Linnaeus Tercentenary News
Volume 1, Number 1
Summer 2004
This is an electronic newsletter about the American Swedish Historical Museum's "Linnaeus and America" project to commemorate Carl Linnaeus on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of his birth in 2007. Request a free subscription or a paper copy from the Museum at 1900 Pattison Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19145-5901; telephone 215.389.1776, fax 215.389.7701, or e-mail info@americanswedish.org. Read each issue at www.americanswedish.org.
Who Is Carl Linnaeus? The Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707-78) was one of the world’s most important scientists. He created the system for organizing and naming plants and animals that all biologists still use, three centuries after his birth. With good reason, Sweden counts him as its most important scientist.
Linnaeus was botanist, physician, gardener, pharmacist, family doctor, royal physician, university professor, popularizer of science, a cofounder of Sweden’s Royal Academy of Sciences, and a tireless scientific writer. He trained dozens of other scientists and sent them around the world to gather specimens of plants and animals that were new to European science. One of his students, Pehr Kalm, spent three years (1748-51) collecting in North America, especially in and around Philadelphia and southern New Jersey, but also northward on foot, horseback, and by canoe through New York to Montreal. The great men of early American science, including John Bartram, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, knew and admired Linnaeus’s work, and they were gratified by his recognition of American naturalists and species.
Linnaeus’s worldwide collecting project had two major purposes. One was economic-he wanted to find plants, animals, and other foreign products that would benefit Sweden. He wanted to know, for example, if Sweden could start its own silk industry using silkworms and American mulberry trees.
Linnaeus’s other reason was scientific. He capped the great work of classification in which European scientists had been engaged since Aristotle’s time, more than 20 centuries earlier. Linnaeus sought the right method to organize how we think and speak about plants and animals. He attempted to group similar types of plants and animals, and to arrange the groups logically into a hierarchy that would include all life. He wanted his system to be so flexible that new specimens could be fitted into it easily. In the process he gave us terms we now take for granted-"mammals," "Homo sapiens," "animal, vegetable, mineral."
Linnaeus was not the only 18th-century scientist who tried to work out a universal classification system. But his system is the one that survived, the one that scientists, drug companies, your garden club, and high school biology teachers use today; the one that pretty much the entire world uses. And that is a good reason-the main reason-for remembering him and commemorating his 300th birthday in 2007.
What Is the ASHM Planning?
Send Us Your NewsEmail your news to info@americanswedish.org; fax to 215.389.7701; or snailmail to Linnaeus Tercentenary, American Swedish Historical Museum, 1900 Pattison Ave., Philadelphia, PA 19145-5901. Call with questions or to talk about an idea: 215.389.1776.
First Grants for Linnaeus and America
Profile: Karen Meier Reeds
The ASHM's International Team of ScholarsGunnar Broberg, Ph. D., professor of the history of science and cultural sciences, University of Lund, Sweden. Author of major books on Linnaeus, on changing concepts of race; editorial board, Uppsala University’s and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ Project Linnaeus (which will make available via the Internet all of Linnaeus’s letters, in their original languages with English summaries).
Gina Douglas, archivist-librarian, Linnean Society, London. The Linnean Society holds the largest Linnaeus collection in Europe--archive, natural history specimens, drawings.
Jenny Edmonds, Ph. D., vice-president and coordinator of Linnaeus Tercentenary Projects, Linnean Society of London; curator, Herbarium, University of Leeds.
Anne El-Omami, director, Graduate Program in Museum Education, University of the Arts, Philadelphia. Expert on museum education in arts and humanities, visitor studies.
Joel T. Fry, curator of historic collections, Historic Bartram's Garden, Philadelphia. Oversees collections, exhibitions, demonstrations, public programs about Linnaeus's leading American collaborators, John and William Bartram.
Susan E. Klepp, Ph. D., professor of history and women’s studies, Temple University, Philadelphia; expert on the social and population history of colonial and early national North America, especially Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley.
Polly McKenna-Cress, chair, Museum Studies Department, University of the Arts, Philadelphia; former director of exhibits and design, the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia. Expert on history and science exhibit design, evaluation, museum education, community outreach. Liaison to collections relating to Franklin and other major figures in 18th-century American science.
