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Article: Revising the record of nature.(ROM Message)
- Article from:
- ROM Magazine
- Article date:
- March 22, 2008
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2008 Royal Ontario Museum Governors. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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We have an unusual inheritance at the ROM in two distinct ways. The Museum is among the world's few remaining "universal" museums of culture--open to collections from all cultures in all places at all times, reflecting a 19th-century ideal of the museum as a socially elevating encyclopedia. Many of the ROM's new galleries will illustrate this ideal. But the ROM is also a significant museum of natural history. In almost all other places, these two mandates were split apart.
That seemed sensible when "man" and "nature" were conceived as separate worlds. Today, the fortuitous union of these themes in one place at the ROM better reflects our understanding that ...