Unheralded

CLAY JENKINSON: The Future In Context — What Do Museums Represent In The 21st Century?

In London this past week, I ventured to the British Museum (above) to spend some time in the Enlightenment Room, home to an amazing array of artifacts that characterize “the long 18th century” — globes, sextants, maps, telescopes, pressed plant collections, mammoth and mastodon bones. What I principally wanted to see was the Orrery — a tabletop planetarium so ingenious, with …


Unheralded

XIAO ZHANG: A Journey Through Time

Ten years ago, a friend and I were visiting a museum in New Haven, Conn., when she exclaimed, “This is the kind of stuff you read about in textbooks!” Recently, many in the Chinese cities of Beijing and Shanghai were equally awestruck during a tour of the British Museum’s “A History of the World in 100 Objects.” In Shanghai alone, …