When life gives you lemons: Frank Meyer, authority, and credit in early twentieth-century plant hunting

Author:

Chacko Xan Sarah1ORCID

Affiliation:

1. Cultural Studies Graduate Group, University of California, Davis

Abstract

In the early twentieth century, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) funded international expeditions with the aim of finding plant specimens for introduction into the agricultural landscape and the new experimental projects in hybridization. One such agricultural explorer, noted for his eponymous lemon, was Frank Nicholas Meyer, an immigrant from the Netherlands whose expeditions in Asia have brought to the United States celebrated fruit and toxic weeds. Neither professional botanists nor farmers, plant hunters like Meyer worked by taking advantage of historical allegiances to academic programs, while leaning on the authority of their newer national institutions. In addition to plants, through photographs that transposed Chinese landscapes to U.S. environmental counterparts, Meyer contributed to the imagination of the agricultural promise of the American West. The era of these plant explorers has ended but their material trace remains in a variety of spaces and modes of existence that have hitherto been disregarded. Reading Meyer’s letters shows the authority and discipline behind his transformation from gardener’s apprentice to professional plant collector. I argue that photographs and plants are understudied material traces that enable historians to re-examine the means by which credit was received, given, and exchanged. By drawing together these traces, I chart the continued importance of exploration and collection in the twentieth century and show the epistemic continuity between nineteenth-century natural history and twentieth-century experimental science.

Funder

Mellon Research Initiative in Environments & Societies Summer Fellowship

Publisher

SAGE Publications

Subject

History and Philosophy of Science,History

Cited by 2 articles. 订阅此论文施引文献 订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献

同舟云学术

1.学者识别学者识别

2.学术分析学术分析

3.人才评估人才评估

"同舟云学术"是以全球学者为主线,采集、加工和组织学术论文而形成的新型学术文献查询和分析系统,可以对全球学者进行文献检索和人才价值评估。用户可以通过关注某些学科领域的顶尖人物而持续追踪该领域的学科进展和研究前沿。经过近期的数据扩容,当前同舟云学术共收录了国内外主流学术期刊6万余种,收集的期刊论文及会议论文总量共计约1.5亿篇,并以每天添加12000余篇中外论文的速度递增。我们也可以为用户提供个性化、定制化的学者数据。欢迎来电咨询!咨询电话:010-8811{复制后删除}0370

www.globalauthorid.com

TOP

Copyright © 2019-2024 北京同舟云网络信息技术有限公司
京公网安备11010802033243号  京ICP备18003416号-3