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Author: Keith Stewart Thomson
Publisher: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation
ISBN: 9781882886265
Category : Natural history
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Thomas Jefferson recorded weather observations, experimented with plant species, kept a pet mockingbird, and turned the entry hall at Monticello into a veritable natural history museum with elk and moose antlers, a grizzly bear claw, and the fossilized jaws of a mastodon. Jefferson wrote with lyrical flair about the landscapes of his mountaintop home, as he did in a 1786 letter to his friend Maria Cosway: How sublime to look down into the workhouse of nature, to see her clouds, hail, snow, rain, thunder, all fabricated at our feet! Jefferson's deep interest in the natural world -- from the flora and fauna of Albemarle County to the exotic specimens gathered by Lewis and Clark on their trek to the Pacific -- and how it shaped his life as a philosopher, farmer, and Founding Father is the subject of A Passion for Nature: Thomas Jefferson and Natural History. --from publisher description.
Author: Keith Stewart Thomson
Publisher: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation
ISBN: 9781882886265
Category : Natural history
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Thomas Jefferson recorded weather observations, experimented with plant species, kept a pet mockingbird, and turned the entry hall at Monticello into a veritable natural history museum with elk and moose antlers, a grizzly bear claw, and the fossilized jaws of a mastodon. Jefferson wrote with lyrical flair about the landscapes of his mountaintop home, as he did in a 1786 letter to his friend Maria Cosway: How sublime to look down into the workhouse of nature, to see her clouds, hail, snow, rain, thunder, all fabricated at our feet! Jefferson's deep interest in the natural world -- from the flora and fauna of Albemarle County to the exotic specimens gathered by Lewis and Clark on their trek to the Pacific -- and how it shaped his life as a philosopher, farmer, and Founding Father is the subject of A Passion for Nature: Thomas Jefferson and Natural History. --from publisher description.
Author: Charles Allen Miller
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
Jefferson and Nature is the first comprehensive study to take Jefferson completely at his word--his favorite word. Nature--the term and the many ideas associated with it--pervades Jefferson's life and writings. It sets him apart from his colleagues in the American Enlightenment and provides the distinctive gateway to his thought and action. By no means consistent and at times apparently opportunistic in his use of the term, Jefferson nevertheless draws nearly every realm of life back to this essential word and idea. Charles Miller's book tells why this is so.
Author: Thomas S. Engeman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
A collection of late 20th-century scholarship devoted to Thomas Jefferson as a politician, writer, philosopher, Christian and economist.
Author: Lee Alan Dugatkin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226169197
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 179
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Book Description
In the years after the Revolutionary War, the fledgling republic of America was viewed by many Europeans as a degenerate backwater, populated by subspecies weak and feeble. Chief among these naysayers was the French Count and world-renowned naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, who wrote that the flora and fauna of America (humans included) were inferior to European specimens. Thomas Jefferson—author of the Declaration of Independence, U.S. president, and ardent naturalist—spent years countering the French conception of American degeneracy. His Notes on Virginia systematically and scientifically dismantled Buffon’s case through a series of tables and equally compelling writing on the nature of his home state. But the book did little to counter the arrogance of the French and hardly satisfied Jefferson’s quest to demonstrate that his young nation was every bit the equal of a well-established Europe. Enter the giant moose. The American moose, which Jefferson claimed was so enormous a European reindeer could walk under it, became the cornerstone of his defense. Convinced that the sight of such a magnificent beast would cause Buffon to revise his claims, Jefferson had the remains of a seven-foot ungulate shipped first class from New Hampshire to Paris. Unfortunately, Buffon died before he could make any revisions to his Histoire Naturelle, but the legend of the moose makes for a fascinating tale about Jefferson’s passion to prove that American nature deserved prestige. In Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose, Lee Alan Dugatkin vividly recreates the origin and evolution of the debates about natural history in America and, in so doing, returns the prize moose to its rightful place in American history.
Author: Mark V. Barrow
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226038157
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 511
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Book Description
The rapid growth of the American environmental movement in recent decades obscures the fact that long before the first Earth Day and the passage of the Endangered Species Act, naturalists and concerned citizens recognized—and worried about—the problem of human-caused extinction. As Mark V. Barrow reveals in Nature’s Ghosts, the threat of species loss has haunted Americans since the early days of the republic. From Thomas Jefferson’s day—when the fossil remains of such fantastic lost animals as the mastodon and the woolly mammoth were first reconstructed—through the pioneering conservation efforts of early naturalists like John James Audubon and John Muir, Barrow shows how Americans came to understand that it was not only possible for entire species to die out, but that humans themselves could be responsible for their extinction. With the destruction of the passenger pigeon and the precipitous decline of the bison, professional scientists and wildlife enthusiasts alike began to understand that even very common species were not safe from the juggernaut of modern, industrial society. That realization spawned public education and legislative campaigns that laid the foundation for the modern environmental movement and the preservation of such iconic creatures as the bald eagle, the California condor, and the whooping crane. A sweeping, beautifully illustrated historical narrative that unites the fascinating stories of endangered animals and the dedicated individuals who have studied and struggled to protect them, Nature’s Ghosts offers an unprecedented view of what we’ve lost—and a stark reminder of the hard work of preservation still ahead.
