How To Write The History Of The New World: Histories, Epistemologies, And Identities In The Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Cultural Sitings)

How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Cultural Sitings)

In the mid-eighteenth century, the French naturalist Buffon contended that the New World was in fact geologically new?that it had recently emerged from the waters?and that dangerous miasmas had caused all organic life on the continents to degenerate. In the “dispute of the New World” many historians, naturalists, and moral philosophers from Europe and the Americas (including Thomas Jefferson) sought either to confirm or refute Buffon’s views. This book maintains that the “dispute” was also a debate over historical authority: upon whose sources and facts should naturalists and historians reconstruct the history of the continent and its peoples?