Abstract:
There is an increasingly sophisticated literature on the role played by museums in reaffirming social norms of examination in the antebellum United States. This literature has largely focused on the way museums presented this knowledge to the public, not how audiences reacted to claims of scientific authority. Popular reaction to pseudoscientific claims demonstrated to the public in the scientific context of museums, in this case Charles Redheffer's 1812 perpetual motion device and P. T. Barnum's Fejee Mermaid, shed light on the close relationship between early popular scientific observation and ways of judging authenticity and deception in the commercial and social realms of the antebellum period.
