U.S. Culture

century, libraries were considered so essential to the nation's well-being

that industrialist Andrew Carnegie donated part of his enormous fortune to

the construction of library buildings. Because Carnegie believed that

libraries were a public obligation, he expected the books to be

contributed through public expenditure. Since the 19th century, locally

funded public libraries have become part of the American landscape, often

occupying some of the most imposing public buildings in cities such as New

York, Los Angeles, Detroit, and Philadelphia. The belief that the

knowledge and enjoyment that books provide should be accessible to all

Americans also resulted in bookmobiles that serve in inner cities and in

rural counties.

In addition to the numerous public libraries and university collections,

the United States boasts two major libraries with worldwide stature: the

Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and the New York Public Library.

In 1800 Congress passed legislation founding the Library of Congress,

which was initially established to serve the needs of the members of

Congress. Since then, this extraordinary collection has become one of the

world's great libraries and a depository for every work copyrighted in the

United States. Housed in three monumental buildings named after Presidents

John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, the library is open to

the public and maintains major collections of papers, photographs, films,

maps, and music in addition to more than 17 million books.

The New York Public Library was founded in 1895. The spectacular and

enormous building that today houses the library in the heart of the city

opened in 1911 with more than a million volumes. The library is guarded by

a famous set of lion statues, features a world-famous reading room, and

contains more than 40 million catalogued items. Although partly funded

through public dollars, the library also actively seeks funds from private

sources for its operations.

Institutions such as these libraries are fundamental to the work of

scholars, who rely on the great breadth of library collections. Scholars

also rely on many specialized library collections throughout the country.

These collections vary greatly in the nature of their holdings and their

affiliations. The Schmulowitz Collection of Wit and Humor at the San

Francisco Public Library contains more than 20,000 volumes in 35

languages. The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem,

part of the New York Public Library, specializes in the history of

Africans around the world. The Schlesinger Library on the History of Women

in America, located at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in

Massachusetts, houses the papers of prominent American women such as Susan

B. Anthony and Amelia Earhart. The Bancroft Collection of Western

Americana and Latin Americana is connected with the University of

California at Berkeley. The Huntington Library in San Marino, California,

was established by American railroad executive Henry Huntington and

contains a collection of rare and ancient books and manuscripts. The

Newberry Library in Chicago, one of the most prestigious research

libraries in the nation, contains numerous collections of rare books,

maps, and manuscripts.

Scholars of American history and culture also use the vast repository of

the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C., and

its local branches. As the repository and publisher of federal documents,

the National Archives contain an extraordinary array of printed material,

ranging from presidential papers and historical maps to original

government documents such as the Declaration of Independence, the

Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. It houses hundreds of millions of

books, journals, photos, and other government papers that document the

life of the American people and its government. The library system is

deeply entrenched in the cultural life of the American people, who have

from their earliest days insisted on the importance of literacy and

education, not just for the elite but for all Americans.

Museums

The variety of print resources available in libraries is enormously

augmented by the collections housed in museums. Although people often

think of museums as places to view art, in fact museums house a great

variety of collections, from rocks to baseball memorabilia. In the 20th

century, the number of museums exploded. And by the late 20th century, as

institutions became increasingly aware of their important role as

interpreters of culture, they attempted to bring their collections to the

general public. Major universities have historically also gathered various

kinds of collections in museums, sometimes as a result of gifts. The Yale

University Art Gallery, for example, contains an important collection of

American arts, including paintings, silver, and furniture, while the

Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California at

Berkeley specializes in archaeological objects and Native American

artifacts.

The earliest museums in the United States grew out of private collections,

and throughout the 19th century they reflected the tastes and interests of

a small group. Often these groups included individuals who cultivated a

taste for the arts and for natural history, so that art museums and

natural history museums often grew up side by side. American artist

Charles Willson Peale established the first museum of this kind in

Philadelphia in the late 18th century.

The largest and most varied collection in the United States is contained

in the separate branches of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington,

D.C. The Smithsonian, founded in 1846 as a research institution, developed

its first museums in the 1880s. It now encompasses 16 museums devoted to

various aspects of American history, as well as to artifacts of everyday

life and technology, aeronautics and space, gems and geology, and natural

history.

