Daniel J. Sherman

Delves into two controversies from the French archaeological world to illuminate the tension between the discipline’s scientific ambitions and its hunger for media attention. For well over a century, from Heinrich Schliemann’s sensational discoveries at Troy in the 1880s, through the Tutankhamun excavations of the 1920s, to the recent LIDAR-aided uncovering of lost Maya cities, archaeology has made headlines. In this new history of archaeology and its archival traces, Daniel J. Sherman treats the friction between science and spectacle as constitutive of the field. By exploring two long-running controversies that roiled the French archaeological world and its wider public in the first third of the twentieth century, he gives the science/media relationship a unique place in the history of archaeology—and its present. The first controversy involves a dispute over the conduct of excavations at Carthage in Tunisia, then under French colonial rule. In the second, accusations of forgery clouded what seemed to be a stunning Neolithic find at a hamlet called Glozel, in the Auvergne region in central France. The affair divided the scholarly community and attracted enormous media attention across Europe and North America. Both controversies occurred at a transitional moment between what has been called the heroic age of archaeology, dominated by explorers and adventurers with little specialized training, and the beginnings of its professionalization. As Sherman shows, the two affairs put the methods, procedures, and networks of archaeology in the spotlight and profoundly shaped its history.

Environmental Science and Sustainability helps students discover their role in the environment and the impact of their choices. Authors David Montgomery and Daniel Sherman bring scientific and environmental policy expertise to a modern treatment of environmental science; in addition to teaching climate change, sustainability and resilience, they reveal how our personal decisions affect our planet and our lives.

Museums display much more than artifacts; Museum Culture makes us on a tour through the complex of ideas, values and symbols that pervade and shape the practice of exhibiting today. Bringing together a broad range of perspectives from history, art history, critical theory and sociology, the contributors to this new collection argue that museums have become a central institution and metaphor in contemporary society.Discussing exhibition histories and practice in Western Europe, the former Soviet Union, Israel and the United States, the authors explore the ways in which museums assign meaning to art through various kinds of exhibitions and display strategies, examining the political implications of these strategies and the forms of knowledge they invoke and construct. The collection also discusses alternative exhibition forms, the involvement of some museums with the more spectacular practices of mass media culture, and looks at how museums construct their public.

For over a century, the idea of primitivism has motivated artistic modernism. Focusing on the three decades after World War II, known in France as "les trentes glorieuses" despite the loss of most of the country's colonial empire, this probing and expansive book argues that primitivism played a key role in a French society marked by both economic growth and political turmoil. In a series of chapters that consider significant aspects of French culture - including the creation of new museums of French folklore and of African and Oceanic arts and the development of tourism against the backdrop of nuclear testing in French Polynesia - Daniel J. Sherman shows how primitivism, a collective fantasy born of the colonial encounter, proved adaptable to a post-colonial, inward-looking age of mass consumption. Following the likes of Claude Levi-Strauss, Andre Putman, and Jean Dubuffet through decorating magazines, museum galleries, and Tahiti's pristine lagoons, this interdisciplinary study provides a new perspective on primitivism as a cultural phenomenon and offers fresh insights into the eccentric edges of contemporary French history.

In 1979, provoked by the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, governors of states hosting disposal facilities for low-level radioactive waste (LLRW) refused to accept additional shipments. The resulting shortage of disposal sites for wastes spurred Congress to devolve responsibility for establishing new, geographically diffuse LLRW disposal sites to states and regional compacts, with siting authorities often employing socio-economic and political data to target communities that would give little resistance to their plans. The communities, however, were far from compliant, organizing nearly 1000 opposition events that ended up blocking the implementation of any new disposal sites. Sherman provides comprehensive coverage of this opposition, testing hypotheses regarding movement mobilization and opposition strategy by analyzing the frequency and disruptive qualities of activism. In the process, he bridges applied policy questions about hazardous waste disposal with broader questions about the dynamics of social movements and the intergovernmental politics of policy implementation. The issues raised in this book are sure to be renewed as interest grows in nuclear power and the disposal of the resulting waste remains uncertain.

