Chego Trouble: Mark Catesby and the Frictions of Representation in Colonial Entomology

Completed in 1747, Mark Catesby's Natural of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands was a major illustrated publication on the flora and fauna of Britain's American colonies. Together with his Hortus Britanno-Americanus, which detailed plant species that might be transplanted successfully to British soil. Catesby's Natural History exerted an impotant influence on the development of art, natural history, and scientific observation in the 18th century. Inspired by a major travelling exhibition of Catesby's watercolour drawings from the Royal Library, this interdisciplinary collection considers Mark Catesby's endeavours as a naturalist-artist, scientific explorer, experimental horticulturist, ornamental gardener, and early environmental thinker in terms of the interests held by the various, overlapping communities in which he functioned.

An Interethnic Paradox: Chicago's Irish and Everyone Else

Index to Titles and Authors/Editors of Books Reviewed

The exhibition at the Queen's Gallery of the drawings for Mark Catesby's The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands was the culmination of a tour that took his drawings to Los Angeles, Houston, Williamsburg and Savannah. It was accompanied by Henrietta McBurney's handsome book-catalogue, Mark Catesby's Natural History of America, intelligently introduced by Amy Meyers of the Huntington Library. Both the exhibition and the book are testimony to the taste for natural history, and plants in particular, in the royal family of the eighteenth century. George III bought Catesby's original drawings in 1768, but the engraved plates of the original editions 30 years earlier were dedicated both to Queen Carolina and Princess Augusta: the two rival ‘garden queens’ of Kew in the previous generation.

George Edwards was born at Stratford, Essex, on 3 April 1694. He was educated in schools with clerical headmasters, and was apprenticed to a London tradesman. A relative of the latter left a library which was stored in Edwards's quarters, affording him opportunity for study of works on natural history, sculpture, painting, astronomy, and antiquities. Upon completing his apprenticeship, he travelled in Holland, Norway, and France. Having returned to Britain, he closely pursued studies in natural history, applying himself to drawing and colouring illustrations of various animals ; these he sold at good prices. However, he remitted his industry in 1731, when in company of two of his relations, he made an excursion to Holland and Brabant, where he collected several scarce books and prints, and had an opportunity to examine the original pictures of several great masters. In December 1733, by the recommendation of Sir Hans Sloane, President of the College of Physicians, he was chosen Library-keeper and had apartments in the College. There he had ample opportunity to continue his studies and delineations. The four volumes of A Natural History of Birds (see Literature Cited) were prepared at the College and published by the printer for the College of Physicians, 1743-1751. Referring to Volume 1, 1743, Robson says, The description was published likewise in the French language, for the use of foreigners, as is that of succeeding volumes (p. 9). The Gleanings of Natural History, with parallel columns of English and French, was published in 3 volumes, 1758-1764. The last of these was dedicated to Earl Ferrers (then Captain Shirley) as an acknowledgment for his kind assistance in contributing a great number of birds intended for Madam Pompadour, and taken by the Captain in a French Prize (p. 11). It's an ill wind that blows nobody good. He communicated some papers upon natural history to the Philosophical Transactions [of the Royal Society] and other periodical publications. And in the prefaces and instructions to his volumes, are contained some curious and ingenious essays on different subjects of natural history likewise a brief and general idea of drawing and painting in water colours, with instructions for etching on copper plates, and reflexions on the passage of birds (p. 14). In this connection, Edwards's acknowledgment of aid from Mark Catesby (1679 ?-1749) is of interest. He wrote, My good Friend Mr. Catesby put me on etching Plates myself, as he had done in his Works ; and not only so, but invited me to see him work at Etching, and gave me all the necessary Hints and Instructions . (Natural History of Birds, 1, 1743, p. xvii). In 1750 Edwards was awarded the Copley gold medal and a few years later

