Learning from nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s influence on young women’s geography and natural history education in nineteenth-century America

ABSTRACT

This article explores Alexander von Humboldt’s influence on the education of young women in early nineteenth-century America. In the past decade, the English-speaking world has seen a resurgence of interest in Alexander von Humboldt. To date however, scholars have devoted relatively little attention to Humboldt’s influence on American education, particularly before mid-century. When did schoolbooks begin to adopt his theories, and how universally did they incorporate them? Were young women exposed to his work as well as young men? To find out, this study analysed 44 editions of the most popular geography and botany texts designed for schools enrolling females as well as males during the period from 1791 to 1859. The analysis considers the degree to which these texts incorporated or ignored Humboldt’s ideas in the following areas: (1) plant geography; (2) climate; (3) learning from nature; (4) human impact on nature; (5) slavery; (6) colonialism; (7) human equality; and (8) the earth’s place in the cosmos.

KEYWORDS:

• Female education
• geography
• natural history
• Alexander von Humboldt
• race and slavery

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ See Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World (New York: Vintage Books, 2015), 8–9; For a list of places in the US named after Humboldt, see Gerard Helferich, Humboldt’s Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Latin American Journey that Changed the Way We See the World (New York: Gotham Books, 2004), 295–9.

² According to Kent Mathewson, Humboldt’s influence on American intellectual life began with his arrival in Philadelphia on 24 May 1804 and extended through his correspondence with American scholars and many publications. See Mathewson, “Alexander von Humboldt’s Image and Influence in North American Geography, 1804–2004,” Geographical Review 96, no. 3 (July 2006): 416–38. According to Laura Dassow Walls, by the time of his death, educated American citizens and scholars alike venerated him. See Walls, “‘Hero of Knowledge, be Our Tribute Thine’: Alexander Von Humboldt in Victorian America,” Special issue, Northeastern Naturalist, 8 (November 2001): 121–34; Walls, The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (University of Chicago Press, 2009). Also see Aaron Sachs, The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism (New York: Penguin Books, 2006); and Wulf, The Invention of Nature.

³ For studies that suggest Humboldt’s work would not become influential until the mid-century, see Martin Brückner, The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 229 n. 32; Margarita Bowen, Empiricism and Geographical Thought: From Francis Bacon to Alexander von Humboldt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). For studies of the impact of William C. Woodbridge’s 1823 isothermal map, which was derived from the work of Humboldt and others, see Susan Schulten, Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 81–86; Jeffrey C. Patton, “The American School Atlas: 1784–1900,” Cartographic Perspectives 33 (Spring 1999): 4–32. For an overview of recent translations and reprints of Humboldt’s work, see Johannes E. Riutta, “Reading Alexander von Humboldt,” in The Well-Read Naturalist: The Natural History Book Review (September 1, 2018), wellreadnaturalist.com (accessed November 22, 2018).

⁴ Wulf, The Invention of Nature, 196.

⁵ To understand how the content of the texts in this sample changed over time, I aimed to examine at least two editions of each, one representing an early version and another representing a late version. This was possible in all but a few cases, yielding a final sample that included 38 editions of 19 geography texts and 8 editions of 5 botany and natural history texts written by female authors. For the use of recitation in American schoolrooms, see Larry Cuban, How Teachers Taught: Constancy and Change in American Classrooms, 1890–1990 (New York: Teachers College Press, 1993), 30–7. For a late-nineteenth-century account of elementary recitation methods, see Joseph M. Rice, The Public-School System of the United States (New York: Century Co., 1893), 9, 20.

⁶ Wulf, The Invention of Nature, 13–19.

⁷ Sachs, The Humboldt Current, 53–7; and Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos: Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe, Volume 2 (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1849), 70.

⁸ Helmut de Terra, Humboldt: The Life and Times of Alexander von Humboldt, 1769–1859 (New York: Knopf, 1955), 45–60; and Douglas Botting, Humboldt and the Cosmos (London: Michael Joseph, 1973), 23–8; 35–51.

⁹ Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, During the Years 1799–1804 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1814), 1–108.

