1) James, Matthew.
34.95 U.S.
PUBLISHER'S SUMMARY: In 1905, eight men from the California Academy of Sciences set sail from
San Francisco for a scientific collection expedition in the Galapagos
Islands, and by the time they were finished in 1906, they had completed
one of the most important expeditions in the history of both
evolutionary and conservation science. These scientists collected over
78,000 specimens during their time on the islands, validating the work
of Charles Darwin and laying the groundwork for foundational evolution
texts like
Darwin's Finches. Despite its significance, almost
nothing has been written on this voyage, lost amongst discussion of
Darwin's trip on the Beagle and the writing of David Lack.
In
Collecting Evolution, author Matthew James finally tells the story of the 1905 Galapagos expedition. James follows these eight young men aboard the
Academy
to the Galapagos and back, and reveals the reasons behind the
groundbreaking success they had. A current Fellow of the California
Academy of Sciences, James uses his access to unpublished writings and
photographs to provide unprecedented insight into the expedition. We
learn the voyagers' personal stories, and how, for all the scientific
progress that was made, just as much intense personal drama unfolded on
the trip. This book shares a watershed moment in scientific history,
crossed with a maritime adventure. There are four tangential suicides
and controversies over credit and fame.
Collecting Evolution
also explores the personal lives and scientific context that preceded
this voyage, including what brought Darwin to the Galapagos on the
Beagle voyage seventy years earlier. James discusses how these men
thought of themselves as "collectors" before they thought of themselves
as scientists, and the implications this had on their approach and their
results.
In the end, the voyage of the
Academy proved
to be crucial in the development of evolutionary science as we know it.
It is the longest expedition in Galapagos history, and played a critical
role in cementing Darwin's legacy.
Collecting Evolution brings this extraordinary story of eight scientists and their journey to life.
RECOMMENDATION: For those with an interested in the history of scientific exploration.
2) Smalley,
Andrea L..
Wild by Nature: North American Animals Confront Colonization. 2017. Johns Hopkins University Press. Hardbound: 334 pages. Price: $49.95 U.S.
PUBLISHER'S SUMMARY: From the time Europeans first came to the New
World until the closing of the frontier, the benefits of abundant wild
animals―from beavers and wolves to fish, deer, and bison―appeared as a
recurring theme in colonizing discourses. Explorers, travelers,
surveyors, naturalists, and other promoters routinely advertised the
richness of the American faunal environment and speculated about the
ways in which animals could be made to serve their colonial projects. In
practice, however, American animals proved far less malleable to
colonizers’ designs. Their behaviors constrained an English colonial
vision of a reinvented and rationalized American landscape.
In Wild by Nature,
Andrea L. Smalley argues that Anglo-American authorities’ unceasing
efforts to convert indigenous beasts into colonized creatures frequently
produced unsettling results that threatened colonizers’ control over
the land and the people. Not simply acted upon by being commodified,
harvested, and exterminated, wild animals were active subjects in the
colonial story, altering its outcome in unanticipated ways. These
creatures became legal actors―subjects of statutes, issues in court
cases, and parties to treaties―in a centuries-long colonizing process
that was reenacted on successive wild animal frontiers.
Following
a trail of human–animal encounters from the seventeenth-century
Chesapeake to the Civil War–era southern plains, Smalley shows how wild
beasts and their human pursuers repeatedly transgressed the lines
lawmakers drew to demarcate colonial sovereignty and control,
confounding attempts to enclose both people and animals inside a legal
frame. She also explores how, to possess the land, colonizers had to
find new ways to contain animals without destroying the wildness that
made those creatures valuable to English settler societies in the first
place. Offering fresh perspectives on colonial, legal, environmental,
and Native American history, Wild by Nature reenvisions the familiar stories of early America as animal tales.
RECOMMENDATION: For those with an interested in American environmental history.