Christopher P. Iannini's Fatal Revolutions is a significant contribution to the hemispheric turn taken by Ralph Bauer, Susan Scott Parrish, and others in recent studies of the relationship between natural history and literary culture in European colonies in the Americas. Through close readings of a seemingly “eclectic series of texts” (p. 8) Iannini makes a compelling argument for the role of depictions of the Caribbean region in the development of American letters, capaciously defined: From Mark Catesby's Natural History of Carolina through [John James] Audubon's Ornithological Biography and Birds of America, North American readers had been trained to regard the southern colonies (later, states) … as part of an extended Caribbean region that was both a primary source of national wealth and enlightened knowledge and a corrosive influence on national manners, borders, and beliefs. (pp. 282–83) Iannini's primary concern is the linkage between the development of the plantation economy in the Americas and “the rise of natural history as a new scientific discipline, intellectual obsession, and literary form” (p. 3). In effect, Fatal Revolutions traces the increasing role that the ethnography of slavery plays in works of natural history written between 1700 and the early nineteenth century.

ABSTRACTIs the racial variation in the tech labor force and tech entrepreneurship associated with differences in STEM degree attainment? Using data from the American Community Survey, we examine whether racial disparities in tech employment and entrepreneurship reflect differences in STEM degree attainment within the labor force, a challenge known as the tech pipeline problem. We document that White workers are overrepresented in tech entrepreneurship, while Black, Hispanic, and Asian workers are underrepresented in tech entrepreneurship. Notably, Black workers are the only group underrepresented in tech employment relative to their share of the STEM‐educated labor force. Our findings suggest that gaps in STEM degree attainment account for only a small portion of the racial disparity in the tech labor force. We also find important differences in the relationship between STEM degree attainment, tech employment, and tech entrepreneurship by race. We conclude the paper with a proposed research agenda for further study.

Tungiasis is a neglected parasitic skin disease caused by the permanent penetration of the female sand flea (also called jigger flea) Tunga penetrans into the skin of its host. After penetration, most commonly on the feet, the flea undergoes an impressing hypertrophy, and some days later the abdominal segments of the flea have enlarged up to the size of about 1 cm. The flea infestation is associated with poverty and occurs in many resource-poor communities in the Caribbean, South America and Africa. In this review, a historical overview on tungiasis is given. The natural history, pathology, epidemiology, diagnosis, therapy and control of the parasitic skin disease are discussed. It is concluded that tungiasis is an important parasitosis causing considerable morbidity in affected populations. Future studies are needed to increase the knowledge on the biology, pathophysiology, epidemiology, therapy and control of the ectoparasite.

Tungiasis is a cutaneous ectoparasitosis caused by the female sand flea Tunga penetrans whose higher prevalence occurs in Sub-Saharan Africa, South América and the Caribbean. We report a case of a 23 year old chilean male who presented dermal lesions suggestive of tungiasis on his return from Brazil. The diagnosis was confirmed by biopsy, identifying the arthropod and an egg from one of the lesions. The natural history, co-morbidities and treatment options were reviewed.

The Natural History, the life work of the English naturalist and artist Mark Catesby (1682-1749), the most important precursor of Audubon, was twenty years in the making, from 1729 to 1749. It was the first comprehensive study of the flora and fauna of the eastern seaboard of North America, and its beautifully finished, often striking images remained an indispensable reference source throughout the century of its publication. Published here for the first time are the original watercolors from which Catesby prepared the etchings which accompanied his published volumes. Having been stored away from the light between the pages of a unique copy of the book in the Royal Library at Windsor, which King George III bought in 1768, they are wonderfully fresh, and communicate all the enthusiasm of the pioneer naturalist amazed by the colors and variety of the new species of birds, fish, mammals, reptiles, insects and plants he was documenting (some of them now extinct). The watercolors have recently undergone conservation at the Royal Library and selections are being exhibited at several international venues. The conservation has brought to light many new drawings illustrating Catesby's working methods, and Henrietta McBurney's research sheds valuable new light on Catesby and the composition of his epochal Natural History.

