The Natures of John and William Bartram by Thomas P. Slaughter

John Bartram (1699-1777), the first native-born American to devote his entire life to the study of nature, was an eminently practical man, a scientist devoted to the rigorous description of living things. Among his subjects was the Venus flytrap, along with hundreds of species of plants and animals, fully one quarter of all the plants identified and sent to Europe during the colonial period. His son William (1739-1823) was a pioneering naturalist who documented his travels through the Florida wilderness in prose and drawings that inspired a generation of Romantic poets. William's lyrical Travels is read today, while John's work is not.

As he follows the Bartrams through their respective careers--and through the tenderness and disappointment of the father-son relationship--Thomas P. Slaughter examines the ways 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.

"An outstanding work of scholarship that tells us much about a natural world that no longer exists but that our age should know."-- " Philadelphia Inquirer"


"Slaughter has broken the confines of ordinary narrative history. . . . Books about the business of fatherhood and the trials of sonhood are very rare, and this is a fine one."-- " Boston Globe"

Thomas P. Slaughter is Andrew V. Tackes Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. He is editor of William Bartram: Travels and Other Writings and author of Exploring Lewis and Clark and Apostle of Abolition: A Spiritual Biography of John Woolman.

University of Pennsylvania Press

Pub Date: November 23, 2005

0.9" H x 7.9" L x 5.2" W

328 pages

paperback