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This dissertation offers a new interpretation of German naturalist-explorer Alexander von Humboldt’s profound influence on nineteenth-century American literature and culture. Humboldt was a household name in mid-nineteenth-century America, often interchangeable with his most celebrated work, Cosmos: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe (1845-1859). By demonstrating that Cosmos influenced how a range of scientists and literary writers represented the natural world, this project seeks to dispel the sense of historical inevitability that surrounds the midcentury with Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) looming on the horizon. Although Humboldt’s Cosmos did help move natural science into nonreligious territory, the US reception presents a more complex story than simply the eclipse of natural theology, the conventions of finding God in nature and reconciling new science with theism. This dissertation argues that mid-nineteenth-century writers reimagined Christian natural theologies for the emergent ecological world that Cosmosproposed. Drawing on new studies that emphasize the ways that the religious and secular are mutually constituted, it shows that scientists and literary writers recalibrated natural theologies through Cosmos’s terms and imagery, new historical-literary approaches to the Bible, and epistemic premises from their particular Christian denominations. The first chapter examines Humboldt’s reception in US religious journals and influence on the writings of US scientists. Subsequent chapters analyze how literary writers Susan Fenimore Cooper, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, and William Gilmore Simms integrated Cosmos and repurposed natural theologies for an ecological natural world. The Cooper and Thoreau chapters accentuate the theological background of an aesthetics of wonder. The Cosmos moment also gave rise to a new synthesis of Christian providentialism and US imperialism ideology, evident particularly in fictions of nature by Simms and Melville, despite Humboldt’s ardent disavowal of racist ethnologies. A coda proposes that Black writers James McCune Smith and Frederick Douglass employed Humboldtian science in a distinctively Black abolitionist natural theology. This dissertation’s archive of emergent ecological literature will enrich how scholars understand the confluence of nineteenth-century science and religion.

This dissertation expands the comprehension of the history of climate in architecture by examining the evolution of the architectural meanings, uses, representations, and simulations of climate between 1800 and the present by means of a historical critical analysis of two scientific artifacts that attempted to model climate for the first time in the fields of geography and architecture. The Naturgemälde (1799 – Alexander von Humboldt) was a type of infographic image that simulated conceptually climate as a global system. The Climatron (1954 – Victor Olgyay) was a laboratory machine that physically simulated climate to test building scaled-models. Primary data was collected in the places where both artifacts were created, and where related archival materials are currently held. The method of analysis compared the models against each other, against contemporary computer simulations of climate for architects, and against their early theoretical foundations. The dissertation reflected on the universality of science in architecture and the role of the places and the technology involved to produce knowledge about climate, while challenged the concept of climate in architecture. It endeavored to find more holistic scientific approaches to design-with-climate that consider hard data alongside art. The tangible outcomes are four articles advised by one of the committee members according to their expertise: MODELS OF CLIMATE AND WEATHER explains the attempts to simulate conceptually and materially climate and weather in order to reduce their complexity to a human scale; ARCHITECTURAL INSIGHTS FROM EARLY DRAWINGS OF CLIMATE AND WEATHER: NATURGEMÄLDE, ISOTHERMS, CLIMATE PORTRAITS, AND THE BIOCLIMATIC CHART, reflects about the paradox of drawing climate and weather; PACKAGING NATURE FOR ARCHITECTS: EARLY ORIGINS OF DESIGNING WITH NATURAL MORPHOLOGY AND CLIMATE, focuses on how ideas travel from environmental sciences into architecture; and UNDERSTANDING THE CHARACTER OF PLACE: HUMBOLDT’S PHYSIOGNOMY OF NATURE, VICTOR OLGYAY’S BIOCLIMATIC REGIONALISM AND THE OUTLINE OF A PHYSIOGNOMY OF CLIMATE examines, from an architectural standpoint, the role of the beauty of climate in the understanding of the character of a place.

This work seeks to understand one specific relationship between the European human sciences as they developed in the second half of the nineteenth century and Enlightenment natural sciences as they existed at the beginning of the nineteenth century. I argue that ethnologist Adolf Bastian (1826–1905) maintained two forms of interpreting Humboldtian science that existed after the death of famed scientific explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859). First, Bastian upheld an explicit interpretation of Humboldtian conceptions of civilization and Bastian explicitly used the Humboldtian comparative method of study. Second and most importantly, the transition from Humboldtian methods to Bastian's ethnology and psychic unity of mankind marks a moment of rupture. Humboldt's insistence on the subjective experience of nature as a form of scientific progress could only be condensed and objectified by Adolf Bastian's ethnological studies of “mankind.”

Las imágenes étnicas en la Nueva Granada colonial fueron desfiguradas por erróneas generalizaciones. Esta indebida generalización se produjo, por ejemplo, cuando se extrapoló a los indígenas de Nueva Granada, la descripción de los indígenas caribes de Chiribichi (costa venezolana), que había sido preparada por el dominico fray Tomás de Ortiz. Esta descripción era citada todavía por Germán Arciniegas en 1965. En general la imagen negativa del indio sirvió para justificar su explotación y dificultó mucho la denuncia de las arbitrariedades cometidas incluso por clérigos. Una excepción en su época fue Alexander von Humboldt, que evitó indebidas generalizaciones y denunció las injusticias de la sociedad colonial frente a los indios. Humboldt trató de mantener su objetividad.