Subtitle: Knowledge of the Natural World in Colonial New York
Author: Sara S. Gronim
Subject: History of Science / Regional History
Cloth ISBN 0-8135-4024-0
Pages: 272 pages. 10 b&w illustrations
Publication Date: March 2007

"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

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.

Sara S. Gronim is an assistant professor in the department of history at Long Island University.