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This is a very useful scholarly volume on an author who is both notorious yet understudied, a situation that begs for more intelligent interventions and challenges to received opinion. The issue of human population and the possibilities of over- or under-population continue to divide academics, political figures, and members of the general public. The essays in this book could be helpful, inspiring more and deeper analysis of the long debate over Thomas Robert Malthus’s impact on socio-econom...

In 2017, New Zealand’s Whanganui River was designated as having the same rights as a human person. The decision drew upon Maori belief in the animate status of nonhuman beings and depended ...

recorrendo aos campos da história dos impressos e da história da ciência - dois campos de importância indiscutível para entender Benjamin Franklin, o impressor da Filadélfia, e Benjamin Franklin, o famoso experimentador elétrico - este ensaio sugerirá que as memórias de Franklin são evidência de que ele pensou sobre si mesmo como encarnado em ações (como ele tinha se apresentado ao mundo, através de experimentos científicos) e como identificado em relação a outras pessoas, como ele tinha sido por muito tempo, como um colaborador em diversos projetos e como um correspondente. Isso é diferente do seu sentido desencarnado e individualista que a maioria das edições de sua autobiografia, como uma simples narrativa, lhe deram. Edições mais complexas e com diversos textos podem ser ao menos igualmente válidas, sobretudo para mostrar como ideias de identidade pessoal, nesse ponto da história, eram coletivas e encarnadas.

The early American past is overdue for sustained attention as a distinctive stage in environmental history. As we denizens of the Anthropocene look toward some kind of post-fossil fuel stage of history, looking back at the pre-industrial era of American history would help us to identify what was at stake in making a transition into a carboniferous energy regime, and therefore what may be at stake in transitioning out of it. For that reason, the environment is a potent and relevant historical context, perhaps more so than the social, political, and cultural contexts that have driven the scholarship in the field of early American history over the last forty years. Much of that historiography has used the American Revolution as pivot or terminus. But the industrial revolution and its crucial turn toward carbon-based energy was in the end even more revolutionary as a historical watershed. Indeed, the industrial revolution, the “other revolution,” represents one of the greatest opportunities for early Americanists who are interested in environmental history, which should at this point mean all of us.

The fact that nonhuman animals share the power of communication, plus the likelihood that some share our capacity for ideation, demands reevaluation of why human ideas matter, and especially whether they adequately convey a sense of our place within the rest of nature. Nonhuman beings and phenomena may be intrinsically unhuman, but are not necessarily less important than us. Analysis of this difference-as-significance is an ongoing problem of the Anthropocene. This essay focuses on Arthur Lovejoy's Great Chain of Being and Edmund Burke's concept of the sublime, describing alternative ways of situating humans in relation to the nonhuman.

It is a given that the United States has been an important global power, yet it may be of at least equal significance that the nation has been an only faltering planetary power. Global is social – it implies the social relations that extend over the globe. In contrast, planetary is physical, indicating the physical planet itself. Far more historical studies have focussed on the former than on the latter; examining the history of the United States within planetary terms is only beginning to be done. One long tradition of human engagement with the whole Earth is the practice of circumnavigation, going around the world. This essay examines American circumnavigators’ accounts ecocritically, in terms of their consciousness of the natural world, in order to explain that the United States came to the tradition of going around the world belatedly and not always beneficially.

In a private letter written in 1778, Ignatius Sancho, famous black British man of letters, deplored the persistence of racial prejudice, yet he did so in terms that proposed another kind of human inequality, and this has been the problem of genius ever since. Sancho reported (in order to denounce) an ongoing debate among white colonists and Britons over whether the African captive who had been taken to Boston as a child, sold as a slave, and named by her owners Phillis Wheatley, had herself actually written the Poems on Various Subjects published under her name in 1773. Sancho observed that Wheatley’s poems had been preceded by a list of worthies who swore to her authorship, yet these testifiers made no comment on her status as chattel, let alone offered any criticism that she (or anyone else) might not deserve that degraded status: The list of splendid—titled—learned names, in confirmation of her being the real authoress—alas! shows how very poor the acquisition of wealth and knowledge is—without generosity—feeling—and humanity.—These good great folks—all know—and perhaps admired—nay, praised Genius in bondage—and then, like the Priests and the Levites in sacred writ, passed by—not one good Samaritan amongst them.1

