Sponsored by the Office for History of Science and Technology
Jan Golinski
University of New Hampshire
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Enlightenment Climatology and the Problem of America
When we talk today about the "moral climate" or the "climate of ideas," our language preserves vestiges of the eighteenth-century discourse that used properties of the air to explain features of human culture. During the Enlightenment, in Britain and North America, this climatic discourse assumed a historical dimension, reflecting an awareness of contemporary social and cultural change. British writers viewed their island¹s weather as providentially temperate and conducive to the nation¹s growing prosperity. Americans, on the other hand, confronted an atmosphere that remained incompletely tamed by human settlement and expressed the vigor of American nature itself. Writers including Constantin-François de Volney and Thomas Jefferson debated how the climate of the continent bore upon the prospects for American civilization. While adopting perspectives and methods from British climatology, American observers acknowledged they faced different circumstances in the New World. Climate stood metonymically for nature as a whole, regarded as less "civilized" than in Europe and impinging more forcefully upon human life.
4:00PM
Monday, February 28
203 Wheeler Hall Office for History of Science and Technology, 543 Stephens Hall #2350
University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-2350
tel: (510) 642-4581, e-mail: Office@ohst7.berkeley.edu
