André Michaux in North America: Journals and Letters, 1785–1797 - Hardcover

Michaux, André

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 081732030X ISBN 13: 9780817320300

Publisher: University Alabama Press, 2020

Synopsis

Journals and letters, translated from the original French, bring Michaux’s work to modern readers and scientists
 
Known to today’s biologists primarily as the “Michx.” at the end of more than 700 plant names, André Michaux was an intrepid French naturalist. Under the directive of King Louis XVI, he was commissioned to search out and grow new, rare, and never-before-described plant species and ship them back to his homeland in order to improve French forestry, agriculture, and horticulture. He made major botanical discoveries and published them in his two landmark books, Histoire des chênes de l’Amérique (1801), a compendium of all oak species recognized from eastern North America, and Flora Boreali-Americana (1803), the first account of all plants known in eastern North America.
 
Straddling the fields of documentary editing, history of the early republic, history of science, botany, and American studies, André Michaux in North America: Journals and Letters, 1785–1797 is the first complete English edition of Michaux’s American journals. This copiously annotated translation includes important excerpts from his little-known correspondence as well as a substantial introduction situating Michaux and his work in the larger scientific context of the day.
 
To carry out his mission, Michaux traveled from the Bahamas to Hudson Bay and west to the Mississippi River on nine separate journeys, all indicated on a finely rendered, color-coded map in this volume. His writings detail the many hardships—debilitating disease, robberies, dangerous wild animals, even shipwreck—that Michaux endured on the North American frontier and on his return home. But they also convey the soaring joys of exploration in a new world where nature still reigned supreme, a paradise of plants never before known to Western science. The thrill of discovery drove Michaux ever onward, even ultimately to his untimely death in 1802 on the remote island of Madagascar.
 

About this title

About the Author

André Michaux (1746—1802) was a French botanist and explorer most noted for his study of North American flora.

Charlie Williams is retired librarian at the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library in North Carolina. He is chairman of the André Michaux International Society (AMIS).
 
Eliane M. Norman is professor emerita of biology at Stetson University. She is coauthor of André Michaux in Florida: An Eighteenth Century Botanical Journey.
 
Walter Kingsley Taylor is professor emeritus of biology at the University of Central Florida. He is coauthor of André Michaux in Florida: An Eighteenth Century Botanical Journey and author of several field guides to Florida biota, including Florida Wildflowers in Their Natural Communities, A Guide to Florida Grasses, and Florida Wildflowers: A Comprehensive Guide.
 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The benefits of having this source now available to us in English are several. On the one hand it will serve as a useful corrective to so much of the Anglo-centric literature concerning science in early America, which, beyond tips-o’-the-hat to the Marquis de Lafayette, tends to overlook the role of France and French science in the history of science and the making of America. More in particular, André Michaux, Intrepid Naturalist in America: Journals and Letters is a notable contribution to the literature of Science & Empire studies. It’s a contribution because it draws more attention to Michaux’s American adventure and because, as a field journal, it provides a fine-grain, day-to-day focus on the activities of a European scientist working in a colonial context. Michaux is not unknown in the worlds of science and historical scholarship, but with this publication of his journal he will become better known, and historians of science and empire now have available to them a non-trivial, detailed source and case study for evoking ever more refined understandings of how science facilitated colonial development and how the experience of the world outside of Europe enriched the natural sciences beyond measure.

Another major strength of this work is that it will be especially appreciated by botanical scientists and students and lovers of botany and natural history. Michaux’s notebooks were not just travel diaries, but they are also scientific logbooks. In his journal he records thousands of plant names, many of them new to him and to science, and thus his notebooks are primary source data for the history of botany that professional and amateur botanists and historians of botany cognizant of the science involved will find rewarding to read and consult.

But one hardly needs to be an expert botanical scientist to enjoy reading Michaux’s notebooks as presented to us here by Williams, Norman, and Taylor. The present work is fascinating in and of itself, even mesmerizing, as we follow Michaux in his travels day-to-day. The introductions to each chapter provide an overview of each notebook, orienting us to the journey ahead, and the substantial notes provided by the editors enrich and contextualize Michaux’s sometimes scattered details and references. What emerges is an uncanny feel for the reality of Michaux’s experience and life in the new United States in the 1780s. Meeting Benjamin Franklin in 1786. Huddling in the rain in Georgia in 1787. Staying at a Cherokee Indian village in South Carolina in 1788 and learning about hominy from the locals. His visit to the Bartrams's garden in Philadelphia in 1789 and the expense of stabling his horses in the city. Deciding not to proceed into Kentucky likewise in 1789 because “several travelers were killed by Indians.” And so on, as these absorbing examples can be multiplied until they become the journal itself.

—from the Foreword by James E. McClellan, III

Edition details

• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 081732030X
• ISBN 13: 9780817320300
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 608
• Editor: Williams Charlie, Norman Eliane M., Taylor Walter K.