¹⁰ de Terra, Humboldt, 87.

¹¹ Ibid. Alexander von Humboldt to Karl Freiesleben (June 1799).

¹² Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, Essay on the Geography of Plants (University of Chicago Press, 2013).

¹³ For a useful chronology of Humboldt’s publications and activities, see Sachs, The Humboldt Current, 369–73. Josiah Holbrook, “Biography. Humboldt,” Family Lyceum, May 11, 1833, 1.

¹⁴ For the history of geography as a profession, see Michael Heffernan, “Learned Societies,” in The SAGE Handook of Geographical Knowledge, ed. John A. Agnew and David N. Livingstone (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2011), 111–25. For women in mapmaking, see Will C. Van den Hoonaard, A History of Women in Cartography (Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2013). For the presence of geography in common and private schools serving females in the early nineteenth century, see Kim Tolley, The Science Education of American Girls: A Historical Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2003), 13–34.

¹⁵ Jedidiah Morse, Geography Made Easy (Boston, Isaiah Thomas & Ebenezer T. Andrews, 1791), title page. The dedication appears on the following page.

¹⁶ For geography as a school subject in the English-speaking world, see Susan Schulten, “Map Drawing, Graphic Literacy, and Pedagogy in the Early Republic,” History of Education Quarterly 57 (May 2017): 185–220; Judith A. Tyner, Stitching the World: Embroidered Maps and Women’s Geographical Education (New York: Routledge, 2015), 1–20. For an overview of contemporary rationales for the study of geography, see Tolley, The Science Education of American Girls, 20–30.

¹⁷ John O’Neill, A New and Easy System of Geography and Popular Astronomy (Baltimore: G. Dobbie and Murphy, 1808), preface.

¹⁸ For the widespread adoption of geography as a core subject in the curriculum, see Tolley, The Science Education of American Girls, 13–34. Also see Margaret A. Nash, Women’s Education in the United States, 1780–1840 (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2005), 45–6. For a socio-cultural analysis of the ubiquitous rise of geography in the United States during the early national period, see Brückner, The Geographic Revolution in Early America.

¹⁹ Jedidiah Morse, A Compendious and Complete System of Modern Geography (Boston: Thomas and Andrews, 1814), 70–1, 233, 268, 280–2.

²⁰ Nathaniel Dwight, A System of Universal Geography for Common Schools (Northampton, MA: Simeon Butler, 1816), 196. Dwight’s 1808 edition, published in New York by Evert Duyckinck, did not include any mention of Humboldt. For discussion of the content of eighteenth-century popular geography textbooks, see David N. Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the History of a Contested Enterprise (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1992), 111–13. Also see Bowen, Empiricism and Geographical Thought, 144–54.

²¹ Roswell Chamberlain Smith, Geography on the Productive System, for Schools, Academies, and Families (Philadelphia: W. Marshal & Co., 1836), 173–4.

²² Ibid.

²³ Humboldt and Bonpland, Essay on the Geography of Plants, 67. For Humboldt’s role in the development of ecological ideas, see Stephen T. Jackson, “Introduction: Humboldt, Ecology, and the Cosmos,” in ibid., 1–46; and Malcolm Nicolson, “Humboldtian Plant Geography after Humboldt: The Link to Ecology,” British Journal of the History of Science 29 (1996): 289–310. Also see Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977): 191–3; and Walls, The Passage to Cosmos, 108–9.

²⁴ John Lauris Blake, A Geography for Children (Boston MA: Richardson, Lord and Holbrook, 1831), 2, 52–3. The quotes are from page 53.

²⁵ Humboldt and Bonpland, Essay on the Geography of Plants; Sachs, The Humboldt Current, 52–3; Malcolm Nicolson, “Alexander von Humboldt, Humboldtian Science and the Origins of the Study of Vegetation,” History of Science 25, no. 2 (June 1987): 167–94; William C. Woodridge, Rudiments of Geography (Hartford, CT: Oliver D. Cooke & Sons, 1825), 176–8; and Charles Augustus Goodrich, Outlines of Modern Geography on a New Plan, Carefully Adapted to Youth (Hartford, CT: S.G. Goodrich, 1826), 255–8. The quote is on page 257.

