Project MUSE®: Transactions of the American Philosophical Society - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/868
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Transactions of the American Philosophical Society.daily12026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 112 (2023) through current issueLatest Articles: Transactions of the American Philosophical SocietyTWOProject MUSE®Transactions of the American Philosophical Society2325-92640065-9746Latest articles in Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Introduction: Making Nature
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985540
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"What you see here today is the work of much more than three sets of scientists' hands."1 This observation from former American Philosophical Society Librarian & Director Michelle McDonald encapsulates the core message of the APS's 2024 Museum exhibition Sketching Splendor: American Natural History, 1750–1850. Drawing on the vast APS archive of illustrations and texts created by 18th-century naturalists William Bartram, Titian Ramsay Peale, and John James Audubon, the exhibition emphasized the importance of images and visuals for infusing early studies of American flora and fauna with both scientific rigor and a pervading sense of wonder. Yet thanks to the careful and deliberate framing of Bartram, Peale, and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/868/image/coversmallIntroduction: Making Nature2026-03-21text/htmlen-USIntroduction: Making Nature2026-03-212026TWOProject MUSE®421152026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-03-21Labor and Natural History at Woodmanston Plantation (and Beyond)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985541
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The lives of brothers John (1818–1891) and Joseph LeConte (1823–1901) began and ended in places of natural splendor. They were born among the rich abundance of the blackwater swamps of Georgia's coastal plain on Woodmanston Plantation. Many years after decamping from the South during Reconstruction for prestigious academic appointments, they died in Northern California, John in his Berkeley home and Joseph on a final excursion in Yosemite Valley. Their origins resembled main trends in the history of natural history: formative years spent amid enslaved labor, botanical curiosity, and genteel science. The closure of their lives aligned with the institutional specialization of modern science. Their careers coursed
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/868/image/coversmallLabor and Natural History at Woodmanston Plantation (and Beyond)2026-03-21text/htmlen-USLabor and Natural History at Woodmanston Plantation (and Beyond)2026-03-212026TWOProject MUSE®1108012026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-03-21The Price of Collecting: Sailors and the Labor of French Natural History in the South Seas, 1800–1840
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985542
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On March 22, 1803, two boats returned to a French exploration ship, the Géographe, at anchor off the coast of Western Australia. The Géographe was a naval vessel, sent out in 1800 by the French government with a sister ship, the Naturaliste, and a complement of civilian scientists, to explore the South Pacific and map the coastline of Australia. The two boats in question had been dispatched by ship's captain and expedition commander Nicolas Baudin to Faure Island in Shark Bay to catch turtles and replenish the ship's stores of meat. He had additionally instructed the officer in charge to "take care to collect any objects of curiosity and Natural History that you should happen to find and hand them all over to me
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/868/image/coversmallThe Price of Collecting: Sailors and the Labor of French Natural History in the South Seas, 1800–18402026-03-21text/htmlen-USThe Price of Collecting: Sailors and the Labor of French Natural History in the South Seas, 1800–18402026-03-212026TWOProject MUSE®1126412026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-03-21Making Nature Accessible: Wallace Craig and the Wood Pewee
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985543
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This story centers Wallace Craig, a pioneering ethologist—one who studies animal psychology and behavior—of the early to mid-20th century. Craig, acknowledged by his contemporaries and later historians of science as a groundbreaking investigator of the social and emotional lives of animals, has nevertheless—then and now—remained a marginal figure in the history of biology, largely owing to his status as a late-deafened researcher. This story also involves the eastern wood pewee, a small, gray flycatcher common to the eastern half of North America with a distinctive call. Together, Craig and the pewee offer a historical example of nonlethal collecting in natural history, and a unique, collaborative study of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/868/image/coversmallMaking Nature Accessible: Wallace Craig and the Wood Pewee2026-03-21text/htmlen-USMaking Nature Accessible: Wallace Craig and the Wood Pewee2026-03-212026TWOProject MUSE®515232026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-03-21Seeing the Forest Through the Trees: New Approaches to John Bartram's Observations
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985544
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In 1743, John Bartram ventured into the heart of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy on a mission that was equal parts scientific and diplomatic. Eight years later, the journal he kept of that expedition was published in London as Observations.1 Although the book would be his largest literary output, it continues to serve as somewhat of a dark spot on an otherwise illustrious career. Bartram may have been the most capable botanist of his day, but his writing lacked the qualities that would make the text useful to curious natural philosophers—let alone enjoyable to read. This sentiment was voiced by critics as soon as the book was published and has largely remained to the present day. We bring a new approach to Bartram's
