Things Amer Art Museums and Civic Culture in the Progressive Era

"Jeffrey Trask's well-researched and engagingly written history of New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art explores the expanding educational role of museums during the Progressive Era... Trask successfully establishes the Met's efforts at cultural democracy and their unintended consequences."-Journal of American History "In its revealing and canny glimpse of the convergence of money, stuff, intelligence, and social zeal in one institution at one critical time, Trask's work would constitute a worthy success."-American Historical Review "Things American gives us, at last, a history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art based on genuine archival materials. Moreover, it reorients our thinking about art museums in the United States, demonstrating that there were important democratic, utilitarian, and civic impulses at work behind them. The book also broadens our thinking about progressivism, reminding us how it shaped art museums and how those museum-related programs it spawned continued beyond World War I."-Steven Conn, author of Do Museums Still Need Objects?