Collaboration, Gender, and Leadership at the Minnesota Seaside Station, 1901-1907.

Mentorship and collaboration necessarily shaped opportunities for women in science, especially in the late nineteenth century at rapidly expanding public co-educational universities. A few male faculty made space for women to establish their own research programs and professional identities. At the University of Minnesota, botanist Conway MacMillan, an ambitious young department chair, provided a qualified mentorship to Josephine Tilden. He encouraged her research on algae and relied on her to do departmental support tasks even as he persuaded the administration to move her from instructor to assistant professor in 1903. Resulting publications on Minnesota algae led her to look further west, first at Yellowstone National Park and then along the Pacific Northwest coast. After visiting a particularly productive littoral site on Vancouver Island, she suggested that they establish a Minnesota Seaside Station there. Over its seven years in operation under the Midwestern leaders, that location proved remarkably productive. At the remote site, the two operated within their typical but not inevitable gendered roles and deliberately defined their seaside station as unconventional. They expected participants to study productively and, at the same time, find imaginative ways to enjoy nature at a place far from urban amenities. Gendered expectations remained casual as participants moved both within and against them. This study investigates how, in the early twentieth century, the role and expectations of mentorship shifted as Tilden established her own independent research agenda. The Minnesota Seaside Station, in particular, proved significant in developing the leadership skills essential for her to pursue research in the Pacific region at a time when American expansionism and indigenous cooperation made sites accessible to academic researchers.

Museum perceptions and productions: American migrations of a Maori hei-tiki.

Museum objects have biographies shaped by their material, geographical and cultural origins, their initial intended purpose, and the ways in which they are valued and interpreted by curators and public audiences. Often one object becomes highly symbolic of a particular group even as its presentation over time reflects changing perceptions of the culture as well as the individual object. A Maori hei-tiki - a small but distinctive greenstone pendant - collected by Charles Wilkes on his United States Exploring Expedition in 1840 provides insight into changing museum practices, museum networks of exchange, the impact of professionalizing expertise in ethnology and anthropology since the late nineteenth century, shifting public interests and expectations, and, indeed, the unanticipated ways in which museum objects find their way into exhibition, in this case at the Smithsonian Institution. The material resilience and embedded historicity of the hei-tiki remain as a counterbalance to its versatility as an object useful in multiple stories over nearly two centuries.

Nature, not books: scientists and the origins of the nature-study movement in the 1890s.

Scientists played a key role in the first systematic introduction of nature study into North American public schools in the late nineteenth century. The initiatives of Wilbur Jackman and John Merle Coulter, affiliated with the young University of Chicago, and Liberty Hyde Bailey and Anna Botsford Comstock, at Cornell University, coincided with the "new education" reform movement that found object lessons and experience-based education superior to textbook teaching. Educational psychologists and philosophers of the 1890s, including G. Stanley Hall, related curriculum methods to perceived developmental stages in children, with a focus on immediate experience. Putting these pedagogical ideas--gained in summer institutes, normal schools, and programs at Chicago and Cornell--into practice were administrators and classroom teachers in both urban and rural classrooms. By 1900, a consensus about the value of nature study among scientists, community leaders, and teachers established it as the recognized general method of studying the natural world in public schools across much of the United States.