While everyone has heard of the 'Humboldt Current', few know anything of the man after whom it was named. Yet Alexander von Humboldt was a towering figure of his time - scientist, explorer, and polymath, imbued with Enlightenment ideas. Aaron Sachs' colourful intellectual history rescues Humboldt from obscurity, and reveals the impact of a single European on both American thought and the environmental movement.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
- Prologue: Humboldt in America: 1804-2004
- The Chain of Connection
- Excursion-Exile: Napoleon's France
- Part One - East
- Humboldt and the Influence of Europe
- Personal Narrative of a Journey: Radical Romanticism
- Cosmos: Unification Ecology
- Excursion-Eureka: The Death of Edgar Allan Poe
- Part Two- South
- J. N. Reynolds and the "More Comprehensive Promise" of the Antarctic
- "Rough Notes of Rough Adventures": Exploration for Exploration's Sake
- "Mocha-Dick": The Value of Mental Expansion
- Excursion-Watersheds: 1859-1862
- Part Three - West
- Clarence King's Experience of the Frontier
- Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada: The Art of Self-Exposure
- "Catastrophism and the Evolution of Environment": A Science of Humility
- Excursion-Yreka: Just North of Mount Shasta
- Part Four - North
- George Wallace Melville and John Muir in Extremis
- In the Lena Delta: Arctic Tragedy and American Imperialism
- The Cruise of the Corwin: Nature, Natives, Nation
- Excursion-Home: The Harriman Expedition
- The Grounding of American Environmentalism
- Epilogue: Humboldt on Chimborazo
- Chronology
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index