Nature's Registry

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.

It is a joy to follow Anne MacKinney’s lively mind at work as she insightfully teases out an expansive world of dynamic relationships hidden in Berlin’s nineteenth-century natural history museum lists and registers. A must-read for historians interested in museums, science, bureaucracy, and the public as they codeveloped in the crucial but underresearched era before 1850.