that altered the societies of Pacific peoples, and the island and coastal environments in which they lived. U.S. colonial expansion to the west coast, Hawaii, Alaska and Samoa is a direct result of these trades.
In this book, Mary Malloy examines the impact of American voyages in the region through four things that were extracted from the Pacific (sea otters, sandalwood, marine mammals, and cultural objects) and four things introduced by the crews of Yankee ships (diseases, Christianity, metal tools, and plantation-style sugar agriculture). Collectively, they dramatically altered the land, waters, and populations of the largest ocean basin on the planet.
The Culture Keepers: A History of Museums from Ancient Times to Modern
Museums have immense power to influence how people relate to art, to history, to science and to culture. How they got that power is the subject of this book. An examination of how art and objects were displayed and explained since Babylonian kings first assembled collections to impress the public, can tell us something about how European and non-European things ended up in different museums, how the looting of cultural heritage items has persisted from ancient times to modern, how museums were used to define and then disperse national narratives (that then crumbled when the paradigm was challenged), and how museums are expected to sustain the tourist economies of cities around the globe.
This book is based on a course I taught in the Museum Studies program at Harvard for ten years. Museums have been profoundly impacted by the COVID pandemic and the ending of the book keeps changing as new challenges are presented. The project has been in the works in one way or another for almost twenty years, but I hope to finish it in 2022. I do not currently have a publisher for this project, but welcome suggestions and inquiries.