American Curiosity
Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10032245 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Harold L Burstyn (Syracuse University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2007 |
| Volume | 94 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 253-253 |
| Publication date | 2007-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of American History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/25094818 |
| OpenAlex | W2002884820 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 15 |
Susan Scott Parrish's subtitle reveals the exact contours of her study. Yet she begins with a different image: the Guinea-born slave Kwasi. The governor of the Dutch colony of Surinam “sent Kwasi to the Hague in 1776 to visit Willem V, prince of Orange” (p. 2). William Blake engraved Kwasi's likeness for a book; Linnaeus named in his honor a tree native to Surinam (Quassia amara) whose products formed a substantial export to Europe. “[A] principal healer and diviner for both slaves and colonials in Surinam,” Kwasi helped the Dutch attack the Saramakas, escaped slaves and their descendants (ibid.). What does Kwasi have to do with the British colonists and their scientific correspondents in London? Parrish demonstrates, in seven chapters and thirty-two monochrome illustrations, that “Kwasi shows us, in the colonial sphere and by extension the larger Atlantic world, the ways in which conjuring and scientific modes were by no means walled off from each other among imported African, displaced native, colonial European, and imperial European communities” (p. 5). “British America ... was exceptional as a meeting place or battleground for once distant peoples, microbes, plants, and animals that produced a strange new world for all” (p. 7)
Ancient history · Archaeology · Atlantic World · China · Colonialism · Ethnology · Frontier · Genealogy · Classics · History · History of Science and Natural History
Thoreau’s Garden Politics (re-edition)
The Secrets of Indians
The Information Isolation Trope
Bigfoot Swims in the Garden of Eden
To make Florida answer to its name
Such Monsters Do Exist in Nature”
Nature, networks, and expert testimony in the colonial Atlantic
Women, Men, and the Legal Languages of Mining in the Colonial Andes
Collecting Humanity in the Age of Enlightenment
Narrating Colonial Violence and Representing New-World Difference
Sloth bones and anteater tongues
Beyond discovery and enlightenment
The Jamaican airs
Reforming uncultivated minds
From Chelsea to Savannah
| Unique citing works | 15 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.94 |
| Citation span | 2010 - 2024 (15) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 15 |