Check nearby libraries
Buy this book
John Bartram was the greatest collecting botanist of his day, and personally introduced fully one quarter of all the plants that reached Europe from the New World during the colonial period. He established one of the first botanical gardens in America and turned it into a commercial nursery, linking Europe and America with a mail-order business in seeds and plants.
He was a founding member of the American Philosophical Society, a Quaker disowned by his Meeting for heresy, and a central character in Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer.
His son William was America's first great native-born natural historian and important painter of nature, developing his own surrealist style. He was the author of Travels, America's first significant book of natural history - a work that inspired the poems of Wordsworth and Coleridge, provided wilderness settings for the novels of Charles Brockden Brown and James Fenimore Cooper, and influenced the nature-based philosophy of Emerson and Thoreau.
Through the lives of the Bartrams, Slaughter illuminates changing American attitudes toward science, religion, nature, and commerce. He also addresses questions of parenthood, race and gender relations, and evocations of the self.
Tracing the origins of environmental ethics, often believed to be distinctively modern, to the early nineteenth century, he portrays the two Bartrams as philosophical innovators in their opposition - considered radical at the time - to sport-hunting and the wholesale destruction of rattlesnakes, and in their beliefs in the volition of plants and the common spirit animating all living things.
The Bartrams' attempts to find both salvation and a living in nature, and their relationship - sometimes strained, sometimes touching - make for a moving story about the conjunction of nature with human nature and about the intellectual and emotional origins of their thought and spiritual outlook. This is what it meant to be a father, a son, a seeker of purpose and meaning, in that time long ago when the verdant wilderness still covered much of the North American continent.
Check nearby libraries
Buy this book
Previews available in: English
Edition | Availability |
---|---|
1
The Natures of John And William Bartram
October 30, 2005, University of Pennsylvania Press
Paperback
in English
0812219341 9780812219340
|
zzzz
Libraries near you:
WorldCat
|
2
The Natures of John and William Bartram: Two Pioneering Naturalists, Father and Son, in the Wilderness of Eighteenth-Cen tury America
October 28, 1997, Vintage
Paperback
in English
0679781188 9780679781189
|
zzzz
Libraries near you:
WorldCat
|
3
The natures of John and William Bartram
1997, Vintage Books
in English
- 1st Vintage Books ed.
0679781188 9780679781189
|
zzzz
Libraries near you:
WorldCat
|
4
The natures of John and William Bartram
1996, Alfred A. Knopf
in English
- 1st ed.
0679430458 9780679430452
|
aaaa
Libraries near you:
WorldCat
|
Book Details
Edition Notes
Includes bibliographical references (p. 275-292) and index.
Classifications
The Physical Object
ID Numbers
Source records
Internet Archive item recordmarc_openlibraries_sanfranciscopubliclibrary MARC record
Library of Congress MARC record
marc_columbia MARC record
Excerpts
Community Reviews (0)
Feedback?August 4, 2024 | Edited by MARC Bot | import existing book |
August 14, 2020 | Edited by ImportBot | import existing book |
January 11, 2019 | Edited by MARC Bot | import existing book |
November 28, 2012 | Edited by AnandBot | Fixed spam edits. |
December 10, 2009 | Created by WorkBot | add works page |