²⁶ Morse, Geography Made Easy (1791), 18.

²⁷ For the significance of Humboldt’s understanding of climate, see Jackson, “Introduction,” 36–46.

²⁸ Jedidiah Morse, The American Universal Geography: Or, A View of the Present State of All the Kingdoms, States, and Colonies (Charlestown, MA: G. Clarke, 1819), 808.

²⁹ Samuel Griswold Goodrich, A System of School Geography Chiefly Derived from Malte-Brun (Philadelphia, PA: Desilver, Thomas & Co, 1835), 123.

³⁰ Joseph Emerson Worcester, Elements of Geography, Modern and Ancient (Boston, MA: Lewis and Samson, 1844), 215.

³¹ Almira Hart Lincoln [Phelps], Familiar Lectures on Botany, Including Practical and Elementary Botany (Hartford, CT: H. and F.J. Huntington, 1829), 134. Lincoln Phelps referenced Humboldt numerous times, see pages 1, 134, 203–4. For the significance of her botany texts, see Emanuel D. Rudolph, “Amira Hart Lincoln Phelps (1793–1884) and the Spread of Botany in Nineteenth Century America,” American Journal of Botany 71, no. 8 (September 1984): 1161–7.

³² Jane Marcet, Conversations on Vegetable Physiology (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1839), 112–13.

³³ S.R.C. Malin and Dr R. Barraclough, “Humboldt and the Earth’s Magnetic Field,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society 32, no. 3 (September 1991): 279–93; L. Kellner, “Alexander von Humboldt and the Organisation of International Collaboration in Geophysical Research,” Journal of Contemporary Physics 1, no. 1 (1959): 35–48, https://doi.org/10.1080/00107515908202594. Near the end of his life, Humboldt wrote his publisher to explain that he believed he had made three important contributions to science: (1) the geography of plants; (2) the theory of isothermal lines; and (3) observations concerning geomagnetism and the establishment of magnetic observation stations across the globe. See Alexander von Humboldt und Cotta. Briefwechsel, ed. Ulrike Leitner with Eberhard Knobloch (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2009), 592.

³⁴ Patton, “The American School Atlas,” 4–32.

³⁵ For Woodbridge, see Edward L. Lach, Jr., “William Channing Woodbridge,” in American National Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); William D. Walters, “ William Channing Woodbridge: Geographer,” Journal of Social Studies Research 16, no. 4 (Fall 1993): 42–7. For Humboldt’s influence on Woodbridge, see Patton, “The American School Atlas.” For the influence of Emma Willard in American education, see Anne Firor Scott, “The Ever Widening Circle: The Diffusion of Feminist Values from the Troy Female Seminary 1822–1872,” History of Education Quarterly 19, no. 1 (Spring 1979): 3–25; Nancy Beadie, “Emma Willard’s Idea Put to the Test: The Consequences of State Support of Female Education in New York, 1819–67,” History of Education Quarterly 33, no. 4 (Winter 1993), 543–5; and Murry R. Nelson, “Emma Willard: Pioneer in Social Studies Education,” Theory & Research in Social Education 15, no. 4 (Winter 1987): 245–56.

³⁶ Humboldt, Views of Nature: Or Contemplations on the Sublime Phenomena of Creation (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1850), xii.

³⁷ Henry David Thoreau, Correspondence (New York: New York University Press, 1958), 309–10.

³⁸ For studies of the nature study movement in the United States, see Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, “Nature, Not Books: Scientists and the Origins of the Nature-Study Movement in the 1890s,” Isis 96, no. 3 (September 2005): 324–52 and Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, Teaching Children Science: Hands-On Nature Study in North America, 1890–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Kevin C. Armitage, The Nature Study Movement: The Forgotten Populariser of America’s Conservation Ethic (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009); and Tolley, “Study Nature, Not Books,” in The Science Education of American Girls, 127–48.

