| Book Review | The American Historical Review, .

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Book Review

Canada and the United States

Lester D. Stephens. Science, Race, and Religion in the American South: John Bachman and the Charleston Circle of Naturalists, 1815–1895. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2000. Pp. xviii, 338. $39.95.

Lester D. Stephens looks at the scientific writings of six nineteenth-century naturalists whose work and lives were associated with Charleston, South Carolina. Stephens's wide-ranging research and talents as a sympathetic biographer cast welcome light on the importance of this group, which consisted of Lutheran minister and mammalogist John Bachman (1790–1874), whom Stephens features; Francis S. Holmes (1815–1882), a planter as well as a naturalist; John McCrady (1831–1881), a student of fossils who made a point of rejecting Charles Darwin's theories; and three naturalists with medical training, Edmund Ravenel (1797–1871), Lewis R. Gibbes (1810–1894), and John Edwards Holbrook (1794–1871). 1

The careers of these men are a reminder of how natural science of the period was the occupation of amateurs in the literal sense, people whose studies arose from a personal passion to collect, catalogue, and organize the animals and plants vouchsafed to their part of North America. Theirs was a labor without funding, opportunity for wide travel, or links to institutions. And the men selected by Stephens for closer examination, although more prominent than many, were not alone. The antebellum years were the United States' most democratic era for scientific work, where women and men "botanized" in their local woods, raised medicinal plants and rare specimens, catalogued birds, collected fossils, and believed that they were contributing to a posterity of knowledge about their land. . . .

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