William Bartram, The Search for Nature's Design: Selected Art, Letters, and Unpublished Writings
520William Bartram, The Search for Nature's Design: Selected Art, Letters, and Unpublished Writings
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Overview
Part 1, the correspondence, includes letters to and from Bartram’s family, friends, and peers, establishing his developing consciousness about the natural world as well as his passion for rendering it in drawing. The difficult business of undertaking scientific study and commercial botany in the eighteenth century comes alive through letters that detail travel arrangements, enduring hardship, and mentoring. Commonly regarded as a recluse or eccentric, Bartram nstead emerges as deeply engaged with the major ideas, issues, and intellectual life of his time.
Part 2 presents selections from Bartram’s diverse but little-known unpublished writings. Leading scholars in their field introduce manuscripts such as a draft for Travels, garden diaries faithfully kept, an antislavery treatise scrawled on the back of a plant catalog, a commonplace book, pharmacopoeia compiled for his brothers, and exacting accounts of Native American culture. Each selection reveals another dimension of Bartram’s unending interest in the world he encountered at home and while traveling through the southern colonies.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780820328775 |
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Publisher: | University of Georgia Press |
Publication date: | 05/25/2010 |
Series: | Wormsloe Foundation Nature Books , #46 |
Pages: | 520 |
Product dimensions: | 7.30(w) x 10.30(h) x 1.60(d) |
About the Author
William Bartram (Author)
WILLIAM BARTRAM (1739-1823) is renowned as one of the first early American naturalists.
Thomas Hallock (Editor)
THOMAS HALLOCK, assistant professor of English at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg, is the author of From the Fallen Tree: Frontier Narratives, Environmental Politics, and the Roots of a National Literature, 1749–1826.
Nancy E. Hoffmann (Editor)
NANCY E. HOFFMAN is an adjunct professor at Villanova University. She coedited the tercentennial reappraisal America’s Curious Botanist: John Bartram, 1699–1777.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations vii
List of Symbols and Abbreviations xi
Acknowledgments xiii
Prologue xv
Robert McCracken Peck
Introduction 1
Thomas Hallock and Nancy E. Hoffmann
Part One. A Life in Letters
Edited by Thomas Hallock with assistance from Joel T. Fry and Nancy E. Hoffmann
Chapter One. Early Years (1754– 1765) 19
Chapter Two. “Tardy Genius” (1766–1772) 52
Chapter Three. Travels South (1772–1776) 83
Chapter Four. From Travels to Travels (1780– 1791) 118
Chapter Five. “The Philosopher of Kingsessing” (1791–1803) 158
Chapter Six. Mentor (1803–1813) 203
Chapter Seven. Memorials (1813–1849) 231
Part Two. Selected Manuscripts
Edited by Nancy E. Hoffmann with assistance from Thomas Hallock
Chapter One. William Bartram’s “Commonplace Book” 245
Introduction by Joel T. Fry
Chapter Two. William Bartram’s Draft Manuscript for Travels: Private Journal and Public Book 282
Introduction by Nancy E. Hoffmann
Chapter Three. “The Dignity of Human Nature”: William Bartram and the Great Chain of Being 340
Introduction by Laurel Ode-Schneider
Chapter Four. Native Americans in William Bartram’s “Hints & Observations” 359
Introduction by Kathryn E. Holland Braund
Chapter Five. All Equally Dear to God: William Bartram’s Antislavery Manuscript 372
Introduction by Kerry Walters
Chapter Six. The Bartram-Muhlenberg Correspondence (1792, 1810) 381
Introduction by William Cahill
Chapter Seven. The Elements of Botanical Art: William Bartram, Benjamin Smith Barton, and the Scientific Imagination 426
Introduction by Michael Gaudio
Chapter Eight. William Bartram and Eighteenth-Century Medicine: A Collection of Recipes from Post-Revolutionary Philadelphia 440
Introduction by Renate Wilson
Chapter Nine. William Bartram’s “Garden Calendar” 462
Introduction by Elizabeth Fairhead and Nancy E. Hoffmann
Appendix A. Calendar of Correspondence 481
Appendix B. Preliminary List of Illustrations by William Bartram 499
Appendix C. Chronology of William Bartram’s Travels, 1773–1777 515
Appendix D. Manuscript Alterations and Comments 519
Works Cited 535
Contributors 551
Index of Historic Plant Names 553
Index 597