| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Science, Race, and Religion in the American South: John Bachman and the Charleston Circle of Naturalists, 1815–1895. By Lester D. Stephens. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. xx, 338 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-8078-2518-2.)

"Charleston was the center of natural history research in the Old South, and it played a truly significant role in advancing knowledge in that field." This is the central premise of Lester D. Stephens's solid monograph on the history of a circle of naturalists active in Charleston in the two decades before the Civil War. Using the tool of collective biography, he convincingly establishes that Charleston was inferior only to Philadelphia, New York, and Boston in the quality of its natural science research, while conceding that the physical sciences garnered little attention during the same years. Stephens first describes the lives and works of six men: John Bachman, Edmund Ravenel, John Edwards Holbrook, Lewis Reeve Gibbes, Francis Simmons Holmes, and John McCrady. He then turns to the burning debate among southern naturalists in the 1850s, the question of whether humankind consisted of one or several species. Finally Stephens describes the destruction of scientific activity wrought by the war and the denouement of scientific life in Charleston that followed in its wake. . . .

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