‘To Polish and Adorn the Mind’: The United States Naval Lyceum at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, 1833–89

Abstract

The United States Naval Lyceum, a museum and library at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, offers a revealing insight into the history of American science, material culture, and museums. This article explores the Lyceum’s history to enlarge our understanding of the ways the nineteenth-century museums used artefacts of natural and human history to tell meaningful stories. The Naval Lyceum was a place where navy officers, as curators, could perform their worldliness, demonstrate their scientific expertise, and create connections to community and to the past, and where visitors might make emotional links to the worlds of nature and humanity.

Keywords:

• Naval Lyceum
• museum history
• naval history
• Brooklyn
• NY
• New York City
• Brooklyn Navy Yard
• history of natural history
• history of collections
• American history

Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges the assistance of the archivists and curators at the Brooklyn Navy Yard Center at BLDG 92 and the Naval Academy Museum, in particular Daniella Romano and James Cheevers, and also the advice of the anonymous readers for the Museum History Journal.