Reviewed by Susan Scott Parrish | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 65.3

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Reviewed by Susan Scott Parrish | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 65.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Everyday Nature: Knowledge of the Natural World in Colonial New York. By Sara S. Gronim. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2007. 275 pages. $49.95 (cloth).
Reviewed by Susan Scott Parrish, University of Michigan
Over the last decade, a number of scholars have been extending work written in the 1990s on the social history of European early modern and Enlightenment science to include various colonial peripheries. These studies, by the likes of Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Joyce E. Chaplin, James Delbourgo, Richard Henry Drayton, Richard H. Grove, Londa L. Schiebinger, and others, have demonstrated the importance of both objects and observers in colonial environments to metropolitan calculation and larger epistemological shifts.¹ Sara S. Gronim's new book, while it builds on this work, is actually trying to achieve something quite different. Hers is an admirable study of one colony's reception of and resistance to the wider Atlantic scientific revolution.	1
Gronim has the material here to tell a story of New York's contributions to Atlantic science—via Cadwallader Colden's ethnography and physics, Jane Colden's Linnaean botany, Joseph Morgan's mechanical inventions, Lewis Evans's map, and Lord Cornbury's observations on giant bones—and she does include, explain, and do justice to these episodes. However, asserting in the opening pages (rather riskily from a narrative standpoint) that "no one lived in New York who is particularly important to the formal history of the scientific revolution" (8), she follows by saying that what is compelling about New York is that because the colony was "ethnically and religiously heterogeneous" (8) as well as "politically contentious" (8), with a preponderance of "literate but not learned" (8) middling men, it is an ideal locale to mark "why some people might change their minds when presented with new claims about knowledge, and why some might not" (8). Hers is by necessity a diffuse and challenging goal, namely, tracking a public's changes of opinion and modes of thought. It is a worthy goal nonetheless, and one that Gronim meets by looking in just the right places.	2
A long-standing assumption of American historiography is that colonization changed those involved—whether Indian, African, or European—scrambling old identities and beliefs and, in the best cases, dynamically creating new, hybrid cultures. Though Gronim does discuss, for example, the growing exclusion of non-Europeans from the "social body and the body politic" (196), and specifically the position of the Iroquois before and after the Seven Years' War as well as the fate of blacks in the wake of the mixed-race 1741 rebellion in Manhattan, she does not put the epistemological shifts experienced by nonwhites front and center. Nor does she make particularly much of these groups' contributions to colonial science. Of European immigrants, she avoids an exceptionalist story of Americanization: because the climate and topography of Long Island and the Hudson River Valley were quite familiar to northern European settlers, Gronim argues that their "beliefs and practices required only modest adaptation" (2), that they were "insulated from the necessity of mastering the minutiae of the local natural world" (4), and that they "were only modestly interested in the knowledge of local Indians" (2) and Africans. Indeed, particularly in the first third of the book, Gronim wants so much to illustrate how New Yorkers were "like early modern Europeans elsewhere" (46) that the reader may wonder, as I did, why, then, does such a story demand telling? Be patient. As soon as Gronim turns to the eighteenth century, her accounts of the uneven and socially inflected processes by which modern "improvements" were adopted reveal an interesting—and pathbreaking as far as the historiography of colonial science goes—study of how science was lived in the everyday.	. . .

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