Reprint of the original, first published in 1872.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Elements of Botany, For Beginners and For Schools" by Asa Gray. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

Keeney examines the role of botany in the lives of nineteenth-century 'botanizers,' amateur scientists who collected, identified, and preserved plant specimens as a pastime. Using popular magazines, fiction, and autobiographies of the day, she explores the popular culture of this avocation, which attracted both men and women by the thousands.

At a time when the environment is of growing concern to students and general readers, nature writing is especially meaningful. This book profiles the literary careers of 52 early American nature writers, such as John James Audubon, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Caroline Stansbury Kirkland, Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau, and Mabel Osgood Wright. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and discusses the writer's life and works. Entries close with primary and secondary bibliographies, and the encyclopedia ends with suggestions for further reading. Global warming, pollution, and other issues have made the environment a topic of constant discussion these days. Many environmental concerns were treated by early American nature writers, who recognized the beauty of the natural world in an age of commercial expansion. Some of the most famous writers of the 18th and 19th centuries wrote about nature, and their works are stylistic masterpieces. At a time when students are being encouraged to read and write about nonfiction, these masterworks of early American nature writing are all the more important. This book gives students and general readers a welcome introduction to early American nature writers.

How worldwide plant circulation and new botanical ideas enabled Americans to radically re-envision politics and society The Garden Politic argues that botanical practices and discourses helped nineteenth-century Americans engage pressing questions of race, gender, settler colonialism, and liberal subjectivity. In the early republic, ideas of biotic distinctiveness helped fuel narratives of American exceptionalism. By the nineteenth century, however, these ideas and narratives were unsettled by the unprecedented scale at which the United States and European empires prospected for valuable plants and exchanged them across the globe. Drawing on ecocriticism, New Materialism, environmental history, and the history of science—and crossing disciplinary and national boundaries—The Garden Politic shows how new ideas about cultivation and plant life could be mobilized to divergent political and social ends. Reading the work of influential nineteenth-century authors from a botanical perspective, Mary Kuhn recovers how domestic political issues were entangled with the global circulation and science of plants. The diversity of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s own gardens contributed to the evolution of her racial politics and abolitionist strategies. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s struggles in his garden inspired him to write stories in which plants defy human efforts to impose order. Radical scientific ideas about plant intelligence and sociality prompted Emily Dickinson to imagine a human polity that embraces kinship with the natural world. Yet other writers, including Frederick Douglass, cautioned that the most prominent political context for plants remained plantation slavery. The Garden Politic reveals how the nineteenth century’s extractive political economy of plants contains both the roots of our contemporary environmental crisis and the seeds of alternative political visions.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1897.