Biologists and the Promise of American Life : : From Meriwether Lewis to Alfred Kinsey / / Philip J. Pauly.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Princeton University Press eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Pauly, Philip J.,
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2018]; ©2000
• Year of Publication: 2018
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

Explorers, evolutionists, eugenicists, sexologists, and high school biology teachers--all have contributed to the prominence of the biological sciences in American life. In this book, Philip Pauly weaves their stories together into a fascinating history of biology in America over the last two hundred years. Beginning with the return of the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1806, botanists and zoologists identified science with national culture, linking their work to continental imperialism and the creation of an industrial republic. Pauly examines this nineteenth-century movement in local scientific communities with national reach: the partnership of Asa Gray and Louis Agassiz at Harvard University, the excitement of work at the Smithsonian Institution and the Geological Survey, and disputes at the Agriculture Department over the continent's future. He then describes the establishment of biology as an academic discipline in the late nineteenth century, and the retreat of life scientists from the problems of American nature. The early twentieth century, however, witnessed a new burst of public-oriented activity among biologists. Here Pauly chronicles such topics as the introduction of biology into high school curricula, the efforts of eugenicists to alter the "breeding" of Americans, and the influence of sexual biology on Americans' most private lives. Throughout much of American history, Pauly argues, life scientists linked their study of nature with a desire to culture--to use intelligence and craft to improve American plants, animals, and humans. They often disagreed and frequently overreached, but they sought to build a nation whose people would be prosperous, humane, secular, and liberal. Life scientists were significant participants in efforts to realize what Progressive Era oracle Herbert Croly called "the promise of American life." Pauly tells their story in its entirety and explains why now, in a society that is rapidly returning to a complex ethnic mix similar to the one that existed for a hundred years prior to the Cold War, it is important to reconnect with the progressive creators of American secular culture.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- ILLUSTRATIONS -- PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- INTRODUCTION. Toward a Cultural History of American Biology -- PART I. NATURALISTS AND NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY -- CHAPTER ONE. Natural History and Manifest Destiny, 1800-1865 -- CHAPTER TWO. Culturing Fish, Culturing People: Federal Naturalists in the Gilded Age, 1865-1893 -- CHAPTER THREE. Conflicting Visions of American Ecological Independence -- PART II. SPECIALIZATION AND ORGANIZATION -- PROLOGUE: Whitman's American Biology -- CHAPTER FOUR. Life Science Initiatives in the Late Nineteenth Century -- CHAPTER FIVE. Academic Biology: Searching for Order in Life -- CHAPTER SIX. A Place of Their Own: The Significance of Woods Hole -- PART III. THE AGE OF BIOLOGY -- PROLOGUE. A View from the Heights -- CHAPTER SEVEN. The Development of High School Biology -- CHAPTER EIGHT. Big Questions -- CHAPTER NINE. Good Breeding in Modern America -- EPILOGUE -- NOTES -- INDEX