"This groundbreaking book finally puts natural history where it belongs--at the center of eighteenth-century American cultural history." Pauline Maier Massachusetts Institute of Technolog

Colonial America presented a new world of natural curiosities for settlers as well as the London-based scientific community. InAmerican Curiosity Susan Scott Parrish examines how various peoples in the British colonies understood and represented the natural world around them from the late sixteenth century through the eighteenth. Rather than flowing strictly from metropole to colony scientific knowledge about America emerged from a horizontal exchange of information across the Atlantic.Delving into an understudied archive of letters Parrish uncovers early descriptions of American natural phenomena as well as clues to how people in the colonies construed their own identities through the natural world. Although hierarchies of gender class institutional learning place of birth or residence and race persisted within the natural history community the contributions of any participant were considered valuable as long as they supplied novel data or specimens from the American side of the Atlantic. Thus Anglo-American nonelites women Indians and enslaved Africans all played crucial roles in gathering and relaying new information to Europe.Recognizing a significant tradition of nature writing and representation in North America well before the TranscendentalistsAmerican Curiosityalso enlarges our notions of the scientific Enlightenment by looking beyond European centers to find a socially inclusive American base to a true transatlantic expansion of knowledge.