Content area
Full Text
The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America. By Laura Dassow Walls. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. xvi, 404 pp. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-226-87182-0.)
In this passionate and marvelous book, Laura Dassow Walls illuminates a virtually forgotten force in the nineteenth-century United States: Alexander von Humboldt. The cosmos of the title refers both to Humboldt's final five-volume study that was the culmination of his life's work and to Humboldt's vision of human knowledge that simultaneously encompasses scientific and aesthetic understandings of the natural world. The effects of his work on Americans were considerable. He deeply influenced artists, explorers, philosophers, poets, historians, ethnologists, and naturalists. Americans named towns, lakes, streets, and rivers after him, and everywhere celebrated the centennial of his birth in 1869. Walls argues that scholars of the nineteenth century who ignore Humboldt miss a...