³⁹ Woodbridge, Rudiments of Geography (1825), viii.

⁴⁰ Emma Willard, quoted in “Notices,” American Journal of Education 1, no. 10 (October 1826), 637.

⁴¹ The inductive method is also explained in S.G. Goodrich, A System of School Geography, Chiefly Derived from Malte-Brun (1839), 1 and in Jesse Olney, Practical System of Modern Geography; Or, A View of the Present State of the World (Hartford, CT: 1833), v–vi.

⁴² For the impact of these women on American nature writing, see Jennifer Dawes Adkison, “Elizabeth Cary Agassiz”; Daniel Patterson, “Susan Fenimore Cooper”; and Christine Hilger, “Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps,” in Early American Nature Writers: A Biographical Encyclopedia, ed. Daniel Patterson (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008), 8–13; 89–95, and 281–7, respectively.

⁴³ Amos Eaton, Manual of Botany, for the Northern and Middle States of America (Albany, NY: Websters and Skinners, 1822), 11.

⁴⁴ William Kennedy Blake, in William Kennedy Blake Diary, 1851, 11. Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. For the rise of natural history among American women, see Tolley, The Science Education of American Girls, 95–126; and Marcia Bonta, American Women Afield: Writings by Pioneering Women Naturalists (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1995).

⁴⁵ Charles A. Goodrich, Outlines of Modern Geography, on a New Plan, Carefully Adapted to Youth (Hartford, CT: S.G. Goodrich, 1826), 254.

⁴⁶ Humboldt and Bonpland, Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America, Volume 2 (London: Bell & Daldy, 1869 [1819]), 9. For discussion of Humboldt’s role in environmentalism in German and Anglo-American historiography since the 1980s, see Nicholaas A. Rupke, Alexander von Humboldt: A Metabiography (University of Chicago Press), 185–92.

⁴⁷ William C. Woodbridge, A System of Universal Geography (Hartford, CT: Oliver D. Cooke & Co., 1827), 129.

⁴⁸ Susan Fenimore Cooper, Rural Hours (New York: George P. Putnam, 1850), 202–18. The quote is on page 206. Her references to Humboldt are on pages 123 and 482. For Cooper as a pioneer of American nature writing and an early advocate for environmental sustainability, see Susan Fenimore Cooper, Essays on Nature and Landscape, eds. Rochelle Johnson and Daniel Patterson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002), xiii–xxxii.

⁴⁹ Woodbridge, System of Universal Geography (Hartford, CT: John Beach, 1838), 289. For Humboldt’s critiques of colonialism, see Sachs, The Humboldt Current, 58–9; 67–71. Also see Sachs, “The Ultimate ‘Other’: Post-Colonialism and Alexander von Humboldt’s Ecological Relationship with Nature,” History and Theory 42 (December 2003): 111–35. For debates among scholars over the degree of Humboldt’s anti-colonialism, see Rex Clark and Oliver Lubrich, eds., Cosmos and Colonialism: Alexander von Humboldt in Cultural Criticism (New York: Berghahn, 2012).

⁵⁰ Alexander von Humboldt, Personal Narrative, Volume 3 (London: George Bell and Sons, 1885 [1825]), 271.

⁵¹ See Vera M. Kutzinski and Ottmar Ette, “Inventories and Inventions: Alexander von Humboldt’s Cuban Landscapes”; Alexander von Humboldt, Political Essay on the Island of Cuba: A Critical Edition (University of Chicago Press, 2011), vii–xxiv. Also see Walls, The Passage to Cosmos, 197–209.

⁵² Daniel Adams, Geography, Or, A Description of the World (Boston, MA: Lincoln and Edmands, 1820), 140. For Adams, see John F. Ohles, ed. Biographical Dictionary of American Educators (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 1878), 7. For discussion of slavery in a broader sample of geography textbooks, many of which appeared in only one or two editions, see Ruth Miller Elson, Guardians of Tradition: American Schoolbooks of the Nineteenth Century (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), 88–93.

