Science at the Roots

As part of the American Philosophical Society's "America's Scientific Revolutionaries" project, the blog series, “Science at the Roots,” highlights the lives and work of lesser-known APS Members, as well as the networks surrounding APS Members to examine those who were forced to practice science at the margins, from botanist Jane Colden to astronomer and surveyor Benjamin Banneker. Revealing the diversity of all those who practiced, read, and witnessed science demonstrates that science in American life existed beyond the work of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and other familiar faces. Through these short biographies, the blog series explores an essential correlation: how the United States came into being in a supposed Age of Enlightenment. How did science give shape to a fledgling nation? How did it provide hope and opportunities for both the powerful and the weak? How did it participate in and perpetuate the violence and exclusion embedded in American society? Was any part of it particularly and peculiarly American? And, in the end, what can we learn from all of this?