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The Natures of John and William Bartram : Two Pioneering Naturalists, Father and Son, in the Wilderness of Eighteenth-Cen tury America
The Natures of John and William Bartram Two Pioneering Naturalists Father and Son in the Wilderness of EighteenthCen tury America Author:Thomas P. Slaughter John Bartram was the greatest horticulturist and botanist of eighteenth-century America, a farmer-philosopher who won the patronage of King George III and Benjamin Franklin. His son William was a pioneering naturalist who documented his travels through the Florida wilderness in prose and drawings that inspired a generation of Romantic poets. In ... more »telling their stories, Thomas Slaughter creates a complex and compelling dual biography that is also a history of early American attitudes toward nature.
As he follows the Bartrams through their respective careers -- and through the tenderness and disappointment of the father-son relationship -- Slaughter examines the ways in which each viewed the natural world: as a resource to be exploited, as evidence of divine providence, as a temple in which all life was interconnected and sacred. The Natures of John and William Bartram is a major work of natural and human history -- beautifully written, psychologically insightful, and full of provocative ideas concerning the place of nature in the imagination of Americans, past and present.« less