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Manifest Destinies

in The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America

This chapter discusses the following: Humboldt's visit to the United States in 1804; his scientific work and publications while in Paris; his move to Berlin in early 1827, where he became the king's ... More

This chapter discusses the following: Humboldt's visit to the United States in 1804; his scientific work and publications while in Paris; his move to Berlin in early 1827, where he became the king's own Voltaire; his efforts to help reorganize Germany's struggling scientific society, the German Association of Naturalists and Physicians; and the growth and splintering of Humboldtian science across the procession of voyages and explorations it inspired.Less

Confluences

in The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America

This chapter begins with a discussion of how Humboldt became a cultural hero to both Latin and North Americans, from the masses to the intelligentsia, by showing them how to imagine themselves as ... More

This chapter begins with a discussion of how Humboldt became a cultural hero to both Latin and North Americans, from the masses to the intelligentsia, by showing them how to imagine themselves as something more than offshoots of European ambition. He literally put America on the global map, positioning its history, nations, and resources in relation to the rest of the world, and drawing the detailed and extensive maps by which Americans could find, and know, themselves. This is followed by a brief biography of Humboldt. The chapter then reviews some of his writings.Less

Alexander Von Humboldt and Revolution: A Geography of Reception of the Varnhagen von Ense Correspondence

Rupke Nicolaas

in Geography and Revolution

Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) is not commonly depicted as a revolutionary—at least not in the Anglo-American literature on him. Some of his biographers may consider his contributions to plant ... More

Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) is not commonly depicted as a revolutionary—at least not in the Anglo-American literature on him. Some of his biographers may consider his contributions to plant geography or to meteorology of revolutionary importance, but Humboldt is not seen as a political revolutionary in the way that, for example, his younger contemporary Karl Marx was. Yet precisely this view of Humboldt as a supporter—even an instigator—of political revolutions was taken in the former East Germany, where the account of his life and work was placed in the discursive space of Marxist historiography. There, a biographical narrative was constructed that highlighted Humboldt's friendships with revolutionaries, making him a revolutionary by association. One of these friendships had been with the “revolutionary democrat” Georg Forster, the “great champion of the idea of 1789” who had passionately supported the Jacobins in France, and one of those who, in 1793 in Mainz, had established “the first democratic republic on German soil.”Less

“All are alike designed for freedom”: Humboldt on Race and Slavery

in The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America

This chapter considers Humboldt's views on race and slavery. Humboldt played a key role in American abolitionism or the trajectory of racial science. He was the only major scientist during the ... More

This chapter considers Humboldt's views on race and slavery. Humboldt played a key role in American abolitionism or the trajectory of racial science. He was the only major scientist during the nineteenth century to argue consistently, for six decades, that “race” was not a biological category and that, as he declared in Cosmos, “all are alike designed for freedom.” Stephen Jay Gould states in his classic study of racial science that Humboldt should be the hero of modern racial egalitarians, for “he, more than any other scientist of his time, argued forcefully and at length against ranking on mental or aesthetic grounds.” The Humboldt brothers together developed a historical anthropology that sought to appreciate every human group on its own terms, for none were in any meaningful sense “superior” or “inferior” to any other. Their arguments are important both for their own sake, and for the impact they had on modern conceptions of race.Less

The Mountain as Object of Knowledge

Bernard Debarbieux, Gilles Rudaz, and Martin F. Price

in The Mountain: A Political History from the Enlightenment to the Present

Chapter 1 introduces the scholarly modalities for constructing the category of the mountain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the paradigms that gradually became associated with it. It ... More

Chapter 1 introduces the scholarly modalities for constructing the category of the mountain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the paradigms that gradually became associated with it. It focuses on the various modalities of the objectification of mountains, and the forms of knowledge and argument associated with that operation. Eighteenth-century natural history, philosophy, and geography proposed a far-reaching alternative to the traditional and popular conceptions of mountains, considered like a topographical contrast. They engaged in what aspired to be a radical objectification: the mountain became a category of comparable and commensurable physical objects characterized by a set of attributes, all purportedly objective, hence independent of the particular points of view from which the inhabitants of one place or another might see and describe their surroundings. This led to the invalidation of popular ways of naming and conceiving mountains, and to the rise of a new human type: the mountaineer, mainly defined on a natural basis.Less