The serious public display of art began when the Metropolitan Museum of

Art in New York City, founded in 1870, moved to its present location in

Central Park in 1880. At its installation, the keynote speaker announced

that the museum’s goal was education, connecting the museum to other

institutions with a public mission. The civic leaders, industrialists, and

artists who supported the Metropolitan Museum, and their counterparts who

established the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Art Institute of Chicago,

and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, were also collectors of fine art.

Their collections featured mainly works by European masters, but also

Asian and American art. They often bequeathed their collections to these

museums, thus shaping the museum’s policies and holdings. Their taste in

art helped define and develop the great collections of art in major

metropolitan centers such as New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston.

In several museums, such as the Metropolitan and the National Gallery of

Art in Washington, D.C., collectors created institutions whose holdings

challenged the cultural treasures of the great museums of Europe.

Funding

Museums continued to be largely elite institutions through the first half

of the 20th century, supported by wealthy patrons eager to preserve

collections and to assert their own definitions of culture and taste.

Audiences for most art museums remained an educated minority of the

population through the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century.

By the second decade of the 20th century, the tastes of this elite became

more varied. In many cases, women within the families of the original art

patrons (such as Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller,

and Peggy Guggenheim) encouraged the more avant-garde artists of the

modern period. Women founded new institutions to showcase modern art, such

as the Museum of Modern Art (established by three women in 1929) and the

Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Although these museums still

catered to small, educated, cosmopolitan groups, they expanded the

definition of refined taste to include more nontraditional art. They also

encouraged others to become patrons for new artists, such as the abstract

expressionists in the mid-20th century, and helped establish the United

States as a significant place for art and innovation after World War II.

Although individual patronage remained the most significant source of

funding for the arts throughout the 20th century, private foundations

began to support various arts institutions by the middle of the century.

Among these, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Rockefeller

Foundation were especially important in the 1920s and 1930s, and the Ford

Foundation in the 1960s. The federal government also became an active

sponsor of the arts during the 20th century. Its involvement had important

consequences for expanding museums and for creating a larger audience.

The federal government first began supporting the arts during the Great

Depression of the 1930s through New Deal agencies, which provided monetary

assistance to artists, musicians, photographers, actors, and directors.

The Work Projects Administration also helped museums to survive the

depression by providing jobs to restorers, cataloguers, clerical workers,

carpenters, and guards. At the same time, innovative arrangements between

wealthy individuals and the government created a new kind of joint

patronage for museums. In the most notable of these, American financier,

industrialist, and statesman Andrew W. Mellon donated his extensive art

collection and a gallery to the federal government in 1937 to serve as the

nucleus for the National Gallery of Art. The federal government provides

funds for the maintenance and operation of the National Gallery, while

private donations from foundations and corporations pay for additions to

the collection as well as for educational and research programs.

Government assistance during the Great Depression set a precedent for the

federal government to start funding the arts during the 1960s, when

Congress appropriated money for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)

as part of the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities. The NEA

provides grants to individuals and nonprofit organizations for the

cultivation of the arts, although grants to institutions require private

matching funds. The need for matching funds increased private and state

support of all kinds, including large donations from newer arts patrons

such as the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund and the Pew Charitable

Trusts. Large corporations such as the DuPont Company, International

Business Machines Corporation (IBM), and the Exxon Corporation also

donated to the arts.

Expansion

The increased importance placed on art throughout the 20th century helped

fuel a major expansion in museums. By the late 1960s and 1970s, art

museums were becoming aware of their potential for popular education and

pleasure. Audiences for museums increased as museums received more funding

and became more willing to appeal to the public with blockbuster shows

that traveled across the country. One such show, The Treasures of

Tutankhamun, which featured ancient Egyptian artifacts, toured the country

from 1976 to 1979. Art museums increasingly sought attractions that would

appeal to a wider audience, while at the same time expanding the

definition of art. This effort resulted in museums exhibiting even

motorcycles as art, as did the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1998.

Museums also began to expand the kinds of art and cultural traditions they

exhibited. By the 1990s, more and more museums displayed natural and

cultural artifacts and historical objects from non-European societies.

