American curiosity : cultures of natural history in the colonial British Atlantic world / Susan Scott Parrish.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Parrish, Susan Scott, author.

Contributor:

Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture.

Series:

Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Natural history--United States--History.

Natural history.

Science--Social aspects--United States--History.

Science.

Intercultural communication--United States--History.

Intercultural communication.

Imperialism--History.

Imperialism.

United States--Ethnic relations.

United States.

United States--Intellectual life.

Great Britain--Intellectual life.

Great Britain.

Great Britain--Colonies--America.

United States--Relations--Great Britain.

Great Britain--Relations--United States.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (342 p.)

Place of Publication:

Chapel Hill, [North Carolina] : Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Colonial America presented a new world of natural curiosities for settlers as well as the London-based scientific community. In American Curiosity , Susan Scott Parrish examines how various peoples in the British colonies understood and represented the natural world around them from the late sixteenth century through the eighteenth. Parrish shows how scientific knowledge about America, rather than flowing strictly from metropole to colony, emerged from a horizontal exchange of information across the Atlantic. Delving into an understudied archive of letters, Parrish uncovers early descriptions of American natural phenomena as well as clues to how people in the colonies construed their own identities through the natural world. Although hierarchies of gender, class, institutional learning, place of birth or residence, and race persisted within the natural history community, the contributions of any participant were considered valuable as long as they supplied novel data or specimens from the American side of the Atlantic. Thus Anglo-American nonelites, women, Indians, and enslaved Africans all played crucial roles in gathering and relaying new information to Europe. Recognizing a significant tradition of nature writing and representation in North America well before the Transcendentalists, American Curiosity also enlarges our notions of the scientific Enlightenment by looking beyond European centers to find a socially inclusive American base to a true transatlantic expansion of knowledge.

Contents:

The British metropolis and its "America," 1584-1763. A strange overplus ; Nature's admirable regularity ; London's curious

English bodies in America. The English humoral body ; Contagious climates ; The English body saved ; Uncouth symptoms

Atlantic correspondence networks and the curious male colonial. Mutual commerce ; Not one rational eye ; The empirical advantage ; Becoming an F.R.S. ; Us Americans

The nature of candid friendship. Familiar letters ; The honest friend versus the fop ; Curious love ; Gifts

Lavinia's nature. Fatal curiosity ; A peculiar grace in the fair sex ; Specimens by every shipping ; Finding signs of the pastoral

Indian sagacity. The most secret things of nature ; Dear and deadly grapes ; Contested mediation ; No people have better eyes ; A wonderful antidote

African magi, slave poisoners. Topographies of slave knowledge ; Cunning ; Hiding places ; Collectors ; Poisoners ; Healers ; Obscene birds ; Forest trial, forest refuge.

Notes:

Includes index.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

979-88-908792-0-2

979-88-908792-1-9

0-8078-5678-9

1-4696-0095-1

OCLC:

967540722