Book Review

The growth of the United States and Canada into nation-states and the expansion of their settled lands paralleled the emergence of the natural sciences from their European origins. Nineteenth-century scientific explorations of central, western, and northern North America were inevitabilities. Yet, until forty years ago, they were remembered, if at all, as legendary sagas. Between 1959 and 1986 those explorations were placed in historical perspective in a series of single-authored books by Richard Bartlett, William Goetzmann (three), and Morris Zaslow. By 1997 nothing had supplanted those by then "classics," questioned their overall interpretations, or synthesized subsequent work. In that year, several chapters in the third volume of North American Exploration, edited by John L. Allen, together supplied the latter. But it did not do justice to the variety and range of recent and ongoing research. The American Philosophical Society recognized this gap and in March 1997 convened a conference "to examine and . . . illuminate new historical approaches to scientific expeditions and surveys, and to stimulate discussion and intellectual interchange between the new generation of scholars and their more established colleagues." Surveying the Record is an edited collection of sixteen of the papers presented but, regrettably, contains no evidence of the discussions.

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