James Delbourgo and Michael Gordin will be discussing Delbourgo’s book, Collecting the World — Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum at Labyrinth Books on Wednesday, November 8 at 6 p.m. The event is co-sponsored by Princeton University’s Humanities Council.

In The New York Review of Books, Jenny Uglow writes: “While Sloane has been acknowledged in histories of the British Museum and of collecting, it is harder to step back in time and give an accurate picture of his mind-set and that of his age. In this, working from Sloane’s manuscripts and from the surviving objects themselves … Delbourgo has triumphantly succeeded …. But Delbourgo takes us further. In rescuing Sloane from amnesia, he has given a double-edged account that upends the conventional understanding of the early Enlightenment and indeed the Enlightenment Museum itself …. Delbourgo’s challenging analysis shows how complex the cultural origins of the British Museum in fact were.”

James Delbourgo is professor in the history of science at Rutgers. He has written for the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Atlantic and Cabinet Magazine. His previous books include A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America, which won the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize. Michael Gordin is professor of history at Princeton University. He specializes in the history of the modern physical sciences and Russian, European, and American history and is the author of, among other books, Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War; Red Cloud at Dawn: Truman, Stalin, and the End of the Atomic Monopoly; The Pseudoscience Wars; and Scientific Babel: How Science Was Done Before and After Global English.

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