Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 62-10, Section: A, page: 3537.

Directors: Jon Butler; John Mack Faragher.

This study offers a cultural history of natural history in the early American republic. It focuses on natural knowledge conflicts to expose epistemological dissonance, competing rules of evidence, and the contested nature of scientific authority. It demonstrates that natural history was not confined to an intellectual elite but was a cultural project in which the American population eagerly participated. But, this democratic interest and the fluid structures of scientific authority spawned idiosyncratic and enthusiastic theories frequently challenged by naturalists positioning themselves as experts. Interpretive disputes between the "curious" and the "learned" exposed competing philosophies of inquiry and incompatible evidentiary rules, different codes of thought and behavior that compelled adherence to unbalanced thresholds of belief in natural history matters. These natural knowledge conflicts shaped the trajectory of American science, the contours of national identity, and everyday interactions with the natural world.

The character of early republican natural history was forged in response to the European indictment of American nature, the result of European reliance on theories, not facts. American natural historians advocated personal observation as the best method to catalogue the new nation, arguing that nature would reveal itself to Americans regardless of education or social standing. What was reported resembled folk-knowledge more than modern science. Individual chapters examine tales of submerging swallows, the intersection of botany and market economics, early republican theories of ancient history, and natural theology to reveal how competing forms of natural knowledge frustrated naturalists pushing natural history away from mere fact collecting toward a pattern-driven discipline.

This project is as much about early republican culture as the history of science. It demonstrates that an investigation of the natural world was a meeting ground between elites and ordinary Americans, a mutual endeavor in which one interpretive approach eventually took precedence over, but did not eradicate, another. It joins on-going debates about the structure and limits of authority in the years following the Revolution, the persistence of "non scientific" understandings of nature challenging conclusions concerning scientific hegemony.