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Everyday Nature: Knowledge of the Natural World in Colonial New York
In the modern world, the public looks to scientists and scholars for their expertise on issues ranging from the effectiveness of vaccines to the causes of natural disasters. But for early Americans, whose relationship to nature was more intimate and perilous than our own, personal experience, political allegiances, and faith in God took precedence over the experiments of the learned. In Everyday Nature, Sara Gronim shows how scientific advances were received in the early modern world, from the time Europeans settled in America until just before the American Revolution. Settlers approached a wide range of innovations, such as smallpox inoculation, maps and surveys, Copernican cosmology, and Ben Franklin’s experiments with electricity, with great skepticism. New Yorkers in particular were distrustful because of the chronic political and religious factionalism in the colony. Those discoveries that could be easily reconciled with existing beliefs about healing the sick, agricultural practices, and the revolution of the planets were more readily embraced.
A fascinating portrait of colonial life, this book traces a series of innovations that were disseminated throughout the Atlantic world during the Enlightenment, and shows how colonial New Yorkers integrated new knowledge into their lives.
A fascinating portrait of colonial life, this book traces a series of innovations that were disseminated throughout the Atlantic world during the Enlightenment, and shows how colonial New Yorkers integrated new knowledge into their lives.
276 pages, Hardcover
First published April 1, 2007
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August 22, 2008
Sara S. Gronim examines how colonial new yorkers understood the natural world. This book examines how everyday people saw nature as enlightenment transformed how scientists, intellectuals, and elites saw the world around them. It would be a wonderful book for a class on science and society as it engages the question of how people's ideas about the world change, and how people interpret (and interpolate) scientific knowledge. The people studied in this book took parts of information most useful to them and understood that information (like the smallpox vaccine) through frameworks already in play.
"If the history of the scientific revolution was once written as the product of the minds of a few brilliant men, historians in the past thirty years have shown how important the participation of many more ordinary people - instrument makers, navigators, gardeners, doctors, and hundreds of collectors and experimenters who never became famous - was to the development of this shift in understanding nature. Moreover, historians now understand how crucial colonial places were to the scientific revolution. Breaking the insularity of Europe, where the erudite once believed that classical learning contained all there was to know, the newly encountered star patterns, plants, climates, animals, and people forced European savants to develop entirely new systems of thought in order to encompass this plethora of inforamtion. As importantly, people in colonial places themselves - not only European colonists, but Africans, Asians, and Native Americas - contributed their expertise to the growing catalog of the world's natural phenomena. The history of the scientific revolution, then, is a global one, with many people in many places reworking their understanding of the natural world" (6).
[Note- this is really more a book about European colonists perspectives than anyone else's]
In terms of the composition of the book, it was well-written. I loved that each chapter title was a word that summed up the chapter's theme. I appreciated the attention to religion and the sense of change over time.
The final chapter was particularly fascinating to me as it examined how (and if) maps made people begin thinking of themselves as New Yorkers as attention was drawn to the state as a bounded territory. In the end, the real new yorker was defined by race as much by location.
"If the history of the scientific revolution was once written as the product of the minds of a few brilliant men, historians in the past thirty years have shown how important the participation of many more ordinary people - instrument makers, navigators, gardeners, doctors, and hundreds of collectors and experimenters who never became famous - was to the development of this shift in understanding nature. Moreover, historians now understand how crucial colonial places were to the scientific revolution. Breaking the insularity of Europe, where the erudite once believed that classical learning contained all there was to know, the newly encountered star patterns, plants, climates, animals, and people forced European savants to develop entirely new systems of thought in order to encompass this plethora of inforamtion. As importantly, people in colonial places themselves - not only European colonists, but Africans, Asians, and Native Americas - contributed their expertise to the growing catalog of the world's natural phenomena. The history of the scientific revolution, then, is a global one, with many people in many places reworking their understanding of the natural world" (6).
[Note- this is really more a book about European colonists perspectives than anyone else's]
In terms of the composition of the book, it was well-written. I loved that each chapter title was a word that summed up the chapter's theme. I appreciated the attention to religion and the sense of change over time.
The final chapter was particularly fascinating to me as it examined how (and if) maps made people begin thinking of themselves as New Yorkers as attention was drawn to the state as a bounded territory. In the end, the real new yorker was defined by race as much by location.
Displaying 1 of 1 review