How Botany Was Weaponized in the 19th Century For Imperial Expansion of Plantations, And How Humble Gardeners Pushed Back

How Botany Was Weaponized in the 19th Century For Imperial Expansion of Plantations, And How Humble Gardeners Pushed Back

In 19th century America, no science was more important than botany. Understanding plants meant more productive plantations, more wealth extracted from cash crops, and more money flowing into the United States. The science of botany became weaponized, fueling ideas of Manifest Destiny and other programs of political expansion was used for political ends. But other authors and thinkers believed that nature could teach humanity different lessons. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s struggles in his garden inspired him to write stories in which plants defy human efforts to impose order. Radical scientific ideas about plant intelligence and sociality prompted Emily Dickinson to imagine a human polity that embraces kinship with the natural world. Frederick Douglass cautioned that the most prominent political context for plants remained plantation slavery. Today’s guest is Mary Kuhn, author of “The Garden Politic: Global Plants and Botanical Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America.” We explore how politicians of the 19th century used agriculture as a vehicle for power politics, but the same branch of science contained the seeds of alternative political visions.

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Episoder(1077)

From Bronze to Blood: How the Sword Became Humanity's First Murder Weapon

From Bronze to Blood: How the Sword Became Humanity's First Murder Weapon

For nearly two thousand years, swords reigned as humanity's weapon of choice—the first tools designed exclusively to kill other humans rather than hunt animals. When archaeologist Paul Gething redisco...

19 Mar 47min

Scientists Who Were Ridiculed, Exiled, and Imprisoned for Being Right

Scientists Who Were Ridiculed, Exiled, and Imprisoned for Being Right

Science progresses through breakthrough discoveries, but behind many of the field's greatest advancements lies a darker history of scientific dysfunction—hostile competition, information hoarding, and...

17 Mar 47min

How Two California Wines Shattered Centuries of French Supremacy in a Blind Taste Test

How Two California Wines Shattered Centuries of French Supremacy in a Blind Taste Test

In 1976, nine French wine judges did the unthinkable: they blindly selected two California wines over France's most elite vintages in what became known as the Judgment of Paris. This shocking upset se...

12 Mar 36min

How an Italian Engineer with 700 Knights Defeated 100,000 Ottoman Troops at the Siege Rhodes

How an Italian Engineer with 700 Knights Defeated 100,000 Ottoman Troops at the Siege Rhodes

Throughout the 16th century, one man stood between the Ottoman Empire and European domination, yet his name has been largely forgotten. Gabriele Tadino was an Italian military engineer whose genius tr...

10 Mar 43min

Why America's Military Never Became a Threat to Democracy

Why America's Military Never Became a Threat to Democracy

America's Founding Fathers feared a standing army would inevitably threaten civilian governance. Yet 250 years later, the U.S. military remains a strange outlier among nearly every nation that has eve...

5 Mar 51min

How Christianity Shaped America's 500-Year Mission to Become a Holy Land

How Christianity Shaped America's 500-Year Mission to Become a Holy Land

Thomas Jefferson’s 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists famously described the First Amendment as building a "wall of separation between church and State." This line has been the gold standard for thos...

3 Mar 52min

Every Communication Breakthrough—From Cave Art to AI Video—Exists to Tell Stories

Every Communication Breakthrough—From Cave Art to AI Video—Exists to Tell Stories

There’s an argument to be made that every technology advance in communication – from cave paintings to fake AI movie trailers – is at its root an attempt to tell stories. Our first night-fires created...

26 Feb 58min

The East’s Auschwitz: How Imperial Japan’s Secret Experimenters Escaped Justice

The East’s Auschwitz: How Imperial Japan’s Secret Experimenters Escaped Justice

During the Holocaust, Josef Mengele discarded every medical ethic to perform horrific human experiments at Auschwitz, including non-consensual vivisections, limb transplants, and agonizing surgeries c...

24 Feb 44min

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