Insects in the New Nation: A Cultural Context for the Emergence of American Entomology

Abstract

“Insects may be small and invite contempt, but efforts to deal with them evoke all of the most deeply held beliefs about what it is to be human.” That is how John H. Perkins closed his hook, Insects, Experts, and the Insecticide Crisis (1982). It is an analysis of how cultural events and forces affected the creation of expert knowledge of American economic entomology, particularly in the period since the Civil War. But let us look further back —to a time when Americans were just starting to study American insects— and observe the social, political, and economic events and forces that influenced the emergence of American entomology and expose the philosophical assumptions of the participants in the historical drama. The time falls roughly between the American Revolution and the Civil War, when entomology was part of a swelling wave of interest in natural history, but before it was made a profession with the establishment of the teaching, research, and extension network. It was a time when entomology consisted mostly of taxonomic and life-history studies. The setting is restricted largely to the northeastern United States, where most of the historical drama unfolded. Also, the first serious attempts to make entomology an institutional and professional science were made in this setting.