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A study of Francisco Jose de Caldas y Tenorio, who was born in 1768 in the Spanish colony Nueva Reino de Granada. In the first half of the 18th century France sent an expedition to the equator to learn the true figure of the Earth. However, Spain maintained strict control over the colonies' access to books and other Europeans' access to the colonies. Caldas, with a fervent interest in science and lacking the educational resources and personal contacts available in Europe, developed a scientific program based on what was available to him. The arrival of the Prussian naturalist, Alexander von Humboldt, brought to a head Caldas's discontent with his own isolation from the European community. Black and white illustrations.
In the early modern world, botany was big science and big business, critical to Europe's national and trade ambitions. Tracing the dynamic relationships among plants, peoples, states, and economies over the course of three centuries, this collection of essays offers a lively challenge to a historiography that has emphasized the rise of modern botany as a story of taxonomies and "pure" systems of classification. Charting a new map of botany along colonial coordinates, reaching from Europe to the New World, India, Asia, and other points on the globe, Colonial Botany explores how the study, naming, cultivation, and marketing of rare and beautiful plants resulted from and shaped European voyages...
Between 1777 and 1816, botanical expeditions crisscrossed the vast Spanish empire in an ambitious project to survey the flora of much of the Americas, the Caribbean, and the Philippines. While these voyages produced written texts and compiled collections of specimens, they dedicated an overwhelming proportion of their resources and energy to the creation of visual materials. European and American naturalists and artists collaborated to manufacture a staggering total of more than 12,000 botanical illustrations. Yet these images have remained largely overlooked—until now. In this lavishly illustrated volume, Daniela Bleichmar gives this archive its due, finding in these botanical images a wi...
A guide to Latin American history includes a chronology of key events from pre-Columbian history through the present, a thematic survey following each topic (economic change, cultural development, politics and government) across time, and 300 biographies of Latin Americans throughout history.
This is a cutting-edge collection of original essays on the connections and structures that made the Atlantic world a coherent regional entity.
The legacy of Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) looms large over the natural sciences. His 1799–1804 research expedition to Central and South America with botanist Aimé Bonpland set the course for the great scientific surveys of the nineteenth century, and inspired such essayists and artists as Emerson, Goethe, Thoreau, Poe, and Church. The chronicles of the expedition were published in Paris after Humboldt’s return, and first among them was the 1807 “Essay on the Geography of Plants.” Among the most cited writings in natural history, after the works of Darwin and Wallace, this work appears here for the first time in a complete English-language translation. Covering far more than its title implies, it represents the first articulation of an integrative “science of the earth, ” encompassing most of today’s environmental sciences. Ecologist Stephen T. Jackson introduces the treatise and explains its enduring significance two centuries after its publication.
Includes "Bibliographical section".
Nassar distinguishes an understudied philosophical tradition that emerged in Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, traces its development, and argues for its continued significance. She shows how four key thinkers, whom she calls the 'romantic empiricists', developed a distinctive approach to the study of nature, which culminated in an ecological understanding of nature and the human place within it. Nassar contends that the romantic empiricist insights and approaches remain crucial for us today, as we seek to address the environmental crisis.--
This collection of essays explores two traditions of interpreting and manipulating nature in the early-modern and nineteenth-century Iberian world: one instrumental and imperial, the other patriotic and national. Imperial representations laid the ground for the epistemological transformations of the so-called Scientific Revolutions. The patriotic narratives lie at the core of the first modern representations of the racialized body, Humboldtian theories of biodistribution, and views of the landscape as a historical text representing different layers of historical memory.
In Of Love and Other Passions Guiomar Dueñas-Vargas delves into the world of emotions among the bourgeois elite in Bogotá from the end of the colonial period to 1870. While most studies of the period focus solely on the country’s political activity, Dueñas-Vargas shows how Colombia’s social, cultural, and political changes transformed the meaning of love, which contributed to the evolution of new models of femininity and masculinity. By examining sources such as personal letters and diaries, Dueñas-Vargas presents the emotional profiles of families and couples, demonstrating how their conduct challenged the established order. As lovers insisted on choosing their own mates rather than marrying spouses selected by their parents, they undermined the patriarchal structure of Colombian society. Such decisions unveil the many functions women assumed in both public and private life and how they participated in the invention of a nation.