DeWitt Clinton and Amos Eaton : geology and power in early New York / David I. Spanagel.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Spanagel, David I., author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Eaton, Amos, 1776-1842.

Eaton, Amos.

Clinton, DeWitt, 1769-1828.

Clinton, DeWitt.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Geology--New York (State)--History--19th century.

Geology.

Geology--United States--History--19th century.

Geology--Political aspects--New York (State)--History--19th century.

Scientists--New York (State)--Biography.

Scientists.

Politicians--New York (State)--Biography.

Politicians.

History.

Intellectual life.

Politics and government.

New York (State)--Politics and government--19th century.

New York (State).

New York (State)--Intellectual life--19th century.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute--History.

United States.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

xii, 270 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014.

Summary:

David I. Spanagel explores the origins of American geology and the culture that helped give it rise, focusing on Amos Eaton, the educator and amateur scientist who founded the Rensselaer School, and on DeWitt Clinton, the masterful politician who led the movement for the Erie Canal. DeWitt Clinton and Amos Eaton shows how a cluster of assumptions about the peculiar landscape and entrepreneurial spirit of New York came to define the Empire State. Spanagel sheds light on a particularly innovative and fruitful period of interplay among science, politics, art, and literature in American history. New Yorkers' romantic views of natural majesty and ideas about improving the land influenced scientific ideas and other features of contemporary culture. The life of Amos Eaton provides a lens through which readers gain fresh awareness of scientific knowledge, economic planning, and cultural values during the first half of the nineteenth century. Scientists of the time were fascinated by questions such as: How old is the earth? When did time begin? How might the passage of time have shaped and reshaped the original landscape? In the United States, New Yorkers of the mid-1820s mounted the most concerted effort to find answers to these large questions of natural history. Both geographic conditions and historical forces led Amos Eaton and his wealthy patron Stephen Van Rensselaer to open the Rensselaer School at Troy, New York, in 1826. Eaton thus gave America its first generation of professional scientists, many of whom formed professional organizations and standards of practice still active today. Deeply researched, this book will interest historians of nineteenth-century American arts and science, politics, and technological development. Book jacket.

Contents:

Preamble

Introduction: a meeting place for waters and students of Earth history

Part I. Exploring New York State

Invitations to study the Earth's past

Natural sciences and civic virtues

The landlord and the ex-convict

Part II. Engineering for a New World's geology

Clinton's ditch

Eaton's agricultural and geological surveys

Empire State exports

Part III. Entertaining deep time and the sublime

Literary naturalists

Kindred spirits

Rocks, reverence, and religion

Conclusion: Echoes of New York's embrace of the geological investigation.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781421411040

1421411040

OCLC:

852957172