Performances of curiosity: British and British-American natural histories of the New World in the colonial period

This dissertation analyzes the construction of American nature and of the colonial self with a particular emphasis on the period 1660-1760. The most basic questions I have set out to answer are: how did natural historians describe American nature and why did they? What images, terms, ideas, or categories did they either bring with them from England or Scotland, or, if American-born, imbibe from publications and correspondence sent from the Old World? I discuss in particular how the new Baconian science and its genteel, imperial, and masculine program of "curiosity" was transplanted in the British colonies of America. Because of its metropolitan nascence, colonials wondered whether curiosity could be maintained intact in a New World, rich in previously hidden productions of nature, but threatening in its untested capacity to alter English bodies, mores, and minds. I argue that, given this provincial anxiety about mental refinement, the colonial American observers made the flora and fauna of British America into the mediating arena of their own positive self-construction. In other words, I trace the way that the colonials' practice of natural history intersected with their pursuit of a metropolitan civility. My methods and objectives differ in each chapter: I begin by analyzing the rhetoric of the new science and its promotional literature, and tracing the sundry appearances of the term "curiosity." I then focus on the letters and specimens sent back and forth across the Atlantic, and from these reconstruct the modes of expression and the social milieu of this trans-atlantic natural history community. Next, I take a very close look at two different narratives written by William Byrd II of a 1728 expedition into the frontier territory of Virginia and Carolina to study Byrd's contradictory invocations of the condition of curiosity. Last, I take a sustained look at the way one remarkable specimen, the female opossum, was perceived and represented between 1500 and 1800 and what this tells us about shifts in scientific practice, in beliefs about women's "nature," in the Old World's perception of the New, and in America's vision of itself.