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Everyday
Nature
Price: $23.95
First
Paperback Edition
Subtitle: Knowledge of the
Natural World in Colonial New York
Author:
Sara S. Gronim
Subject: Regional
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-4673-5
Pages:
276 pages
Publication Date: November 2009
Praise for the Everyday Nature:
"This volume is the
first close study of American colonials' beliefs and practices that
spans the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While deeply empirical,
it also situates colonials within the larger Atlantic context."-Philip
J. Pauly, author of Fruits and
Plains: Horticulture and the Transformation of North America
"...an admirable study of one colony's reception of and resistance to
the wider Alantic scientific revolution."-William and Mary Quarterly
"Gronim's greatest contribution is to the body of
literature...which insists that the scientific revolution was not so
much a product of 'a few briliiant men' but rather the work of 'man
more ordinary people'. Everyday Nature celebrates these unsung
innovators as those ultimately responsible for reworking our modern
understanding of the natural world."-Long
Island Historical Journal
"Everyday
Nature carefully
distinguishes between the in-depth scientific knowledge of scholars
back in Oxford or Cambridge
or Paris, the popular knowledge found
in almanacs, newspaper
articles, and self-help books in New York, and the knowledge used by
Native Americans and
African-American slaves in their daily lives. . . . Gronim’s
well-written
volume introduces us to knowledge of the natural world in a different
segment
of colonial society than historians of science usually study.-ISIS, 2009
Description:
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.
About the Author:
Sara S. Gronim is an associate professor in the
department of history at Long Island University and the 2008 recipient
of the History of Science Society’s Margaret W. Rossiter History of
Women in Science Prize.
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Price: $23.95
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