Staffan Müller-Wille, Ph. D., research fellow, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin; formerly curator, Deutsches Hygiene-Museum, Dresden. Author of book on Linnaeus and taxonomy.
Annika Windahl Pontén, project coordinator for Linnaeus 2007 at Uppsala University, Sweden.
James L. Reveal, Ph. D., botany, University of Maryland. Author of book on early American botanical exploration; co-editor of Lewis and Clark plant collections.
Robert E. Savage, Ph. D. in cell biology, University of Wisconsin; Isaac H. Clothier, Jr., Professor (Emeritus), Swarthmore College. Student of Linnaean contacts with American scientists, especially John and William Bartram.
Londa Schiebinger, Ph. D. history of science; professor of the history of science, Stanford University. Author of two major books on Linnaeus, Enlightenment science, gender, and race; author and editor of two forthcoming books on colonial botany and American plants.
Alfred E. Schuyler, Ph. D., curator emeritus of botany, the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia. Liaison to collections of manuscripts and scientific specimens relating to early American natural history. Expert on botanical legacy of Bartrams, Lewis and Clark. Curator of exhibit on history of 18th- and 19th –century American botany.
Charlotte Tancin, librarian and senior research scholar, Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. Exhibition curator, "Order from Chaos: Linnaeus Disposes"; project director, Linnaeus Link--a survey of Linnaean collections worldwide. Oversees largest Linnaean collection in North America.
Willard Whitson, director of exhibits, Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia. Expert on exhibit design in biology and history of science, museum education, community outreach in science/humanities. Liaison to collections of manuscripts and specimens relating to early American natural history, exploration, and popular science.
Linnaeus PartnersPartners who came into this project from the beginning are the American Swedish Institute in Minneapolis, and the Swedish-American Museum Center in Chicago. Both are cosponsoring our exhibition and will present it in their galleries in 2007, after it closes in Philadelphia. The Swedish Council of America is also a project cosponsor and will help the ASHM to circulate the panel version of the exhibition.
We have been working with faculty and staff members of a number of distinguished institutions, including Philadelphia’s Historic Bartram’s Garden, the Academy of Natural Sciences, the University of the Arts, Temple University, and the Wagner Free Institute of Science. We have also had outstanding cooperation from the Linnean Society of London, and Uppsala University and the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences.
Would your organization or institution like to be a Linnaeus Partner and help the ASHM to publicize and present this project? Are you a museum, a school, a garden club, an arboretum, a local historical organization, a scientific society, a library? Let us know what you think about our project, what questions you have about it, how we can make it better, how your organization would like to help. It won’t cost you anything and you will make this a better project by involving more people in it.
Tomas AnfältTomas was the curator of manuscripts at Uppsala University Library and at the historic DeGeer Library at Lövsta Bruk. He was known internationally as a scholar on Linnaeus and many other subjects, an exhibition designer and curator, an author of fine works of history, and an editor (he was the director of Project Linnaeus, which is publishing all of Linnaeus’s letters on the Internet). Most important of all, he was an outstanding friend and an excellent colleague.
ASHM personnel who visited Sweden and Finland in 2003 and 2004 on preliminary reconaissances for Linnaeus and America benefited from Tomas’s superb work as unofficial tour guide. He organized meetings for us with the people and institutions we just had to visit and guaranteed us a cordial welcome wherever we went. His enthusiasm for history, science, and Carl Linnaeus were boundless and he communicated that passion to all with whom he worked. Also his enthusiasm for good food, good talk, his family, and a host of subjects from 18th-century Swedish company towns, to how to dress and cook moose, to music, politics, and international economics.
Everyone at the ASHM mourns Tomas and we extend our condolences to his wife, Mai-Lys, and their family. He helped this project to get an excellent start, and we are going to do it without him, somehow, and in his memory.
About the ASHMOpen Tues.-Fri., 10-4, Sat.-Sun., noon-4. Admission, $6 adults, $5 students and senior citizens. For program and membership information, call 215.389.1776, or visit the Museum's website at www.americanswedish.org.
Go to the third issue of Linnaeus Tercentenary News.