There is much to admire about Please Touch, Jessie Swigger’s history of the first four children’s museums in the United States—from its crisp, jargon-free prose to its straightforward organization. Its meaty introduction is followed by four case study chapters, focused on the children’s museums in Brooklyn, Boston, Detroit, and Indianapolis, respectively. Founded between 1899 and 1925 at a time when few museums catered to young visitors, these institutions were the product of the Progressive Era drive to serve children, and they ushered in what some scholars have identified as the first wave of children’s museums. Each chapter brings the story further into the twentieth century, with the last two exploring the post-World War II period and the tepid institutional responses of the children’s museums in Detroit and Indianapolis to race relations. The book concludes with an epilogue that reflects briefly on the impact of these pioneers on the second wave of children’s museums—a period starting circa 1962, when the establishment of the American Association of Youth Museums marked the widespread acceptance of children’s museums.

The structure of the book largely succeeds in allowing Swigger to achieve a balance between local details—the product of extensive archival research—and the overarching historical patterns that give any book its interpretative power. The author uses the introduction particularly effectively to set her work in the context of three large themes: museum history, the history of pedagogy, and women’s history. Seeking to claim a degree of social usefulness for their work, museum professionals in the late nineteenth century coined the term New Museum Idea to encapsulate their hope that museums could contribute to popular education without completely abandoning their commitment to scholarly research. As Swigger shows, children’s museums in many cities worked closely with public school teachers to supply the natural history specimens that were central to Nature Study, a field that resonated with progressive educators on a number of levels, including an emphasis on hands-on experience; an interest in helping children make connections between local things and their own lives; and an opportunity to bring urban children into contact with the natural world. As they had in elementary education and librarianship, women used what was widely accepted as their natural affinity for children to forge new professional roles for themselves in the museum world, actively participating in new museum associations.

Thanks to this strong introduction, the reader is well prepared to grapple with the case study chapters and their emphasis on who did what when. While there are notable similarities among the four featured museums, Swigger is rightly attentive to their differences, some of which grew out of tensions embedded in the very concept of a children’s museum. For some, the core of any museum was the preservation and display of its collection. For others, children’s museums were a fundamentally different animal created to serve a particular audience, rather than to safeguard precious things. Perhaps the ultimate example of the latter approach is the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, which started without any collection at all; instead, it invited community members to donate objects they deemed of interest to youngsters.

Other differences had to do with organizational structure. As a private nonprofit entity, for instance, the Boston Children’s Museum operated independently of municipal decisions, but sometimes found itself catering primarily to the white (although not necessarily native-born) children of Jamaica Plain. In Detroit, the Children’s Museum was fully publicly funded and thus expected to prioritize its lending program, which brought a range of objects into public classrooms. Other departures, however, seem more connected to the personalities of the white middle-class women who feature predominantly in this history. When the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, under the direction of Anna Billings Gallup, took up Americanization efforts after World War I, the message was distinctly anti-Bolshevist: labor organizing was dangerous and antithetical to American values. In contrast, at Boston’s Children’s Museum during the very same years, Delia Griffin was perhaps influenced by the cultural pluralism of philosopher Horace Meyer Kallen, author of the 1915 essay, “Democracy and Melting Pot.” Griffin embraced a form of Americanization that sought to learn about immigrant communities, emphasizing cultural understanding across lines of ethnic difference.

As important as it is to understand these programs, early children’s museums were also places. As the author notes in the introduction, “finding a place for the museum to live was, for obvious reasons, essential to each one’s success” (12). Indeed, Swigger faithfully documents extended discussions about facilities in each of her case study chapters, although she leaves it to readers to discern any larger pattern. The pattern, however, is certainly there. None of the children’s museums studied opened in a building designed to be a children’s museum. Instead, they were housed, at least temporarily, in either a park structure (in Boston), in the basement of an art museum (in Detroit), or in the former carriage house of a once great domicile (in Indianapolis), before finding more or less permanent homes in former mansions. This pattern is hardly surprising, given that institutions devoted to children rarely started out in purpose-built buildings. Marta Gutman, for instance, has shown in A City for Children (2014) that orphanages and kindergartens serving the poor children of Oakland, California, were opened in buildings initially used for other purposes, including one that had been a saloon. In contrast, David Sloane has noted in a chapter in the edited collection Designing Modern Childhoods (2008) that early children’s hospitals, perhaps because they could be expected to care for middle-class children, were often opened in former residences, thus providing these more coddled children with home-like settings for their care.

More intriguing is the fact that two of the four children’s museums featured in this book had, by 1935, commissioned architect-designed buildings, although neither was built. William Lescaze generated the design for the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, while plans for Indianapolis were produced by Kurt Vonnegut Sr., architect-father of the famous author and member of the museum’s board of trustees. Swigger treats these developments as right in line with other initiatives to renovate, update, and expand reused buildings, but these purpose-built children’s museums can also be read as evidence that museum leaders wanted to claim control over their workspace—a key strategy for garnering professional recognition. Considered in that light, it would be especially interesting to explore systematically how these designed-for-the-purpose buildings differed from the mansions-turned-museums that were the norm during the first half of the twentieth century.

In sum, Jessie Swigger has offered a wealth of information about the first four children’s museums in the United States. To be sure, she does not say all there is to say about these four case studies, but she opens a number of interesting scholarly conversations about an understudied institutional type that owes its existence to the deep concerns for children that characterized the Progressive Era.