⁵³ For discussion of ignorance as strategic ploy, see Robert N. Proctor, “Agnotology,” in Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance, eds. Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger (Stanford University Press, 2008), 8–20. Also see the essays in A.J. Angulo, ed., Miseducation: A History of Ignorance-Making in America and Abroad (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016).

⁵⁴ Noah Webster, Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language (London: Bell and Daldy, 1864), 1079.

⁵⁵ Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1850), 358.

⁵⁶ Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996 [1981]), 70. For analysis of Humboldt’s views on race in the context of nineteenth-century scientific racism, see Walls, Passage to Cosmos, 173–97. For racial classification in American science, see Edward Lurie, “Louis Agassiz and the Races of Man,” Isis 45, no. 3 (September 1954): 227–42.

⁵⁷ Adams, Geography (1820), 49.

⁵⁸ Worcester, Elements of Geography (1844), 189.

⁵⁹ Goodrich, System of School Geography (1835), 284–5. The quote is on page 285.

⁶⁰ Woodbridge, Modern School Geography on the Plan of Comparison and Classification (Hartford, CT: Belknap and Hammersley, 1844), 139.

⁶¹ Ibid; Smith, Geography on the Productive System (1845), 78.

⁶² Olney, Practical System of Modern Geography (1838), 277.

⁶³ Samuel G. Goodrich, A History of All Nations, from the Earliest Periods to the Present Time, Volume 1 (New York: Miller, Orton and Mulligan, 1856), 44.

⁶⁴ For discussion of the way geographies ranked humans by race near the end of the nineteenth century, see John Willinsky, Learning to Divide the World: Education at Empire’s End (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); and Elson, Guardians of Tradition, 65–100. Most of the texts discussed by Willinsky and Elson were published just after the mid-nineteenth century, a later period than that covered by the sample of texts in this study.

⁶⁵ The New York Times devoted its entire front page to coverage of these celebrations on September 15, 1869. For discussion of the celebrations, see Sachs, The Humboldt Current, 11–12; Wulf, The Invention of Nature, 7–8.

⁶⁶ Louis Agassiz, “Humboldt,” The New York Times, September 15, 1869, 1.

⁶⁷ Ibid.

⁶⁸ For depictions of the earth hanging in space, see Samuel G. Goodrich, Peter Parley’s Method of Telling About Geography to Children (Philadelphia: Desilver, Thomas, 1836); William C. Woodbridge, Modern School Geography 1844; and Samuel G. Goodrich, A History of all Nations, from the Earliest Periods to the Present Time (Cincinatti, OH: H.W. Derby & Co., 1852 [1849]), 44.

⁶⁹ See Matthew D. Tribbe, No Requiem for the Space Age: The Apollo Moon Landings and American Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 207–28. The quote is on page 80. For the impact of Anders’s photograph of the earth from the moon, see Robert Poole, Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). For the American environmental movement in the late 1960s, see Adam Rome, “‘Give Earth a Chance’: The Environmental Movement and the Sixties,” Journal of American History 90, no. 2 (September 2003): 525–54.

⁷⁰ Alexander von Humboldt, Kosmos: A General Survey of Physical Phenomena of the Universe, Volume 1 (London: Hippolyte Baillière, 1845), vii–viii.

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Kim Tolley

Kim Tolley is a historian of education and professor at Notre Dame de Namur University in the United States. She is the author of Heading South to Teach: The World of Susan Nye Hutchison, 1815–1845 (University of North Carolina Press, 2015) and The Science Education of American Girls: A Historical Perspective (Routledge, 2003). She is co-editor (with Nancy Beadie) of Chartered Schools: Two Hundred Years of Independent Academies in the United States, 1727–1925 (Routledge, 2002), and editor of Transformations in Schooling: Comparative and Historical Perspectives (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and Professors in the Gig Economy: The Unionisation of Adjunct Faculty in America (John Hopkins Press, 2018). She has served as the Program Chair for the History and Historiography Division of the American Educational Research Association and as Education Network Representative for the Social Science History Association. In 2018 she served as President of the History of Education Society in America. Her current research interests include women and science, education and slavery, and the response to school vaccination requirements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.