American Curiosity

by Parrish, Susan Scott

• ISBN13: 9780807830093
• ISBN10: 0807830097
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-02-27
• Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Pr

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. Rather than flowing strictly from metropole to colony, scientific knowledge about America 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 Curiosityalso 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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
List of Illustrations	xv
Abbreviations and Short Titles	xvii
Introduction	1	(23)
1. The British Metropolis and Its "America," 1584-1763	24	(53)
A Strange Overplus	25	(16)
Nature's Admirable Regularity	41	(23)
London's Curious	64	(13)
2. English Bodies in America	77	(26)
The English Humoral Body	78	(4)
Contagious Climates	82	(3)
The English Body Saved	85	(4)
Uncouth Symptoms	89	(14)
3. Atlantic Correspondence Networks and the Curious Male Colonial	103	(33)
Mutual Commerce	108	(6)
Not One Rational Eye	114	(4)
The Empirical Advantage	118	(7)
Becoming an F.R.S.	125	(3)
Us Americans	128	(8)
4. The Nature of Candid Friendship	136	(38)
Familiar Letters	137	(19)
The Honest Friend versus the Fop	156	(6)
Curious Love	162	(7)
Gifts	169	(5)
5. Lavinia's Nature	174	(41)
Fatal Curiosity	178	(5)
A Peculiar Grace in the Fair Sex	183	(6)
Specimens by Every Shipping	189	(11)
Finding Signs of the Pastoral	200	(15)
6. Indian Sagacity	215	(44)
The Most Secret Things of Nature	222	(8)
Dear and Deadly Grapes	230	(4)
Contested Mediation	234	(3)
No People Have Better Eyes	237	(10)
A Wonderful Antidote	247	(12)
7. African Magi, Slave Poisoners	259	(48)
Topographies of Slave Knowledge	261	(2)
Cunning	263	(2)
Hiding Places	265	(6)
Collectors	271	(3)
Poisoners	274	(5)
Healers	279	(10)
Obscene Birds	289	(6)
Forest Trial, Forest Refuge	295	(12)
Conclusion	307	(10)
Index	317