The Passage to Cosmos
Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America
Explorer, scientist, writer, and humanist, Alexander von Humboldt was the most famous intellectual of the age that began with Napoleon and ended with Darwin. With Cosmos, the book that crowned his career, Humboldt offered to the world his vision of humans and nature as integrated halves of a single whole. In it, Humboldt espoused the idea that, while the universe of nature exists apart from human purpose, its beauty and order, the very idea of the whole it composes, are human achievements: cosmos comes into being in the dance of world and mind, subject and object, science and poetry.
Humboldt’s science laid the foundations for ecology and inspired the theories of his most important scientific disciple, Charles Darwin. In the United States, his ideas shaped the work of Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, and Whitman. They helped spark the American environmental movement through followers like John Muir and George Perkins Marsh. And they even bolstered efforts to free the slaves and honor the rights of Indians.
Laura Dassow Walls here traces Humboldt’s ideas for Cosmos 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.
Choice Magazine: CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Awards
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Modern Language Association of America: MLA-James Russell Lowell Prize
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Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts: Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize
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Organization of American Historians: OAH-Merle Curti Award
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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 Prize–winning author of What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848
“This searching, panoramic study of the polymathic Alexander von Humboldt's career and astonishingly diverse impact on his American progeny should be required reading for all students of nineteenth-century U.S. literary, cultural, and environmental history.”—Lawrence Buell, Harvard University
“Laura Dassow Walls’s book is a multidimensional living cartography of Alexander von Humboldt’s fascinating life, work, and legacy today. Written in an elegant, truly Humboldtian spirit, it rediscovers the man who was called the second discoverer of America, opening up a new, brilliant chapter in the long (although not continuous) history of Humboldt’s presence in the United States.”—Ottmar Ette, University of Potsdam
“A major contribution to the field. Rediscovering Alexander von Humboldt, Laura Dassow Walls gives us a thinker rooted in the nineteenth century and speaking to the twenty-first: opposed to colonialism on ecological grounds, and bringing together literature and science to develop a vision of world justice.”—Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University
“The publication of this superbly written book is one of those rare events that changes an entire field of study. Not only does Laura Dassow Walls show that Alexander von Humboldt is inescapably central to an understanding of nineteenth-century American literature, she also shows how, despite C. P. Snow’s contention and our own current assumptions, science and literature were for a time the most powerful of allies in America. For anyone interested in American thought and literature The Passage to Cosmos is a beautiful and necessary book.”—Robert D. Richardson, author of Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, Emerson: The Mind on Fire, and William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism
“The Passage to Cosmos provides the best explanation I have ever seen of Alexander von Humboldt’s ideas, career, major works, influence on American society and thought, and his declining reputation. Walls exposes the thought and influence of a complex man who straddled the developing split between science and the humanities and high culture in the nineteenth century.”—Thomas Dunlap, Texas A&M University
"Not the least of the qualities of Dassow Walls’ erudite and wide-ranging narrative is that she enables us to understand something of the man’s genius and polymathic range. Humboldt’s fundamental assumption, she tells us, was that neither humans nor nature could be understood in isolation."—Jeremy Jennings, Times Higher Education
2010 Outstanding Academic Title, CHOICE
Acknowledgments
Preface: Romancing the Ruby-Crowned Kinglet
Prologue: Humboldt’s Bridge
Chapter 1: Confluences
Humboldt’s America
Humboldt’s Europe
A New Earth and a New Heaven
Chapter 2: Passage to America, 1799–1804
Portals and Passages
The Casiquiare Crossing
High Peaks and Hanging Valleys
Chapter 3: Manifest Destinies
Humboldt’s Visit to the United States, 1804
The Humboldt Network
The Many Faces of Humboldtian Science
By Land and by Sea
Interchapter: Finally Shall Come the Poet
Chapter 4: “All are alike designed for freedom”: Humboldt on Race and Slavery
(De)Constructing Race
(Re)Constructing Race
Humboldt and American Slavery
Chapter 5: The Community of Cosmos
Franz Boas, Cosmographer
Introducing Humboldt’s Cosmos
Behold the Earth
Chapter 6: The Face of Planet America
The Apocalypse of Mind: Emerson and Poe
The Face of Nature: Thoreau, Church, and Whitman
Dwelling: Susan Cooper, Muir, Marsh
Epilogue: Recalling Cosmos
Endnotes
Bibliography
Index
Biological Sciences: Natural History
Geography: Cultural and Historical Geography
History: American History | Latin American History
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