Visitors to San Francisco's Exploratorium science centre around 1980 were presented with an unusual spectacle. A grasshopper under a small clear dome with wires inserted into its ventral nerve cord would generate oscilloscope motion and amplified clicks when disturbed. The visitor watched the grasshopper; the grasshopper watched the visitor. Except, as one might expect, because the visitors stopped being as interesting to the grasshopper as vice versa, soon the insect ceased to respond at all. Staff had similar problems with unresponsive fauna or flora in other live physiological displays, such as Brine Shrimp Ballet, which featured ‘sea monkeys’ swimming towards light, and the mimosa plant, whose leaves recoiled when shaken. When the Exploratorium's heterodox director Frank Oppenheimer (brother of fellow physicist Robert) touched a mimosa leaf with his lit cigarette, he generated a swift and visible response; soon visitors were able to generate the same effect using heat wands.

Oppenheimer's cigarette is just one of many engaging details presented in Life on Display. Previous historians of biology and of display have recorded parts of the history of some US museums of natural history and science and technology. But Karen Rader and Victoria Cain have for the first time given us a full twentieth-century history, from the well-documented decades around 1900 to the historiographical terra incognita of the 1980s and beyond. Their coast-to-coast geographic span is also impressive. The Exploratorium's story is well known (if not its biology exhibits), as are those of the Smithsonian and the American Museum of Natural History in New York, which also feature prominently. But Life on Display also mines the rich histories of museums from Boston to Buffalo, California to Colorado.

The authors support their general observations about the attitude of the museum profession in any given decade with numerous episodes from individual institutions, while at various points connecting them to other cognate sites, including art museums, international expositions and theatres. The great men of American natural history are to be found here – George Brown Goode and Henry Fairfield Osborn – but they rub shoulders with a vast cast. American museum preparator James Clark, we learn, spent a budget Christmas alone in London Zoo in 1909; but returning in 1926 he stayed at the Ritz and dined with the Roosevelts. This was thanks to his hugely increased salary, by now far more than his curatorial colleagues earned – just one example of the authors’ keen eye for resources and funding, and what this can tell us about the professional and political emphases of museums.

Rader and Cain use these and many other micro-histories to show that American museums were subject to multiple revolutions and uneven change throughout the twentieth century. Ecological collecting and life group displays had dominated before the First World War, while after it the introduction and impact of dioramas revivified many natural-history museums, where live displays were already delighting visitors. (Oppenheimer would later ban the former in his commitment to the latter.) Elsewhere, dedicated museums of science and technology established themselves in the educational and heritage landscape with new approaches to display centred around human biology drawn from Europe, including the iconic transparent man and woman. With them came the push buttons that would come to characterize the science museum experience.

We learn that curators contributed to the Second World War effort by providing instruction and information to the troops (in 1941 Smithsonian staff supplied the migration patterns of Pacific shrimp to cloak naval movement, and details of Eskimo clothing for designing cold-weather combat gear). Museums also played their role in the Cold War, inspiring budding young American scientists in response to sputnik. This was followed by a massive growth in the size and number of museums in the 1970s, sustained by edutainment in 1980s and 1990s, during which museums sailed the choppy waters of the creationism debates and staged the blockbuster exhibitions of mummies or dinosaurs that we know so well today.

Balancing such change-upon-change, Rader and Cain argue, was the inherent conservatism of many curators, which, combined with a constant struggle for resources, ensured that earlier forms of display and practice endured, and emphases shifted from research to education to exhibitions and back again. National Museum of American History director Remington Kellogg's contribution in the 1950s, for example, was to privilege research over display to the extent that staff referred to him as ‘the abominable no-man’ (p. 171). Later arguments between curators and designers around the planned installation of a bespoke giant grasshopper in the Smithsonian were so disruptive that the expensive fourteen-foot insect was not in the end installed, but rather sold to the Boston Museum of Science. Debates waxed and waned across the century as to what sort of research, education and exhibitions were appropriate and effective: systematics or ethology, immersive or interactive.

With this exhaustively researched and seamlessly co-authored book Rader and Cain have given us a much-needed history of debates about the function of museums and about their internal and external political context, and a structure within which to explore the history of twentieth-century life-science collections. For Life on Display is a history of writing about museums, of advocacy and arguments, ‘chronicling the social history of their exhibits to explain how science and natural history museums have conceived and reconceived their institutional roles in relation to one another, as well as in relation to life science and society in the twentieth-century United States' (p. 280). The challenge is now for others to propose complementary histories of the collections and objects themselves, of the visuality of exhibits and the practices (rather than the proclamations) of curators, conservators and visitors. We also sorely need a transatlantic equivalent to this worthy tome, which for anyone interested in American museums during the last century will remain essential reference deep into this one.