1. Introduction Joyce E. Chaplin and Darrin M. McMahon 2. The Problem of Genius in the Age of Slavery Joyce E. Chaplin 3. Genius vs Democracy: Excellence and Singularity in Post-Revolution France Nathalie Heinich 4. Equality, Inequality, and Difference: Genius as Problem and Possibility in American Political/Scientific Discourse John S. Carson 5. Genius and Obsession: Do You Have to Be Mad to Be Smart? Lennard Davis 6. Inspiration to Perspiration: Francis Galton's Hereditary Genius in Victorian Context Janet Browne 7. 'Genius must do the scullery work of the world': New Women, Feminists and Genius, circa 1880-1920 Lucy Delap 8. The Cult of the Genius in Germany and Austria at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century Julia Barbara Kohne 9. Cultivating Genius in a Bolshevik Country Irina Sirotkina 10. Insight in the Age of Automation David Bates 11. Genius and Evil Darrin M. McMahon

The books about Benjamin Franklin keep piling up, each fat tome ample evidence that the famous early American continues to fascinate people. Do we now know everything about the man? Probably not, and deanitely not when it comes to his work in science, which remains the elephant in the room. Science was the most important part of Franklin’s life, but, quite oddly, it is the least thoroughly and systematically examined part of that sprawling and eventful life. Franklin is the biographer’s delight and despair, not least because of his range of accomplishments—he seemed to do, see, or at least comment on everything. Several new catalogue-of-a-life biographies copiously document Franklin’s impact and accomplishments; other studies focus on his speciac contributions to many—almost too many—events and activities in the eighteenth century. Franklin wrote and published on nearly every topic imaginable. He took an active political role from the 1740s until his death in 1790; he was warrior, diplomat, peacemaker. He had strong yet, in the end, reverent opinions on religion. He was client of several men, then himself patron to many men and women. He was devoted to some members of his family but neglected others; he had many friends, but also enemies. He did brilliant experimental work on electricity, then left experimentation to others. He is ubiquitous and changingly meaningful, our eighteenth-century Zelig. Yet it is all old news. The benchmark comprehensive biography of Franklin appeared in 1938, with Carl Van Doren’s Benjamin Franklin. And comparably deanitive work on Franklin’s electrical experiments appeared with 1941 in I. Bernard Cohen’s scholarly introduction to Benjamin Franklin’s Experiments: A New Edition of Franklin’s Experiments and Observations on Electricity, followed by Cohen’s massively learned Franklin and Newton: An

Thirty years ago, ambitious, doorstopper books on slavery concentrated on the antebellum era; today, they tend to focus on the colonial period. Ira Berlin's Many Thousands Gone joins Hugh Thomas's The Slave Trade (1997), Robin Blackburn's, The Making of New World Slavery (1997), and Philip D. Morgan's Slave Counterpoint (1998) in a recent spate of books about early slavery. These monographs take up the work pioneered by Winthrop Jordan and David Brion Davis to see how slavery and prejudice toward blacks were embedded in western European and then American culture. The shift away from the nineteenth century is evidence of the maturation of the field, in which origins of the peculiar institution and its global dimensions are of greater interest because they are still less understood than the forms of slavery which were dismantled during and after the Civil War. But this shift toward the early-modern period probably also represents a different generation's examination of slavery. During the era of the civil rights movement, comprehension of the racism that had survived the Civil War seemed to support an ideal of the radical transformation of American society toward racial equality. Now, because that transformation has not entirely been achieved, scholars are looking more carefully at the early history of slavery, in order to understand why racial inequality may be so persistent. Berlin opens his book by addressing this concern: "Of late, it has become fashionable to declare that race is a social construction." The problem, Berlin points out, is that this scholarly contention "has won few practical battles. Few people believe it; fewer act on it. The new understanding of race has changed behavior little if at all" (p. 1). Why have the scales not fallen from our eyes? To trace the tenacity of racism, Berlin's examination of slavery's genesis necessarily also has to explain the emergence of racism. He therefore traces two patterns: how slavery came to be equivalent with enslavement of Africans, and how freedom did not guarantee racial equality. Berlin's goal is to demonstrate that, in early North America, slavery was a pervasive and

