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“Laura Dassow Walls leads the reader on a fascinating, breathless chase after the explorer-naturalist who anticipated planetary ecology and inspired both Darwin and Thoreau. Alexander von Humboldt was a pioneer environmentalist whose sympathies crossed nations, races, and cultures; his friendships included Jefferson and Goethe, Simón BolÍvar, Moses Mendelssohn, and John C. Frémont. Walls’s book bridges the worlds of science and the humanities with learning and sensitivity.”
Daniel Walker Howe, Pulitzer Prizeûwinning author of What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848

The Passage to Cosmos
Alexander Von Humboldt and the Shaping of America
Laura Dassow Walls

This month marks the 240th anniversary of the birth of Alexander von Humboldt. Although today he is less well known than some of the luminaries he inspired, Humboldt was the most famous intellectual of the age that began with Napoleon and ended with Darwin.

With The Passage to Cosmos, Humboldt remerges for a new age. Here, Laura Dassow Wall traces Humboldt’s ideas for Cosmos, the book that crowned his career, to his 1799 journey to the Americas, where he first experienced the diversity of nature and of the world’s peoples—and envisioned a new cosmopolitanism that would link ideas, disciplines, and nations into a global web of knowledge and cultures. In reclaiming Humboldt’s transcultural and transdisciplinary project, Walls situates America in a lively and contested field of ideas, actions, and interests, and reaches beyond to a new worldview that integrates the natural and social sciences, the arts, and the humanities.

To the end of his life, Humboldt called himself “half an American,” but ironically his legacy has largely faded in the United States. The Passage to Cosmos will reintroduce this seminal thinker to a new audience and return America to its rightful place in the story of his life, work, and enduring legacy.

Laura Dassow Walls is the John H. Bennett Jr. Chair of Southern Letters at the University of South Carolina and the author of several books, including, most recently, Emerson’s Life in Science: The Culture of Truth.

 

Laura Dassow Walls is available for interviews. For more information, please contact Stephanie Hlywak at (773) 702-0376 or shlywak@press.uchicago.edu

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