Author: Maurizio Valsania
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813933579
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 303
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Book Description
Although scholars have adequately covered Thomas Jefferson's general ideas about human nature and race, this is the first book to examine what Maurizio Valsania terms Jefferson's "philosophical anthropology"--philosophical in the sense that he concerned himself not with describing how humans are, culturally or otherwise, but with the kind of human being Jefferson thought he was, wanted to become, and wished for citizens to be for the future of the United States. Valsania's exploration of this philosophical anthropology touches on Jefferson's concepts of nationalism, slavery, gender roles, modernity, affiliation, and community. More than that, Nature's Man shows how Jefferson could advocate equality and yet control and own other human beings. A humanist who asserted the right of all people to personal fulfillment, Jefferson nevertheless had a complex philosophy that also acknowledged the dynamism of nature and the limits of human imagination. Despite Jefferson's famous advocacy of apparently individualistic rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Valsania argues that both Jefferson's yearning for the human individual to become something good and his fear that this hypothetical being would turn into something bad were rooted in a specific form of communitarianism. Absorbing and responding to certain moral-philosophical currents in Europe, Jefferson's nature-infused vision underscored the connection between the individual and the community.
Author: Charles A. Miller
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780756765026
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 300
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Book Description
This is the first comprehensive study to take Thomas Jefferson completely at his word -- his favorite word. Nature -- the term and the many ideas associated with it -- pervades Jefferson's life and writings. It sets him apart from his colleagues in the American Enlightenment and provides the distinctive gateway to his thought and action. By no means consistent and at times apparently opportunistic in his use of the term, Jefferson nevertheless draws nearly every realm of life back to this essential word and idea. This book tells why this is so. Exceptionally clear, thoughtful, and accessible to specialists and non-specialists alike, this study is a fascinating introduction into major scientific debates of the late 18th and early 19th century. Illustrated.
Author: Jeffrey Zvengrowski
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807172308
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 379
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Book Description
In this highly original study of Confederate ideology and politics, Jeffrey Zvengrowski suggests that Confederate president Jefferson Davis and his supporters saw Bonapartist France as a model for the Confederate States of America. They viewed themselves as struggling not so much for the preservation of slavery but for antebellum Democratic ideals of equality and white supremacy. The faction dominated the Confederate government and deemed Republicans a coalition controlled by pro-British abolitionists championing inequality among whites. Like Napoleon I and Napoleon III, pro-Davis Confederates desired to build an industrial nation-state capable of waging Napoleonic-style warfare with large conscripted armies. States’ rights, they believed, should not preclude the national government from exercising power. Anglophile anti-Davis Confederates, in contrast, advocated inequality among whites, favored radical states’ rights, and supported slavery-in-the-abstract theories that were dismissive of white supremacy. Having opposed pro-Davis Democrats before the war, they preferred decentralized guerrilla warfare to Napoleonic campaigns and hoped for support from Britain. The Confederacy, they avowed, would willingly become a de facto British agricultural colony upon achieving independence. Pro-Davis Confederates, wanted the Confederacy to become an ally of France and protector of sympathetic northern states. Zvengrowski traces the origins of the pro-Davis Confederate ideology to Jeffersonian Democrats and their faction of War Hawks, who lost power on the national level in the 1820s but regained it during Davis' term as secretary of war. Davis used this position to cultivate friendly relations with France and later warned northerners that the South would secede if Republicans captured the White House. When Lincoln won the 1860 election, Davis endorsed secession. The ideological heirs of the pro-British faction soon came to loathe Davis for antagonizing Britain and for offering to accept gradual emancipation in exchange for direct assistance from French soldiers in Mexico. Zvengrowski’s important new interpretation of Confederate ideology situates the Civil War in a global context of imperial competition. It also shows how anti-Davis ex-Confederates came to dominate the postwar South and obscure the true nature of Confederate ideology. Furthermore, it updates the biographies of familiar characters: John C. Calhoun, who befriended Bonapartist officers; Davis, who was as much a Francophile as his namesake, Thomas Jefferson; and Robert E. Lee, who as West Point’s superintendent mentored a grand-nephew of Napoleon I.
Author: Merrill D. Peterson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199840520
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1106
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Book Description
The definitive life of Jefferson in one volume, this biography relates Jefferson's private life and thought to his prominent public position and reveals the rich complexity of his development. As Peterson explores the dominant themes guiding Jefferson's career--democracy, nationality, and enlightenment--and Jefferson's powerful role in shaping America, he simultaneously tells the story of nation coming into being.
Author: Evelynn M. Hammonds
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 410
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Book Description
'The Nature of Difference' documents how distinctions between people have been generated in and by the life sciences. Through commentaries and a wide-ranging selection of primary documents, it charts the shifting boundaries of science and race over more than two centuries of American history.
