Gordon M. Sayre

More letters from the American farmer : an edition of the essays in English left unpublished by Crèvecoeur

A critical edition of essays that J. Hector St John de Crevecoeur (1735-1813) wrote in English, but did not include in Letters From an American Farmer. It is based on an examination of all available relevant textual sources, and includes extensive textual and historical contextual information.

Prehistoric Diasporas: Colonial Theories of the Origins of Native American Peoples

The cultural and political importance of the issue of Native American origins has been emphasized by the recent controversy over Kennewick Man. Kennewick Man is a skeleton that was first found by spectators at a powerboat race along the banks of the Columbia River near Kennewick, Washington in July 1996. Radiocarbon dating established that the bones are roughly 9,000 years old, making it a major archaeological discovery, since only thirty-two human remains that old have been found in North America, and this skeleton is among the most complete. A local anthropologist named James Chatters collected the bones and touched off a media sensation when he was quoted saying that features of the skull resembled “caucasoid” peoples more than modern Native Americans. Chatters later asked an artist friend to make a reconstruction of the flesh on Kennewick Man’s head. When photos of the bald clay model appeared in newspapers and magazines across the country, many news stories repeated Chatters’s suggestion, that Kennewick Man resembled the actor Patrick Stewart.

The Alexandrian Library of LifeA Flawed Metaphor for Biodiversity

In the last quarter-century many scientific, environmental, and popular publications have used a metaphor comparing species extinction and the loss of biodiversity in the modern era to the destruction of the ancient Library of Alexandria in Egypt more than 1,500 years ago. The rhetorical figure is characteristic of the environmental humanities, for it invokes the value of cultural and literary treasures to reinforce the importance of biological diversity. This article traces the origins of the metaphor to related figures of The Book of Life and to the figure of genetic information as a textual code. The Alexandrian Library of Life caught hold in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when concern about biodiversity and the destruction of tropical rainforests coincided with developments in gene sequencing, the Human Genome Project, and the growth of Internet communications and electronic library collections. Scientists and environmentalists at that time sensed both the promise of unprecedented access to bio-information and the threat of lost knowledge through species extinction. The popularity of the metaphor conceals several weaknesses, however. Living species, even using the methods of gene sequencing, cannot be archived or copied like texts, and the impulse to do so reflects imperialist efforts to appropriate and control knowledge, as several empires attempted to do at Alexandria during the library’s long history. The metaphor of a species as a book, represented in the library by one specimen or copy, obscures the fact that the Alexandrian library consisted of manuscripts, not print books. In essence, species may be more like manuscripts than books after all.

Moral Testimony and Noblesse Oblige in Memoirs of the Atlantic Revolutions

writing within narratives of American literary and cultural history. By invoking the locations of Ferguson, Staten Island, and Cleveland, Fanuzzi draws critical attention to the ways in which the archives of writing from the hemispheric French Atlantic gave shape to an American po litical landscape that continues to be marked by violence and re sis tance. These essays alternately zoom out and then in on the space of the hemispheric French Atlantic over the course of the long nineteenth century. Some assemble a network of many texts and writers while others focus closely in on a single text or writer. Both strategies, however, reveal movements across and around the Atlantic world that most often took winding or spiraling forms, driven by fl ight and escape, and punctuated by sites of gathering and acts of solidarity. The publication histories of these texts were often just as winding, while their languages and grammars contain circuits and layers. The interconnections within and between these texts allow us to see the richness and complexity of the po liti cal, literary, cultural, and geographic networks that bound Haiti and the French West Indies to the continental Americas, Eu rope, and Africa. The essays that make up this forum offer a collective appeal to unwind these histories, to track the movements of texts, authors, and languages as they circulated around the hemispheric French Atlantic world over the course of the long nineteenth century, and to follow those routes— marked by terrible violence and by hopeful promise— toward an American studies for the twentyfi rst century.

William Bartram: The Search for Nature's Design—Selected Art, Letters & Unpublished Writings (review)

Colleagues, cease for a moment your anxious complaints about the crisis in scholarly publishing, and buy and enjoy this book! It is printed entirely on heavy gloss paper and includes more than one hundred color illustrations, some of which have never before been reproduced, and many others of which were previously available only in lowerquality black and white. It lists for fifty dollars but is available from online bookstores for twenty to thirty dollars. The two coeditors and nine other contributors, as well as the publishers, the designers, and the donors who must have provided subventions, all deserve our gratitude. If all you do is gaze at the pictures it is still a bargain as a coffee table book. Part 1 of the volume, edited primarily by Thomas Hallock, is a selection of letters to and from John and William Bartram, dating from the 1750s to the 1840s. The letters have been transcribed from a remarkable number of archives, most in Philadelphia but also in Uppsala, Sweden; Nantes, France; Charleston, South Carolina; and Australia. An eighteenpage appendix provides a full calendar of the correspondence of William Bartram, including lost documents and partial transcripts in others’ hands. Hallock’s goal in part 1 was a survey that illustrates aspects of William’s life not well revealed in his 1791 Travels through North & South Carolina, Georgia, East & West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws. Many who have read Travels have an image of a romantic naturalist prone to enthusiastic apostrophes filled with Latin binomials such as liquidambar sty-

Native Signification and Communication

In his study of Joseph-François Lafitau’s Moeurs des sauvages américains comparées aux moeurs des premiers temps, orCustoms of the American Indians Compared with the Customs of Primitive Times, AndreasMotsch quotes (–) this anecdote about a female Huron shaman who was asked for information about seven warriors who had been a long time absent from the village. She employed the method of pyromancy: