American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World

by Susan Scott Parrish

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.

Genres: History, Natural History, History Of Science

344 pages, Paperback

First published February 27, 2006

Reviews

[Bradley · Rating 4 out of 5]

A much needed revision of the historiography of natural history in the British Atlantic. This is probably the best book on the subject since Raymond Phineas Stearns' Science in the British Colonies of America. What is new in Parrish's work is a more thorough treatment of knowledge creation by Native Americans and Africans in the New World. Rather than the story of an inexorable imposition of European hegemony, Parrish argues that Britain's American colonies (this includes both continents and the Caribbean) were the scene of a contest over knowledge-making.

[Alex · Rating 2 out of 5]

A painfully slow read. Her methodology and findings were great, and provided much food for thought. The packaging, however, was just awful. Generally good writers don't put readers to sleep.

[Matthew Molinaro · Rating 4 out of 5]

so first read scott parrish's jordan peele essay for xm's class way back, did I know she was this much of a baddie then? no!! got hooked by how she completely upends all we think about the environment, nature, and knowledge pre-19c, and stayed for enslaved people poisoning masters; an antidote for these times!

[Jason Sellers]

A bit far afield for many of you, but chapter 2 looks at English bodies in America, how they're affected by climates, etc. Ch. 6 looks at affiliations of Indians with environment--especially their perceived knowledge of the medicinal properties of plants. Ch. 7 is somewhat similar in terms of thinking about African/African American knowledge of nature, both for healing and poisoning potential.