Cosmos: The Universe Translated

Alison E. Martin

in Nature Translated: Alexander von Humboldt's Works in Nineteenth-Century Britain

This chapter is devoted to Humboldt’s last, great work Cosmos. This multi-volume ‘Sketch of a Physical Description of the World’ ranged encyclopaedically from the darkest corners of space to the ... More

This chapter is devoted to Humboldt’s last, great work Cosmos. This multi-volume ‘Sketch of a Physical Description of the World’ ranged encyclopaedically from the darkest corners of space to the smallest forms of terrestrial life, describing the larger systems at work in the natural world. But, as British reviewers were swift to query, where was God in Humboldt’s mapping of the universe? Appearing on the market in 1846, just a year after Robert Chambers’ controversial Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, Humboldt’s Cosmos unavoidably underwent close scrutiny. Hitherto overlooked correspondence between Humboldt and Edward Sabine shows how the Sabines deliberately reoriented the second volume of the English translation for Longman/Murray explicitly to include references to the ‘Creator’ and thus restore Humboldt’s reputation. The fourth volume of the Longman edition on terrestrial magnetism – Edward Sabine’s specialism – included additions endorsed by Humboldt which made Sabine appear as co-writer alongside the great Prussian scientist, and Cosmos a more obviously ‘English’ product. Otté, who produced the rival translation for Bohn, was initially under pressure herself to generate ‘original’ work that differed from its rival, producing a version of a work that would remain central to scientific thought well up to the end of the nineteenth century.Less

Passage to America, 1799–1804

in The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America

This chapter details Humboldt's journey from Spain to America. Humboldt traveled not from country to country but through a planetary field of geological, historical, and environmental forces. His ... More

This chapter details Humboldt's journey from Spain to America. Humboldt traveled not from country to country but through a planetary field of geological, historical, and environmental forces. His coordinates were not political but bioregional: rivers, mountain passes, coastlines, trails, and roads. It is seldom clear exactly what “country” he is in, as he sifts and compares, moving up, down, and across both spatial and temporal scale levels, continents and eons, on the alert for harmonies and resonances he can test to see if they might justly be called laws.Less

The Community of Cosmo

in The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America

This chapter begins with a description of the work of Franz Boas, the German anthropologist who brought Humboldt's ideas back to the United States and used them to remake American anthropology, ... More

This chapter begins with a description of the work of Franz Boas, the German anthropologist who brought Humboldt's ideas back to the United States and used them to remake American anthropology, becoming in the process “one of the most influential figures in the history of the social sciences.” It then discusses Humboldt's book, Cosmos, followed by an analysis of his message to its readers.Less

The Allure of Electric Fishes: Humboldt’s Obsession

Stanley Finger and Marco Piccolino

in The Shocking History of Electric Fishes: From Ancient Epochs to the Birth of Modern Neurophysiology

Alexander von Humboldt, a young German baron with training in the sciences, became an international celebrity in the opening decades of the 19th century as a result of his exciting and dangerous ... More

Alexander von Humboldt, a young German baron with training in the sciences, became an international celebrity in the opening decades of the 19th century as a result of his exciting and dangerous travels through the New World and his magnificent illustrated volumes about his scientific explorations. Of all his writings, the material that more than any other captured his readers' imaginations was his encounter with South American eels. Humboldt believed that the eels were releasing their shocks intentionally, a contention made by others before him. He reasoned that, if the discharges were intentional, they should cease upon severing the nerves from the brain to the electrical organs. A cut from his knife confirmed this prediction. He also found that shocks could be transmitted through most of the usual conductors of electricity, including metal rods and people holding hands, and not through the standard array of non-conductors. This set up his long-awaited experiments with substances that had revealed possible differences between animal, metallic, and true electricity.Less

