| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Everyday Nature: Knowledge of the Natural World in Colonial New York. By Sara S. Gronim. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007. xii, 261 pp. $44.95, ISBN 978-0-8135-4024-5.)

Literate but not learned people in early colonial New York took a commonsense approach to understanding the natural world. Since everyone lived in intimate engagement with nature, how one interpreted its processes and anomalies depended mostly on personal experience and social consensus, both of which were largely determined by cultural assumptions transferred in whole cloth from early modern Europe. Beginning in the mid-seventeenth century, Sara S. Gronim details those social relations of knowledge in New Netherland and New York, and how they were challenged in the eighteenth century by newly developing sciences. These new sciences—fields such as astronomy, botany, and the study of electricity—frequently sought to transfer authority over scientific interpretation to a small elite with specialized knowledge and, as such, became subjects of mistrust and contestation in a colony where mistrust and social contention were normative. As a result, by the American Revolution, while a few New Yorkers engaged in scientific pursuits and participated in an Atlantic world scientific arena, the majority of literate New Yorkers remained skeptical of the new truth claims, and the shift in knowledge was "halting and uneven" (p. 199).

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