From Bacon to Bartram: Early American

Inquiries into the Natural World

The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture proposes a topical conference examining the impact that early America had on conceptions of nature. The conference will be held March 22-24, 2002, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

Over the time span 1600 to 1800, Europeans' encounters with the western hemisphere created dynamic sites for testing and extending observations of the natural world. At the same time, ideas about a dominant, "scientific" view of nature were being defined--and radically redefined. With contact among Europeans, native Americans, and Africans, the New World generated data, commodities, and ideological constructs that informed ideas about nature.

Interpretations of nature were central to the world views of people in early America, including Thomas Harriot, Anne Bradstreet, John Winthrop, Jr., Cotton Mather, William Byrd II, Jane Colden, Benjamin Franklin, John Bartram, and William Bartram (as well as their counterparts in the Iberian, French, Swedish, and Dutch colonies). Travelers to the colonies, like Richard Ligon, Hans Sloane, and Olaudah Equiano, as well as inhabitants, like Tituba, Eliza Lucas Pinckney, William Johnson, and Alexander Garden also participated in this inquiry into nature.

Increasingly, the order of nature was understood as a divine plan that offered a way of reconciling God with the natural world. By the eighteenth century, principles of inductive reasoning, narration, and classification permeated colonial thinking and transformed perspectives on the relation of God to humans. Yet, embedded in the practices of collecting, systematizing, and circulating American species was an array of social, economic, and institutional agendas. Presented as the template of knowledge through which the world was understood, natural science had dramatic impact on literature, the arts, and religion, even as these fields offered significant criticism of science.

If natural science was becoming, over this period of time, the medium through which earthly life and divine order were comprehended, what did American experiences contribute to scientific cognition? In what ways did the circumstances and diverse peoples in early America affect ways of knowing the natural world? Scholars have long studied the role of science in early modern Europe and its consequences for the transformation of America. Emerging scholarship by early Americanists now opens new avenues of inquiry into natural science's significance in the old world and the new.

The Institute's conference will be multidisciplinary, and the program committee welcomes paper proposals from scholars across all fields touching upon early America, geographically broadly conceived, between about 1600 and 1800. Areas open for possible investigation, though not delimiting, include: scientific collection, investigation, and classification; networks of exchange and communication; commodification of resources and information; medicine; print dissemination and reception; literary manifestations; material culture; art; cultural cross-fertilization; social practices and cultural contexts; religion; gender structures; racial differentiation; ideological constructs; impact in the old world and the new.

Please submit proposals of 2-5 pages outlining subject, argument, and relevance to topic and time period. Include curriculum vitae.

Send three copies to:

Natural Science Conference,
OIEAHC,
P.O. Box 8781,
Williamsburg, VA 23187-8781.

Postmark deadline for proposals: 30 March 2001. No e-mails, please.