#bashford dean

Source: Fishes, living and fossil. An outline of their forms and probable relationships, by Bashford Dean

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Bashford Dean (October 28, 1867 – December 6, 1928) was an American zoologist, specializing in ichthyology, and at the same time an expert in medieval armor. He is the only person to have held concurrent positions at the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he was Honorary Curator of Arms and Armor; the Metropolitan Museum purchased his collection of arms and armor after his death, which his friend Daniel Chester French commemorated with a plaque.

To mark the centennial of the Arms and Armor Department, this exhibition will survey the career of Dr. Bashford Dean (1867–1928), the department's founding curator. A zoologist by training, Dean was for a time simultaneously a full professor at Columbia University, Curator of Fishes at the American Museum of Natural History, and Curator of Arms and Armor at the Metropolitan Museum. At the Met, he worked initially as a guest curator in 1904, when he was invited to install and catalog the Museum's first significant acquisitions of arms and armor. He continued on as honorary curator until joining the staff full time in 1912 as head of the newly created Arms and Armor Department, rapidly building the collection into one of international importance. In the process he fostered an influential group of private collectors, established American scholarship on the subject, and laid the foundations for the growth of the collection as it exists today.

The glossing over of technological changes and just what they were doing and when is another thing that can lead to a major disconnect with students: It's odd to go from the heavily armed and armored knights of the crusades straight to the conquistadors wearing breastplates and steel wide-brimmed caps and then suddenly to no armor at all in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. The biggest problem with this isn't even that it doesn't give an explanation of the changes that were occurring in the three hundred year gaps between these events, it's that apparently there is nothing worth teaching a class of highschoolers about in those three hundred year gaps, or at least nothing that will be recalled easily later. Oh, right, and it's inaccurate. It's not as if the year 1492 rolled around and everybody suddenly decided to wear a stylish breastplate and light helmet. In fact, the heaviest plate and mail hadn't even come on the scene yet. Plate and mail wasn't really on a sharp decline until the mid-to-late 1600s, and it wouldn't disappear entirely until after the American Revolution, where it saw limited use by officers. Obviously, going into a lot of detail on technological changes is essentially impossible in a classroom setting, and obviously a lot of the "boring stuff" like the Diet of Worms is incredibly important historically and ought to be taught. But I don't think it would kill teachers to occasionally mention interesting events and facts that might actually get a classroom to sit up. Probably the only reason I enjoy history so much today is the happy coincidence that I had a lot of teachers who were really interested in contemporary accounts and the more amusing or "cool" anecdotes. Having history unfold as a story instead of as a list of events and people makes a huge difference. Finally, instead of having homework test kids' knowledge of the material (which I'm pretty sure is what tests are for) by making time-lines and charts, maybe give them an assignment like "find an interesting fact about x time period to share with the class." Sure, it's less labor intensive, but learning is rarely (if ever) a question of labor. By having students look on the internet for fun facts, you'll give them all a chance to get personally involved in history for no other reason than history being fun. And that's what we really want to get out of this: A new generation of kids who won't immediately dismiss history as "boring" or "dead." PS: Also, I appreciate the irony in how dry a lot of the information I presented might seem to other people. That's the reason I got the idea of the interesting fact homework: No matter how cool something might seem to a teacher, there's practically no chance that all of their students will appreciate it, but by telling kids to go find something that they think is cool, you increase the odds of them finding something that draws them into at least one segment of history exponentially.

Bashford Dean's Drawings of Helmets

BASHFORD DEAN