From their distinctive experience of going around the world, maritime circumnavigators concluded that their characteristic disease, sea scurvy, must result from their being away from land too long, much longer than any other sailors. They offered their scorbutic bodies as proof that humans were terrestrial creatures, physically suited to the earthly parts of a terraqueous globe. That arresting claim is at odds with the current literature on the cultural implications of European expansion, which has emphasized early modern colonists' and travelers' fear of alien places, and has concluded that they had a small and restricted geographic imagination that fell short of the planetary consciousness associated with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But circumnavigators did conceive of themselves as actors on a planetary scale, as creatures adapted to all of the land on Earth, not just their places of origin.

The phrase ‘British Atlantic’ brings together two terms that emerged rather belatedly (and perhaps unhelpfully) in the history of English colonisation. From the late seventeenth century onward, the English colonies underwent unprecedented population growth, which inspired new faith in colonists' ability to adapt to and dominate the New World. While other European empires may also have had either a degree of colonial autonomy or rapid population growth, only English-speaking colonists gained confidence from both characteristics. But this settler confidence was challenged, from the mid-eighteenth century onward, by the creation of a British empire with Atlantic dimensions. Because settlers in the English-speaking colonies had for a long time connected a non-British identity, meaning Englishness, to being an ocean away from England itself, the newly British and Atlantic empire was less inviting to them and the temptation to define Americans' political and natural interests as separate from Great Britain was eventually overwhelming. In Parliament and beyond, Britons and British Americans discussed the problems of slavery and openly contemplated how the slave trade and forced labour might not have an indefinite future.

At the heart of early modern empires and early modern science lay an ocean, the Atlantic. That ocean circulated many things—natural specimens, people, commodities, diseases, books—but, perhaps most interestingly, it circulated ideas about its own physical circulation. To be sure, the Atlantic Ocean was a center of empire, but if that ocean physically contained and expressed imperial power, European officials had a remarkably haphazard intellectual grasp of it. The maritime communities with the greatest Atlantic expertise were unlike Secrecy had been a hallmark of craft work during the Middle Ages but, by at least the end of the seventeenth century, crafts were losing their mystery. Erosion of social ranks and the proliferation of printed material both helped to publicize trade secrets.ly to have their knowledge come under direct control of any kind. Publication of maritime knowledge, however, proceeded unevenly, which makes it one of the most intriguing areas of natural knowledge in the early modern era.

Odds are, you’re an ogre. You glut yourself on human flesh, slurping the blood, gnawing that which is still slippery, pausing only to scorch the meat and add some salt (maybe). By definition you crave the flesh of your own kind because, if you’re reading the William and Mary Quarterly, you’re some sort of historian. As the great French historian Marc Bloch wrote, “it is human beings that the historian is trying to discern. . . . The true historian is like the ogre in the story: wherever he smells human flesh he recognizes his prey.”1 “Nicely put,” countered Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “but in spite of my immense admiration for Marc Bloch his definition has always seemed to me too narrow.” Le Roy Ladurie was not suggesting that we historians give up cannibalism but that we learn to be omnivores. To the human-centered topics of conventional historical inquiry, he added nature, specifically climate: “meteorological observations, phenological and glaciological texts, comments on climatological events, and so on.” This Forum in the William and Mary Quarterly looks at that “so on,” the natural but nonhuman parts of the past that historians of climate study because they are omnivores. The climate historian declines the steak and yet is not a vegetarian. (A vegan, according to the Bloch–Le Roy Ladurie definition, would be a scientist who ignores humans entirely.) Human flesh alone is poor intellectual meat because it is so artificially isolated from whatever sustains it in life. Le Roy Ladurie preferred his flesh as lardons, cut up small, crisply fried, and strewn atop frisee. Sound tasty? Keep reading.2