Collections of animals, fish and natural curiosities open to the public have consistently intersected with and reinforced the societies that created them. America’s more than 160 credited zoos and aquaria receive more than 100 million visitors annually. They also speak to changing values of US society.

Victorian zoos, emerging around private menageries and urban modernization, became showplaces for architecture and landscapes as well as animals, exemplified in the Philadelphia, PA zoo’s elaborate buildings or Frederick Law Olmsted’s planning for Boston, MA’s Franklin Zoo and Manhattan’s marvelous pocket menagerie in Central Park. The last was redone by Robert Moses in the 1930s, a period in which other zoos were expanded under Works Progress Administration (WPA) patronage.

In the 1960s, zoos were criticized for their cramped cages and unnatural displays.

These attacks, as well as scientific evolution, shifted the impetus of many zoos from collection towards conservation, where US zoos became world leaders. Placards discussing breeding programs, genetic engineering and habitat preservation have complemented open exhibits and complex habitats. At the same time, zoos use “blockbuster” attractions like Philadelphia’s white lions or the Washington, DC National Zoo’s giant pandas, fruit of Nixon’s rapprochement with China.

America’s other great contemporary zoos, defined by size, programs and resources, include the San Diego Zoo, Chicago, IL’s Lincoln Park, New York City’s Wildlife Conservation Society (including the Bronx Zoo) and the National Zoo in Washington, part of the Smithsonian Institution. Nearly half of all zoos are municipal projects, although they must also rely on foundation assistance and wider civic memberships.

Nonetheless, such zoos represent regional and global tourist attractions—the St. Louis, MO Zoo gained wide media exposure through television’s Wild Kingdom, featuring its director, Marlin Perkins, while Miami, FL’s Metrozoo merited a Frederick Wiseman documentary.

Large-scale public zoos also have been shadowed by smaller private and commercial collections, ranging from a few animals imprisoned beside a highway to larger exhibits like South Carolina’s Brookgreen Gardens, created by Archer Huntington and his wife in 1931 on their estate. As America sprawled along newly paved interstates, larger enterprises—safari parks, reptile-lands and Disney’s Wild Kingdom—followed. Zoos and acquaria have also become features of (and taken as characteristics of) amusement parks.

Aquaria, less attractive than zoos, began with Washington’s National Aquarium, located in the Department of Commerce building. Other early aquaria opened in Battery Park, Manhattan (1895, moved to Coney Island in 1957) and Belle Isle (Detroit, MI, 1904). Many declined after the Second World War, but 1980s waterfront development spurred renewed interest in Baltimore, MD, New Orleans, LA and other cities. These scientific collections also have competed with private commercial venues like the Sea World chain, which specializes in marine circus acts.

The Victorian zoo highlighted exoticism and hierarchy in humans’ domination of fierce nature and other humans. The modern American zoo, by contrast, has become a center of ecological concern and pedagogy as much as display—yet this, too, reflects the changing cultural meanings of both nature and its viewers.