INTRODUCTION

Intellectuals on the far side of the world looked eagerly to English and continental savants to help them make sense of their place, even as they inhabited a landscape that few across the Atlantic could imagine. The provincial inhabitants of the British colonies in North America confronted nature in its most primal setting, and perhaps the great cultural work of the Anglophonic migration was to render terra incognita into vernacular terms. For two centuries this was largely an empirical undertaking, but the American Revolution and the subsequent invention of the American state compelled Americans to expand their imagined geography to encompass both a physical environment – North America – and an emergent community conceived in revolution – the United States. Place and ideology commanded a uniform explanation, and the Enlightenment authorized a totalizing narrative that intimately conjoined what Samuel Stanhope Smith, president of the College of New Jersey, loosely referred to as “climate” with the character of society, and, indeed, with the individual as well. The varieties of complexions among the American Indians, Smith observes, are “nothing more than the known effects of climate, of food, of culture, or of other natural causes, operating on animal bodies … here they are seen in lower stature, and there of taller and more noble port.” His emphasis on the somatic is characteristic of a society obsessed with racial difference, and this firm belief that the peculiar “climate” of North America literally stamps its impression on the “animal bodies” of its inhabitants is a powerful cultural trope. The kindred conviction that nature thus animated might in turn shape thought informed a multitude of intellectual, social, and political dialogues during the era of revolution and the formation of the early American republic.