These included objects ranging from jade carvings, baskets, and ceramics

to calligraphy, masks, and furniture. Egyptian artifacts had been

conspicuous in the holdings of New York's Metropolitan Museum and the

Brooklyn Museum since the early 20th century. The opening in 1989 of two

Smithsonian museums in Washington, D.C., the National Museum of African

Art and the National Museum of the American Indian, indicated an awareness

of a much broader definition of the American cultural heritage. The Asian

Art Museum of San Francisco and the Freer Gallery at the Smithsonian in

Washington, D.C., maintain collections of Asian art and cultural objects.

The 1987 opening of the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, a new Smithsonian

museum dedicated to Asian and Near Eastern arts, confirmed the importance

of this tradition.

Collectors and museums did not neglect the long-venerated Western

tradition, as was clear from the personal collection of ancient Roman and

Greek art owned by American oil executive and financier J. Paul Getty.

Opened to the public in 1953, the museum named after him was located in

Malibu, California, but grew so large that in 1997 the J. Paul Getty

Museum expanded into a new Getty Center, a complex of six buildings in Los

Angeles. By the end of the 20th century, Western art was but one among an

array of brilliant cultural legacies that together celebrate the human

experience and the creativity of the American past.

Memorials and Monuments

The need to memorialize the past has a long tradition and is often

associated with wars, heroes, and battles. In the United States, monuments

exist throughout the country, from the Revolutionary site of Bunker Hill

to the many Civil War battlefields. The nation’s capital features a large

number of monuments to generals, war heroes, and leaders. Probably the

greatest of all these is Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, where

there are thousands of graves of veterans of American wars, including the

Tomb of the Unknowns and the gravesite of President John F. Kennedy. In

addition to these traditional monuments to history, millions of people are

drawn to the polished black wall that is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial,

located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The memorial is a stark

reminder of the losses suffered in a war in which more than 58,000

Americans died and of a time of turmoil in the nation.

No less important than monuments to war heroes are memorials to other

victims of war. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which opened

in 1993 in Washington, D.C., is dedicated to documenting the extermination

of millions of Jews and others by the Nazis during World War II. It

contains photographs, films, oral histories, and artifacts as well as a

research institute, and has become an enormous tourist attraction. It is

one example of a new public consciousness about museums as important

sources of information and places in which to come to terms with important

and painful historical events. Less elaborate Holocaust memorials have

been established in cities across the country, including New York, San

Francisco, and Los Angeles.

Monuments to national heroes are an important part of American culture.

These range from the memorials to Presidents George Washington, Thomas

Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.,

to the larger-than-life faces of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and

Theodore Roosevelt carved into Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. Some

national memorials also include monuments to ordinary citizens, such as

the laborers, farmers, women, and African Americans who are part of the

new Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Americans also commemorate popular culture with museums and monuments such

as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, Ohio, and the

Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York. These

collections of popular culture are as much a part of American heritage as

are fine arts museums and statues of national heroes. As a result of this

wide variety of institutions and monuments, more people know about the

breadth of America’s past and its many cultural influences. This new

awareness has even influenced the presentation of artifacts in natural

history museums. Where these once emphasized the differences among human

beings and their customs by presenting them as discrete and unrelated

cultures, today’s museums and monuments emphasize the flow of culture

among people.

The expansion in types of museums and the increased attention to audience

is due in part to new groups participating in the arts and in discussions

about culture. In the early 20th century, many museums were supported by

wealthy elites. Today’s museums seek to attract a wider range of people

including students from inner cities, families from the suburbs, and

Americans of all backgrounds. The diverse American population is eager to

have its many pasts and talents enshrined. The funding now available

through foundations and federal and state governments provides assistance.

This development has not been without resistance. In the 1980s and 1990s

people challenged the role of the federal government in sponsoring certain

controversial art and culture forms, posing threats to the existence of

the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the

Humanities. Nevertheless, even these controversies have made clearer how

much art and cultural institutions express who we are as a people.

Americans possess many different views and pasts, and they constantly

change what they create, how they communicate, and what they appreciate

about their past.

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