Across the Great Border Fault: The Naturalist Myth in America

Front Cover
Rutgers University Press, 2000 - Natural history - 294 pages

In recent years scholars have begun to question the cultural values underlying our view of Nature. Kevin Dann contributes to this debate by juxtaposing two radically different "Arcadian" experiments founded by Manhattanites seeking cultural renewal through contact with the natural world.

Dann focuses first on initiatives carried out by the American Museum of Natural History and the Eugenics Record Office from 1910 to 1940 within Harriman State Park in the Ramapo Mountains. He argues that these diverse expressions of the early "back-to-nature" movement are united by their biological materialism, or "Naturalism," which became integral to the popular culture of educated metropolitan Americans in the early twentieth century.

He then compares this activity to the contemporary efforts at nearby Threefold Farm, where anthroposophists--followers of Rudolf Steiner's"spiritual science"--developed a program of natural scientific research and education that directly opposed Darwinian explanations of natural history, social Darwinian views of human society, and reductionist scientific methods. By challenging scientific "fact" with spiritual scientific descriptions of supersensible phenomena, the Threefold Farm initiative offered Americans a new gospel of nature.

 

Selected pages

Contents

Back to Which Nature?
1
Arcadia and Metropolis
19
Nature Study at Harriman Park
51
Science and the Sensible
88
Caught between Nature and History
111
Not an Earthly Service
147
Spiritual Science and the Redemption of the Senses
183
Anthroposophical
205
Copyright

Common terms and phrases

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About the author (2000)

Kevin Dann is author of Traces on the Appalachians: A Natural History of Serpentine in Eastern North America and 30 Walks in New Jersey, both from Rutgers University Press), and Bright Colors Falsely Seen: Synaesthesia and the Search for Transcendental Knowledge. He is the Director of LandMarks Historical Research and Consulting in Woodstock, Vermont.

Bibliographic information

QR code for Across the Great Border Fault
TitleAcross the Great Border Fault: The Naturalist Myth in America
AuthorKevin T. Dann
Editionillustrated
PublisherRutgers University Press, 2000
ISBN0813527902, 9780813527901
Length294 pages
  
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