The Passage to Cosmos: a symposium

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Notes

Notes

1. Laura Dassow Walls, The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 404 pp, ISBN 9780226871820.

2. OED online [race, n.6] (accessed July 5, 2010).

3. Henry David Thoreau, ‘Resistance to Civil Government’, www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/71 (accessed September 13, 2010).

4. For the importance of Rousseau to Kant's critical turn, see Frederick Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, & Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 28–9.

5. Alexander von Humboldt to Marc-Auguste Pictet, Berlin, January 3, 1806, in Albert Rilliet, ed., ‘Lettres d’Alexandre de Humboldt à Marc-Auguste Pictet 1795–1824’, Le Globe. Mémoires de la Société de Géographie de Genève, t. 7 (1868): 127–204 at 177–8 (my translation).

6. Alexander von Humboldt, Personal Narrative of Travels, trans. Thomasina Ross, vol. 1 (London: Bohn, 1852), I, x.

7. Humboldt to Pictet, in Rilliet, ed., ‘Lettres d’Alexandre de Humboldt’, 177 (my translation).

8. Alexander von Humboldt, Kosmos. Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung, 5 vols (Stuttgart and Tübingen: Cotta, 1845–62), I (1845), 52.

9. See Helmut Müller-Sievers's insightful analysis in Desorientierung. Anatomie und Dichtung bei Georg Büchner (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003), chapter 1.

10. John Tresch, ‘Even the Tools Will Be Free: Humboldt's Romantic Technologies’, in The Heavens on Earth: Nineteenth Century Observatory Sciences, ed. David Aubin, Charlotte Bigg and Otto Sibum (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 254–84; Tresch, ‘The Daguerreotype's First Frame: François Arago's Moral Economy of Instruments’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 38, no. 2 (2007): 445–76; Marie-Noëlle Bourguet, ‘Landscape with Numbers: Natural History, Travel and Instruments in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’, in Instruments, Travel, and Science: Itineraries of Precision from the 17th to the 20th centuries, ed. Christian Licoppe Bourguet and Otto Sibum (London: Routledge, 2002), 96–122.

11. Kurt-R. Biermann, ‘Einleitende Studie: Zur Vervollständigung des unvollendeten Berichts Alexander von Humboldts über seine amerikanische Forschungsreise’, in Alexander von Humboldt, Reise auf dem Rio Magdalena, durch die Anden und Mexico, Teil I: Texte, ed. Margot Faak (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1986), 9–26.

12. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 279, 254–58.

13. Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World, 55–59, 124–29, and passim.

14. For a reading of British American colonialism as a derivative product of Iberian colonialism, see my Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550–1700 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006); ‘Entangled Histories: Borderland Historiographies in New Clothes’, American Historical Review 112 (2007): 787–99; and ‘The Cores and Peripheries of Our National Narratives: A Response from IH-35’, American Historical Review 112 (December 2007): 1423–31.

15. Aaron Sachs, The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism (New York: Viking, 2006).

16. Laura Dassow Walls, Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-century Natural Science (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995).