Beyond Sweetness: New Histories of Sugar in the Early Atlantic World Elizabeth Hopwood (bio) Beyond Sweetness: New Histories of Sugar in the Early Atlantic World. John Carter Brown Library, Brown University Providence, Rhode Island, October 24–25, 2013. Both sweet and deadly, capital and commodity, sugar has long played an important role in the early Atlantic imaginary. The story of [End Page 611]Atlantic-world sugar production has traditionally—and necessarily—been told in terms of its rising influence on market capitalism and metropolitan tastes. As plant and product, sugar was the foundational ingredient for an Atlantic world appetite, a raw material for alcohol production, and the basis of dessert and tea rituals. It realigned aesthetic values, changed cultural appetites, shaped commodity relations, and became part of transnational culinary-commodity identity formations. Organizers of “Beyond Sweetness: New Histories of Sugar in the Early Atlantic World” asked participants to think “beyond” the traditional narrative of the sugar revolution to consider these far-reaching cultural, political, economic, and personal resonances of the sugarcane plant. Neil Safier spoke in his opening remarks of the creative possibilities that might emerge from a multivocal history of sugar and its agents. In particular, this would include recognition of sugar production’s dependence on the transatlantic slave trade, making visible a violent history as well as a bittersweet legacy. Moving away from a linear trajectory from crop to coffee cup, scholars from across the disciplines spent two days examining how sugar traversed territories, created bodies, developed new technologies, and reimagined knowledge. Speakers invited conference participants to consider themes of ecocriticism, the creation of new geographies, the (in)visibility of an enslaved labor force, and the technological advancements that sugar engendered. From Stuart B. Schwartz’s refiguring of Caribbean geographies in his keynote address to the accompanying exhibit at the John Carter Brown Library to plenary sessions that covered means of production and consumption, agricultural dynamics, the science of sugar, and more, the conference sought to reconnect disparate pieces of sugar history and culture while speaking across disciplines and theoretical frameworks. The first full day focused on competing colonial models of production and the development of sugar production technologies. Day two moved from a consideration of sugar’s economic position within imperial models of colonial production to issues of resistance and contemporary legacies. Organized around key plenary session themes such as mapping sugar, natural history, cannibalism, and aesthetics, the exhibit “Sugar and the Visual Imagination in the Atlantic World, circa 1600–1860” displayed sugar as sweetener, commodity, and a plant that had the power to produce race, slave labor, capital, communities, and individual bodies. Exhibit curator K. Dian Kriz, assisted by Susan Danforth and Elena Daniele, [End Page 612]worked with the John Carter Brown Library’s archival resources to digitize and present maps, books, and prints of the Caribbean (the online exhibit can be found at http://www.jcbl.org/sugar/). Kriz spoke of two goals for the exhibit: to make the images comprehensible to contemporary viewers and to emphasize their strangeness. Sucrerie, a particularly compelling image from the exhibition, is an engraving of a sugar plantation from Jean Baptiste Du Tertre’s Histoire général des Antilles habitées par les François(1667–71). It situates sugar plantation slavery within an island landscape that is both Edenic and carefully controlled. Plants, harvested sugarcane, and slave huts are numerically labeled for unfamiliar viewers. This apparent harmony conflicts with the mechanized and forced labor featured in the center of the image. Multiple agents do the work of sugar production: enslaved men and women carry sugarcane in their arms, work outside the boiling hut, and attend to the animals that drive a sugar-making mill. A white overseer stands in the foreground of the image, brandishing a stick. Sucrerieis striking in its depiction of both the landscape and the laborers, who, as many of the panelists emphasized, are typically made invisible in discussions of the sugar revolution. The ecocritical lens of the conference invited participants to read such images as testament to how the technologies of colonial sugar production affected the land and the enslaved human labor force interdependently. Jennifer Anderson and Kim Hall underscored the...

