Conquest of the West - Native American collections from the Smithsonian Institution kept at the Quai Branly Museum - Jacques Chirac

FRENCH LANGUAGE

In the years 1880-1890 the Smithsonian Institution sent more than a thousand ethnographic and archaeological objects from North America to the Museum of Ethnography at the Trocadero.

The book thus retraces a large part of American history, that of the conquest of the West and its impact on the affirmation throughout the 19th century of a new science, ethnology, embodied by the Smithsonian Institution.
The objects remaining today at the Musée du Quai Branly must therefore be considered as minor but nonetheless essential witnesses to this period of profound political, economic, scientific, cultural and institutional upheaval that the United States was undergoing at the time.