Epilogue: Recalling Cosmos

in The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America

Humboldt died peacefully at his Berlin home on 6 May 1859. The funeral was the largest and grandest Berlin had ever seen for a private citizen. Humboldt's family were followed by state and royal ... More

Humboldt died peacefully at his Berlin home on 6 May 1859. The funeral was the largest and grandest Berlin had ever seen for a private citizen. Humboldt's family were followed by state and royal officials, diplomats, and six hundred students. Yet hundreds more followed his hearse through the streets of Berlin, draped with black and crowded with mourners. A wave of memorial orations and obituaries flowed across America. Many of Humboldt's friends used the occasion to assess his work and importance, which at this close view were seen to be staggering, though there was some disagreement as to whether he should be claimed by all the world, or only the world of science.Less

‘A Colossal Literary and Scientific Task’: Helen Maria Williams and the Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent (1814–1829)

Alison E. Martin

in Nature Translated: Alexander von Humboldt's Works in Nineteenth-Century Britain

This chapter concentrates on Helen Maria Williams, Paris salonnière, radical author and poet. Her translation of Humboldt’s weighty account of his voyage through the Americas with the French Botanist ... More

This chapter concentrates on Helen Maria Williams, Paris salonnière, radical author and poet. Her translation of Humboldt’s weighty account of his voyage through the Americas with the French Botanist Aimé Bonpland, the Relation historique du voyage aux regions équinoxiales du nouveau continent (1814-25), appeared as the seven-volume Personal Narrative of the Equinoctial Regions (Longman, 1814-29). Her rather literal translation was as unpopular as Black’s was well liked by a British readership, but it enjoyed Humboldt’s approval. Previously overlooked archival material detailing the corrections he made to her translation illustrate the close collaborative nature of the undertaking, but also the stylistic freedoms Humboldt permitted her. Williams’s frequently creative (or downright ‘unfaithful’) translational choices favoured the idiom of the sublime in tropical descriptions, which, in their phrasing, also recalled lines from Milton, Thomson or Blake. Williams therefore allowed works from the British literary canon to echo through Humboldt’s prose, making it seem subtly familiar to Anglophone readers. This chapter concludes by focusing briefly on William MacGillivray’s Travels and Researches of Alexander von Humboldt (1832), a successfully revised version of William’s Personal Narrative.Less

The Poetry of Geography: The Ansichten der Natur in English Translation

Alison E. Martin

in Nature Translated: Alexander von Humboldt's Works in Nineteenth-Century Britain

This chapter discusses the salient differences between the two different contemporaneous versions of Humboldt’s Ansichten der Natur: Elizabeth Sabine’s Aspects of Nature (Longman, 1849) and Otté and ... More

This chapter discusses the salient differences between the two different contemporaneous versions of Humboldt’s Ansichten der Natur: Elizabeth Sabine’s Aspects of Nature (Longman, 1849) and Otté and Henry Bohn’s Views of Nature (Bohn, 1850). Humboldt initially wrangled with Elizabeth Sabine and her husband Edward, President of the Royal Society, over the English title but did not interfere further in the translation of this hybrid essay collection that combined science and aesthetics. The descriptive landscape ‘tableaux’ posed various translational difficulties in the strong imaginative appeal they carried but also the philosophical concepts underpinning them, for which Humboldt had created his own terms. Bohn and Otté enhanced the visual interest of the landscape features in Humboldt’s narrative by appealing more directly to the categories of the sublime and picturesque playing up contrasts between fore- and background; Sabine was more explicit in strengthening the spiritual message conveyed through landscape description.Less

The Face of Planet America

in The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America

This chapter discusses Humboldt's influence on the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Frederic Edwin Church, Walt Whitman, Susan Fenimore Cooper, John Muir, and ... More

This chapter discusses Humboldt's influence on the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Frederic Edwin Church, Walt Whitman, Susan Fenimore Cooper, John Muir, and George Perkins Marsh.Less

