Seltz, Jennifer (Author)
'Embodying Nature: Health, Place, and Identity in Nineteenth-Century America' is an environmental and cultural history of how nineteenth-century Americans looked to their own bodies and the bodies around them to understand and argue about the progress and consequences of American continental expansion. I examine how diverse peoples reacted to and tried to understand epidemic and endemic disease in antebellum east Texas; around Puget Sound from about 1830 to 1880; and in San Francisco from the 1830s through the 1870s. These discussions grounded national and regional disputes about the meanings of rapid social and environmental change in the highly personal and material realm of sickness and local experience. Discussions of local health turned into judgments on the social success of American environmental transformation and the systems of labor and organizing nature which Americans hoped to impose on the places they claimed. Paying close attention to the cultural meanings of embodied experience and medical discourse opens up new questions in American environmental history. Both the medical arguments about unfamiliar places, and the everyday judgments made by people trying to stay healthy in what they perceived as threatening environments, blurred and moved the boundary between human and nonhuman nature. The dissertation combines local case studies and thematic discussions, examining the preoccupations which began to overlay and replace older senses of local health in both public and private discussions of the links between bodies and places. These newer concerns reflected a growing medical and popular interest in the bodily consequences of extreme diversity and mobility. The connections among health, mobility, and place mattered on their own terms to people primarily concerned with not getting sick. But they also mattered because Americans and others often used these same categories to define and naturalize social boundaries---especially racial boundaries. Yet paying close attention to the transformations both disease and mobility worked in diverse bodies also inevitably blurred and complicated racial categories as well as the boundaries between persons and place. Ways of understanding race and place changed in tandem as the United States became a continental nation.
...MoreDescription Examines the diverse understandings of epidemic and endemic disease in east Texas, Puget Sound, and San Francisco. Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 66/12 (2006): 4506. UMI pub. no. 3198851.
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