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/868/image/coversmallSeeing the Forest Through the Trees: New Approaches to John Bartram's Observations2026-03-21text/htmlen-USSeeing the Forest Through the Trees: New Approaches to John Bartram's Observations2026-03-212026TWOProject MUSE®803812026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-03-21Notes from the Vault: Exsiccatae, Xylotheks, and Lepidochromes—Illustrating Nature with Itself
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985545
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Although there already may have been more books on natural history published in the 21st century than at any other time in history, we still tend to think of the late 18th and 19th centuries as the "golden age" of natural history publication. During that period, John James Audubon and James Bateman took their publications to extremes in terms of size and quality, while Mark Catesby, Pierre Joseph Redouté, Joseph Bloch, John Gould, and other naturalist-artists dazzled their contemporaries with illustrations that are still referenced by scientists and sought after by collectors today. The goal in all of these publications was to record and disseminate information about plants and wildlife, and to provide the most
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/868/image/coversmallNotes from the Vault: Exsiccatae, Xylotheks, and Lepidochromes—Illustrating Nature with Itself2026-03-21text/htmlen-USNotes from the Vault: Exsiccatae, Xylotheks, and Lepidochromes—Illustrating Nature with Itself2026-03-212026TWOProject MUSE®520012026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-03-21The Exhumation of the Mastodon by Charles Willson Peale: Painting Paleontological Fieldwork as History
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985546
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This essay takes a close look at The Exhumation of the Mastodon by the influential polymath Charles Willson Peale. The Exhumation is one of the most commented on and referenced painting by both historians of American art and historians of natural sciences. Being the only notable, and possibly the first, depiction of 19th-century paleontological fieldwork in oil painting, it is not surprising that this intriguing picture has drawn the attention of scholars of art history and the history of science. Some have seen the painting as a sublimated family portrait, some as a testament to Peale's artistic training in historical painting, some as an early expression of the Manifest Destiny ideology or as a precursor to the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/868/image/coversmallThe Exhumation of the Mastodon by Charles Willson Peale: Painting Paleontological Fieldwork as History2026-03-21text/htmlen-USThe Exhumation of the Mastodon by Charles Willson Peale: Painting Paleontological Fieldwork as History2026-03-212026TWOProject MUSE®656142026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-03-21Ornithology in Peale's Museum
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985547
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Historians have long assumed that the foundations of scientific ornithology in the United States were laid in the early 19th century by Alexander Wilson (1766–1813), author of American Ornithology (1808–1814), and simultaneously in France by Louis Pierre Vieillot (1748–1830) in Histoire naturelle des oiseaux de l'Amérique Septentrionale (1807) and other works.1 The proto-Linnaean writings of Mark Catesby (1683–1749) and William Bartram (1739–1823), while foundational in some respects, were less reliable and lacked the replicability achieved by Wilson and later authors who applied Linnaean (binomial) nomenclature to preserved specimens (taxidermy).2 Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), although a specimen collector and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/868/image/coversmallOrnithology in Peale's Museum2026-03-21text/htmlen-USOrnithology in Peale's Museum2026-03-212026TWOProject MUSE®1537352026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-03-21Making the New World Old: American Monuments and the Relics of Natural History
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985548
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As Americans made "Nature," they made "relics." This article explores those relics of natural history—which might strike us initially as a misnomer or an oxymoron. But as the United States invented itself, such amphibious things played an essential role.The Massachusetts Historical Society (established 1791), its founding contemporaneous with the genesis of the new nation itself, offers an exemplar. In 1809, the MHS compiled a catalog of its Cabinet, chronicling in it "all the Articles which have from time to time been presented to the Society." The cabinet keeper organized it alphabetically, beginning with A, "Animals," with item No. 1 listed as "Frog, Horned / in spirit," and continuing with "Alligator—a young
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/868/image/coversmallMaking the New World Old: American Monuments and the Relics of Natural History2026-03-21text/htmlen-USMaking the New World Old: American Monuments and the Relics of Natural History2026-03-212026TWOProject MUSE®1046452026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-03-21Transforming Collections, Preserving Futures: 2030 at the Museum für Naturkunde
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985549
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The forgotten cost of amassing objects is the damage done to life.Within natural history museums, knowledge is produced by keeping and comparing specimens.2 Yet accumulation, a defining feature of both capitalism and collections, is costly. In 2018, the state of Berlin and the German Bundestag awarded €660 million to the Museum für Naturkunde's Future Plan. This 10-year infrastructure proposal, put forward by Berlin's Museum für Naturkunde (MfN), is intended to accommodate the museum's still-expanding scientific collections. It proposes a combination of infrastructural repairs, storage additions, and "modernization," achieved in part by moving specimens off site. As formerly colonial museums like MfN attempt to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/868/image/coversmallTransforming Collections, Preserving Futures: 2030 at the Museum für Naturkunde2026-03-21text/htmlen-USTransforming Collections, Preserving Futures: 2030 at the Museum für Naturkunde2026-03-212026TWOProject MUSE®1567282026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-03-21