Steadily rising levels of educational attainment typify young African Americans in recent decades. Also typical among this group, particularly among males, is the rising incidence of subpoverty-level earnings and higher nonparticipation in the labor force. This article presents and analyzes data showing that downwardly mobile White workers are increasingly displacing bluecollar Black workers in ways reminiscent of the Great Depression, and that those Blacks who remain employed in blue-collar fields often face reduced compensation and job security. It attributes the severe problems facing Black workers partly to their weaker position relative to Whites to defend themselves from modern-day employer practices and partly to broader economic changes affecting blue-collar workers of both races. BLACK-WHITE EARNINGS INEQUALITY Defenders of the severe earnings inequality that typifies the present U.S. labor market invariably cite the following 1960s-style generalizations to justify the status quo: (a) the meritocracy argument and (b) the employer attitudes argument. The first theory posits that labor market outcomes are solely determined by the abilities of workers and potential workers. Thus, the better-qualified applicant gets the job; the more productive employee receives higher compensation than the less productive one; and advancement opportunities accrue to the most highly qualified workers. Additionally, because ability determines outcomes in a meritocracy, acquiring more education and skills are pragmatic strategies for those who desire to compete successfully in the labor market. There is a large and indisputable element of truth to the meritocracy argument. However, critics point out that this hypothesis ignores important realities about the labor process in the United States. Particularly when simplistic meritocracy arguments are put forth to justify the lower earnings, higher unemployment rates, and lower labor force participation rates of African Americans as opposed to White Americans, critics rightly claim that discrimination skews labor market outcomes in ways that are disadvantageous to Black workers. Though employment discrimination takes many forms, the second argument captures the crux of the discriminatory processes historically operant in the U.S. labor market in its presumption that labor market opportunities are shaped by employer attitudes. Thus, an employer who believes that Blacks generally are less reliable workers than Whites will prefer to hire Whites when applicants appear to be equal in every respect other than race. Such an employer may hire Black workers if (a) a suitable supply of White applicants is unavailable or (b) Blacks can be hired at lower wages than similarly qualified Whites. Given such discriminatory employer attitudes, African Americans tend to suffer from restricted job access and lower wages more often than similarly qualified White workers. These two generalizations are not mutually exclusive. Employer attitudes must be altered before the meritocracy arguments put forth in the first generalization can be accepted as valid. Alternately, variations of the second generalization implicate Whites who refuse to work side by side with Blacks, or White consumers who refuse to shop in environs where Black employees are numerous, as further causes of discriminatory labor market outcomes. According to both variants, however, the culprit responsible for maintaining Black disadvantage in the labor market is the same: White attitudes. Progressive labor market policies popularized in the 1960s were an amalgam of the generalities noted above. Black-White labor market inequalities, it was then assumed, would best be fought by (a) upgrading education and skill levels, particularly among young African Americans; and (b) putting legal pressure on employers to abandon their discriminatory attitudes. Despite the failure of these strategies to ameliorate these disparities, 1960s-era generalizations about employee productivity and employer attitudes still provide important insights into the causes of earnings differentials. …

This essay examines the aims, labor regime, and workers of the St. Vincent botanic garden to highlight differences in the infrastructure of government-funded botany across the British empire. It argues that slavery was a foundational element of society and natural history in the Anglo-Caribbean, and the St. Vincent botanic garden was both put into the service of slavery and transformed by it. When viewed from the Caribbean context and the perspective of enslaved workers, the St. Vincent garden's affiliation with imperial improvement becomes less salient than its support of the status quo of slavery as a system and labor regime. The garden was dependent on enslaved laborers, yet the conditions of work and contemporary prejudices led superintendents to see them as undifferentiated labor. The politics of the archive make it impossible for historians to reconstruct the experiences of the garden's enslaved workers as individuals, including the specific labor that they performed or skills that they possessed. Plantation slavery's appropriation of and influence on the infrastructure of colonial botany through the St. Vincent botanic garden suggests that historians should center the local logics of the societies where scientific knowledge making took place to reveal the many meanings of science.

John Clayton's Collection of Virginia Mosses

The published images in Mark Catesby's Natural History are compared with the original watercolors now preserved in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, England. This comparison has allowed for a more exact evaluation of the 174 plants illustrated by Catesby, resulting in determination of all plant species but one. The typification of most plant names is given in detail, with full bibliographic citations. Most non-plant organisms associated with the plant images are also identified and their nomenclatural status discussed. Catesby plates are newly designated here as lectotypes or neotypes for the following plant names: Cassine paragua Mill., Dracontium foetidum L., Echites umbellatus Jacq., Ficus citrifolia Mill., Fraxinus caroliniana Mill., Gleditsia aquatica Marshall, Hibiscus tiliaceus L., Ilex caroliniana Mill., Ipomoea catesbaei G.F.W. Mey., Laurus sassafras L., L. winterana L., Magnolia virginiana L. var. foetida L., Malva abutiloides L., Menispermum carolinum L., Passiflora cuprea L., Plata...