Butterfly People

by LEACH, WILLIAM R.

• ISBN13: 9780375422935
• ISBN10: 0375422935
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-04-09
• Publisher: Pantheon

Summary

From one of our most highly regarded historians, an original and engrossing chronicle of nineteenth-century America's infatuation with butterflies and the naturalists who described and named countless new species and unveiled the mysteries of their existence. A product of William Leach's life-long love of butterflies and in-depth original research into nineteenth-century correspondence and scientific writings, this engaging, elegantly illustrated history shows how Americans from all walks of life passionately pursued butterflies and through their discoveries and observations transformed the character of natural history. Leach focuses on a half dozen of the pioneer lepidopterists who traveled across the country and then the world, collecting and studying unknown and exotic species. Among the most brilliant were William Henry Edwards, radical Darwinian and great grandson of the theologian Jonathan Edwards, and brave Will Doherty of Cincinnati who spent most of his brief forty-five years on a quest for the rarest species. In a book as full of life as the subjects themselves, and foregrounding a collecting culture now on the brink of vanishing, Leach reveals how the beauty of butterflies led Americans into a deeper understanding of the natural world. He shows, too, that the country's enthusiasm occurred at the very moment that another form of "beauty" was emerging-the objects of technology and industry displayed at world's fairs and commercial shows; and that Americans' attraction to the new beauty would gradually take precedence-at great cost to nature in general and butterflies in particular.