This chapter considers the uses of sublime blockage for science. The sublime was, on the one hand, a prod for precision and, on the other hand, a nod to skepticism and mystery, potentially ennobling an otherwise mechanical science. The chapter shows how astronomers, biologists, chemists, electricians, and natural historians and neurologists exploited sublime blockage either to elevate science above crude mechanism or butchery or to engage in skepticism so that it could arguably further scientific research. Such engagement with blockage paved the way for Franz Anton Mesmer’s quackery along with Benjamin Franklin’s efforts to defeat it, but quackery proved to be a more robust foe than anticipated.

Surprisingly, radio observations of the planets also turned up unexpected discoveries. While testing their transit radio array using the Crab Nebula as a reference source, two scientists at the Carnegie Institution Department of Terrestrial Magnetism noticed a strange variable signal that repeated each night. First suspecting that it was ignition noise from a nearby farm vehicle, they later realized that they were detecting radio emission from powerful electrical storms on Jupiter, which was at the same declination as the Crab Nebula as it passed through their fixed telescope beam. Mercury, long thought to have one side bathed in eternal daylight, was found to be rotating. Radio observations revealed the greenhouse effect on Venus, causing surface temperatures to reach over 600 degrees Celsius, and detected intense radiation belts around Jupiter, analogous to the Earth’s van Allen belts. The other giant planets were all found to be warmer than can be explained by solar heating alone. Precise pulsar timing measurements disclosed the first known extrasolar planetary system, a precursor to the thousands of extrasolar planets later discovered by ground and space based optical studies.

This chapter discusses Herder’s engagement with the French Revolution and his continuing debate with Kant, specifying the ways in which Herder sought to balance humanitarian and patriotic concerns in his political vision in the 1790s and early 1800s. Herder celebrated the French Revolution as an attempt to restore a ‘living constitution’ based on natural order in France. He initially also welcomed Kant’s ideas on human dignity, but soon came to reject his more specific conception of self-determination. His worries about the outbreak of the Revolutionary wars were reflected in his concern that Kant’s philosophy of history might unwittingly exacerbate republican moral absolutism and imperialism. In his view, Kant could not adequately resolve the gap between professed principles and action, law and ethics. Herder’s own understanding of a truly humanitarian philosophy of history was grounded in his Stoic-vitalist account of human self-determination. He further elaborated on the ways in which humans could cultivate their ‘sensus humanitatis’ through reflective engagement with history, criticising various instances of European colonial imperialism. His primary concern, however, was to guide European nations—above all, the German—in cultivating a new ethic to enable the simultaneous pursuit of domestic reforms and international cooperation.

Chapter 4 examines Faulkner’s 1935 novel Pylon within the context of the publication history of his novels and stories themselves. Pylon deals with a celebration to mark the opening of an airport in a fictionalized New Orleans. Daredevil pilots race around a course, and the media hype surrounding the event leads to faster, deadly speeds, a circle of media from which Faulkner offers no way out. Although he could not have predicted it in 1935, Faulkner’s own novels, after he won the Nobel Prize in 1950, escaped the unproductive cycles of poor sales that had plagued many of his earlier efforts, coming out in numerous editions with millions of books sold. The chapter considers multiple editions of Faulkner’s novels, including the Franklin Library edition of The Sound and the Fury published as part of their collection of books heavily advertised on television in the 1980s. Marketed as both texts and objects of display, one might dismiss the Franklin books as so much literary kitsch, but the kind of prestige effect these books rely upon – and to some extent create – produces the necessary authority to enlist Faulkner today as a spokesperson for political issues.

The introductory chapter provides geographical contexts and briefly outlines both the history of the search for the Northwest Passage and the Franklin expedition. It gives an overview of the searches that ensued for the missing expedition over twelve years and emphasises the centrality of visuality and the importance of skills like drawing to shipboard life, as well as highlighting the gaps in the literature that this book will fill, in particular the neglect of rich primary-source visual material (such as on-the-spot sketches and watercolours) as a key source of information and evidence. It notes, too, the sparseness of scholarly work addressing this period of Arctic exploration history and the absence of detailed visual analyses of documentary art from the Arctic. This chapter introduces the key debates in the study of exploration literature, Victorian visuality, and historical geography. These include the gendered space of polar exploration, the imperial gaze, and theories of space and place. It looks too at how visual evidence can be seen as layers of representation, with each response departing further from the original sketch.

Applying a science studies approach to early American literature means focusing on how early modern settler colonialism in the Americas, with all its violence and exploitation, was a knowledge-producing machine. Enslavers and colonizers stole the skills, labor, and resources from enslaved Africans and Indigenous peoples, and in the process forged many of the empirical practices, forms of measurement and categorization, and stratification between types of expertise that we typically recognize as constituting scientific work. Research in early American literature investigates the complexity of particular representations of natural phenomena and traces their circulation within or against powerful narratives that organized culture. This shows how contemporary scientific understandings of natural phenomena are historically and culturally determined and calls attention to the settler colonial work scientific expertise can continue to do in the present and contributing to the project of imagining alternative uses for it. This chapter argues for an approach to reading nature in early American literature that is modeled on acts of translation rather than processes of decoding. This difference is as subtle as it is essential for opening up the present to simultaneous scrutiny as critics confront an archive produced by the violent structures of the past.

Pennsylvania was one of the latest American regions to pursue sericulture, and offers the best illustration of how silken ambitions survived and were reshaped to fit new political and economic environments in the Revolutionary era. Pennsylvanian silk swung from being a dutiful imperial pursuit, albeit one with particular local characteristics, to being an objective very much in step with American independence. It constituted a unique kind of homespun that came to embody not only domestic elegance but also provided ammunition for broader debates over political economy and the future identity of American industrial development. Philadelphia, situated in the heart of the North American colonies, was the first home of the Continental Congress, the city where the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, and the site of the federal capital for ten years between 1790 and 1800. Before all that, it was also the location of the mid-Atlantic’s first silk filature. The production owed much to the creation of a Silk Society by progressive gentlemen, but much of the labour was performed by women in households and communities in the city’s hinterlands.

This chapter examines the various philosophies of education familiar to the Founders. Specifically, it traces the influence of classical theorists like Plato and Aristotle as well as Enlightenment thinkers including Locke, Rousseau, and Montesquieu. It reveals the Founders’ unique synthesis of these two strands of thought. In addition, the chapter surveys the state of education in Colonial America. It recounts the context in which the Founders themselves were educated, and notes the effect this context had on Thomas Jefferson’s early advocacy for a more accessible educational system in Virginia.