Dispute and Dissociation: John Black’s Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain (1811)

Alison E. Martin

in Nature Translated: Alexander von Humboldt's Works in Nineteenth-Century Britain

This chapter examines the first of Humboldt’s works to appear in English translation, John Black’s oft-maligned rendering of the Essai politique sur le royaume de la Nouvelle Espagne (1808-11) as the ... More

This chapter examines the first of Humboldt’s works to appear in English translation, John Black’s oft-maligned rendering of the Essai politique sur le royaume de la Nouvelle Espagne (1808-11) as the Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain (Longman, 1811). Black resituated and rhetorically manipulated Humboldt’s text by appending a hefty footnote apparatus, which gave the narrative a second, highly audible, paratextual voice in constant dialogue with Humboldt’s own. Black therefore subverted the traditional power differential between author and translator to make the Political Essay critical of the very source text it apparently reproduced. His efforts at establishing his own authority and credibility through self-promotion backfired into intrusive pedantry. However, they did cause Humboldt to consider carefully the need for much closer collaboration with future translators, which offers a neat transition into the next chapter.Less

The Vicissitudes of Humboldt’s Mountain Moments

Caroline Schaumann

in Peak Pursuits: The Emergence of Mountaineering in the Nineteenth Century

This chapter argues that Alexander von Humboldt not only merged opposing approaches but also experienced the dissolution of categories when faced with extreme conditions high in the mountains. It ... More

This chapter argues that Alexander von Humboldt not only merged opposing approaches but also experienced the dissolution of categories when faced with extreme conditions high in the mountains. It examines how Humboldt slowly departed from paradigms, such as the European sublime and scientific enlightenment, and admitted to becoming intoxicated with unknown heights. It also conveys information about Humboldt's journey from different viewpoints and analytical perspectives that sometimes remain in unresolved conflict. The chapter looks into Humboldt's letters, diary, published travel reports, and pictorial representations in order to piece together the evolution of a mountaineering discourse that adopts original narrative strategies and rhetorical devices while underscoring the endeavor's overall ambivalence. It also describes how Humboldt was proud of his altitude achievements but continually questioned the mountaineering quest.Less

. The Geography of Nature: Humboldt

John G. T. Anderson

in Deep Things out of Darkness: A History of Natural History

In which we follow Alexander von Humboldt and his friend Bonpland in their travels in northern South America along the upper reaches of the Amazon, into the high Andes, and north to Mexico and the ... More

In which we follow Alexander von Humboldt and his friend Bonpland in their travels in northern South America along the upper reaches of the Amazon, into the high Andes, and north to Mexico and the United States. During this expedition Humboldt developed his initial ideas of biogeography, and he studied the peoples and politics of Latin America. Humboldt’s later travels through Czarist Russia are also discussed, as are his many and varied publications in natural history.Less

Berlin and the Return Home

Paul C. Gutjahr

in Charles Hodge: Guardian of American Orthodoxy

Chapter Nineteen traces Hodge’s final months in Europe, including the six months he spends in Berlin which he considers the highpoint of his trip. In Berlin he meets and befriends Ernst Hengstenberg ... More

Chapter Nineteen traces Hodge’s final months in Europe, including the six months he spends in Berlin which he considers the highpoint of his trip. In Berlin he meets and befriends Ernst Hengstenberg and Johann Neander, and attends the lectures of Alexander Von Humboldt. He partakes of many “Awakening” evening sessions with friends. He then travels home via France, England and Scotland.Less

Introduction

Alison E. Martin

in Nature Translated: Alexander von Humboldt's Works in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Straddling comparative literary and cultural studies and the history of science, this chapter insists on the importance of translation to the scientific culture of early- to mid-nineteenth-century ... More

Straddling comparative literary and cultural studies and the history of science, this chapter insists on the importance of translation to the scientific culture of early- to mid-nineteenth-century Britain. It emphasises the centrality of women to the translation of Humboldt’s work for a British readership and explores more generally the reception of his work by the British critical press.Less