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Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture

Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture ELEANOR JONES HARVEY Smithsonian American Art Museum, in association with Princeton University Press, 2020 444 pp. Eleanor Jones Harvey, senior curator at the SAAM, has not only assembled a stunning exhibition; she has also writt...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Early American literature 2022-01, Vol.57 (1), p.302-355
Main Author: Walls, Laura Dassow
Format: Article
Language:English
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Summary:Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture ELEANOR JONES HARVEY Smithsonian American Art Museum, in association with Princeton University Press, 2020 444 pp. Eleanor Jones Harvey, senior curator at the SAAM, has not only assembled a stunning exhibition; she has also written a panoramic narrative that takes in the full sweep of nineteenth-century American science, politics, art, literature, and culture. Humboldt's vision embraced not only all beings in the physical universe, but also the mind and heart of the human soul, which he understood as participating equally in the outer, or material world (what used to be called "the economy of nature"), and in the inner world of reflection, thought, and emotion, through which nature and the human come alive in a new sense, in and through each other. Chapter 1 details his visit to the United States in 1804, from Philadelphia, where he was lionized by America's intellectual elite, to Washington, DC, where he hobnobbed with the nation's political elite, spending his days in the White House with Jefferson's inner circle and his evenings charming salon society; already, as Harvey writes, "Humboldt was becoming an American monument, part of the fabric of America's cultural identity" (75).
ISSN:0012-8163
1534-147X