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Following independence from Spain, the National Museum of Mexico was founded in 1825 by presidential decree. Nationhood meant cultural as well as political independence, and the museum was expected to become a repository of national objects while building the kind of stories around these objects that would give meaning to the nation and teach its people to become citizens. Despite the elevated rhetoric of the museum's founding, the reality of the National Museum of Mexico was far more tumultuous.

In From Idols to Antiquity, Miruna Achim explores the origins and development of the National Museum of Mexico and the complicated histories of Mexican antiquities during the first half of the nineteenth century. Despite a lack of space and funds, and the government's habit of using the museum as a military barracks, the National Museum managed to amass a vast array of diverse artifacts. Achim reconstructs the early years of the museum as an emerging object, shaped by the logic and uses of historical actors who faced such issues as debates concerning the origin of American civilizations, the nature of the American races, and contentious claims about rightful ownership of antiquities. Drawing on a wide body of sources, including correspondence, inventories, bills of sale, and travelers' diaries, Achim reconstructs this array of characters-bureaucrats, antiquarians, naturalists, artists, commercial agents, diplomats, priests, customs officers, local guides, and academics on both sides of the Atlantic-who make visible the rifts and tensions intrinsic to the making of the Mexican nation and of its cultural politics in the country's post-colonial era.