When looking closer at the presence of marine specimens at American anti-slavery fairs, it becomes clear that these objects were more than items of natural curiosity. 

Once highly valuable, salt affords a new look at life, environment, and sovereignty in the southwest borderlands.

Poe’s work reminds us that the separation of “Arts” and “Sciences” into discrete discourses of knowledge is itself a quite recent invention.

The outlines of “salvation antiquarianism”—with the emphasis on “saving” both in terms of preservation and Christian redemption—appears particularly clearly in the AAS’s inaugural 1813 address.

Indeed, early American salt makers exploited productive precedents established by generations of people who had engaged with salt resources for thousands of years. This deeper history of salt shaped space, relations, and power dynamics during the eighteenth century in ways both explicit and obscure.

Morton and his skull measurements have long been part of the scholarship on American racism, but what happens when we draw Audubon into the racial drama?

Within the narrow rhetoric of antislavery politics that shape Prince’s narrative, however, steady articulation of money markets, repeated reference to financial transactions, and descriptions of resource accrual stand out in a declared autobiography, a distinctly literary production.

A more extravagant disregard for instructions on his second expedition would lead him deep into California—still a part of Mexico—and would win him not censure, but fame.

Sponsored by The Chipstone Foundation.

What can making now tell us about the past? Or should the past remain untouched? 

Like the agents and reagents of a chemical demonstration, Winthrop’s specimens illustrated a fundamental transformation as they were unpacked from their crates: not a transformation in their material state, per se, but rather an alteration of the New World environment and the political economy of colonial New England according to Winthrop’s careful designs.

As much as Audubon drew attention to himself as an artist and man of science—and he did so ceaselessly and shamelessly—he also drew the attention of the American people to the richness and diversity of nature in America, helping them see it in national as well as environmental terms.

Crèvecoeur, William Bartram, Jefferson, and Audubon appropriate the “ideological assumptions, discursive conventions, and representational techniques” of earlier Caribbean natural histories to debate the implications of plantation slavery for a nation ostensibly committed to equality.

Embroidered orchards and peony hair ornaments testify that women were practitioners of floral display, but many women sought knowledge as well as style.

Readers are invited to imagine both the agency of plants and the very human limits to our imaginations.

Our historiographical queries pushed our scientists to think through the meaning and implications, not merely of current scientific consensuses, but also of past ones.

Although menagerie owners emphasized the educational value of their exhibitions, they were clearly driven by economic rather than educational imperatives. Menageries were both capital-intensive and risky ventures.

Five unpublished letters (1825–1830) reveal the ornithologist’s dream and how he (almost) achieved it

Work required Americans to keep a close eye on the natural world, for most still wrung a living from understanding and manipulating nature.

His descriptions of Poll were not as a bird in its own habitat, but as his companion.

Viewing this rare artifact was a great highlight in a journey that has consumed my life for the last six years.

Seeing Lewis’s image I was immediately reminded of the importance of the visual—both for present-day scholars of African American life and culture and for those nineteenth-century freedom fighters who knew the visual field was a key site of struggle for representing the race.

The edge between a forest and a field, with its mixture of habitats, can also host a rich diversity of species. Some are drawn to and thrive on the edge—generalists such as raccoons and coyotes—while other species cannot survive in or even enter the edge.

Were [Fijians] a race of their own or a mix of many?

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“Not only did it seem possible that species were radically different in the New World, but some early observers reported evidence that the boundaries between the plant and animal kingdoms were crossed in some cases.”

In the near future, it may be possible to write an early American history that considers the role of gut microbiota, which, as scientists are documenting, play a critical role in everything from obesity to disease progression.

Confounded physicians could but observe the often contradictory genitalia, and consequently their pronouncements depended as much on traditional stereotypical social indicators as on biological markers when they decreed a physically anomalous individual male or female.

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“As early-nineteenth-century Americans set out to conquer the western wilderness, this mythical creature helped them imagine themselves as new rulers of the natural world.”

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