In 1979, provoked by the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, governors of states hosting disposal facilities for low-level radioactive waste (LLRW) refused to accept additional shipments. The resulting shortage of disposal sites for wastes spurred Congress to devolve responsibility for establishing new, geographically diffuse LLRW disposal sites to states and regional compacts, with siting authorities often employing socio-economic and political data to target communities that would give little resistance to their plans. The communities, however, were far from compliant, organizing nearly 1000 opposition events that ended up blocking the implementation of any new disposal sites. Sherman provides comprehensive coverage of this opposition, testing hypotheses regarding movement mobilization and opposition strategy by analyzing the frequency and disruptive qualities of activism. In the process, he bridges applied policy questions about hazardous waste disposal with broader questions about the dynamics of social movements and the intergovernmental politics of policy implementation. The issues raised in this book are sure to be renewed as interest grows in nuclear power and the disposal of the resulting waste remains uncertain.

This work takes a look at the human impact of World War I by examining the ways in which the French remembered their veterans and war dead after the armistice. Arguing that memory is more than just a record of experience, this cultural history offers a perspective on how commemoration of World War I helped to shape post-war French society and politics. Daniel Sherman shows how a wartime visual culture saturated with images of ordinary foot soldiers, together with contemporary novels, memoirs and tourist literature, promoted a distinctive notion of combat experience. The contrast between battlefield and home front, soldier and civilian was the basis for memory and collective gratitude. Post-war commemoration, however, also grew directly out of the search for the remains of hundreds of thousands of missing soldiers, and the sometimes contentious debates over where to bury them. For this reason, the local monument, with its inscribed list of names and its functional resemblance to tombstobes, emerged as the focal point of commemorative practice. Sherman traces every step in the process of monument building as he analyzes commemoration's competing goals - to pay tribute to the dead, to console the bereaved and to incorporate mourner's individual memories into a larger political discourse.

This work takes a look at the human impact of World War I by examining the ways in which the French remembered their veterans and war dead after the armistice. Arguing that memory is more than just a record of experience, this cultural history offers a perspective on how commemoration of World War I helped to shape post-war French society and politics. Daniel Sherman shows how a wartime visual culture saturated with images of ordinary foot soldiers, together with contemporary novels, memoirs and tourist literature, promoted a distinctive notion of combat experience. The contrast between battlefield and home front, soldier and civilian was the basis for memory and collective gratitude. Post-war commemoration, however, also grew directly out of the search for the remains of hundreds of thousands of missing soldiers, and the sometimes contentious debates over where to bury them. For this reason, the local monument, with its inscribed list of names and its functional resemblance to tombstobes, emerged as the focal point of commemorative practice. Sherman traces every step in the process of monument building as he analyzes commemoration's competing goals - to pay tribute to the dead, to console the bereaved and to incorporate mourner's individual memories into a larger political discourse.

Museums display much more than artifacts; Museum Culture makes us on a tour through the complex of ideas, values and symbols that pervade and shape the practice of exhibiting today. Bringing together a broad range of perspectives from history, art history, critical theory and sociology, the contributors to this new collection argue that museums have become a central institution and metaphor in contemporary society.Discussing exhibition histories and practice in Western Europe, the former Soviet Union, Israel and the United States, the authors explore the ways in which museums assign meaning to art through various kinds of exhibitions and display strategies, examining the political implications of these strategies and the forms of knowledge they invoke and construct. The collection also discusses alternative exhibition forms, the involvement of some museums with the more spectacular practices of mass media culture, and looks at how museums construct their public.

Attracting controversy as readily as they do crowds, art museums--the Grand Louvre project and the new Orsay in Paris, or the proposed Whitney and Guggenheim additions in New York, for example--occupy a curious but central position in world culture. Choosing the art museums of provincial France in the previous century as a paradigm, Daniel Sherman reaches toward an understanding of the museum's place in modern society by exploring its past. He uses an array of previously unstudied archival sources as evidence that the museum's emergence as an institution involved not only the intricacies of national policy but also the political dynamics and social fabric of the nineteenth-century city. The author ascertains that while the French state played an important role in the creation of provincial museums during the Revolutionary era, for much of the next century it was content simply to send works of art to the provinces. When in the 1880s the new Republican regime began to devote more attention to the real purposes and functions of provincial museums, officials were surprised to learn that the initiative had already passed into the hands of local elites who had nurtured their own museums from their inception. Sherman devotes particular attention to the museums of Bordeaux, Dijon, Marseilles, and Rouen. From their origins as repositories for objects confiscated during the Revolution, they began to attract the attention of local governments, which started to add objects purchased at regional art exhibitions. In the period 1860-1890, monumental buildings were constructed, and these museums became identified with the cities' bourgeois leaders. This central connection with local elites has continued to our own day, and leads into the author's stimulating reflections on the art museum's past, present, and future. This original and highly readable account should attract those with an interest in cultural institutions and art history in general as well as those who study the history and sociology of modern France.