DLPS Faculty and Staff Book Gallery
Title
Alfred Russel Wallace's 1886-1887 Travel Diary: The North American Lecture Tour
Files
Description
Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) is best known as the man who sent an essay on natural selection to Charles Darwin in 1858, prompting the older naturalist to drop plans for his multi-volume work on the subject and produce a shortened version – On the Origin of Species – only a little over a year later. Wallace, however, additionally had a long and expansive career extending to many natural and social science fields (and, it should be noted, he was one of his era’s most vocal supporters of spiritualism). Among his other associations he is remembered as one of history’s foremost naturalist-explorers for his twelve years of collecting activities in South America and the East Indies circa 1848 to 1852 and 1854 to 1862, but in the present volume the last of his wanderings is detailed: a transcontinental ten-month lecture tour to North America in 1886–1887. Wallace kept a journal for the entire length of his trip which is filled both with natural history observations, and impressions of the people he met along the way (including many of the most famous Americans from that period). Here, this journal is fully transcribed and annotated; also presented are some of his published writings from this period.
ISBN
978-0-9567795-8-8
Publication Date
1-1-2013
Publisher
Siri Scientific Press
Keywords
travel diaries, Alfred Russel Wallace, lecture tours, North America, nineteenth century
Disciplines
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | United States History
Recommended Citation
Smith, Charles H. Editor and Derr, Megan, "Alfred Russel Wallace's 1886-1887 Travel Diary: The North American Lecture Tour" (2013). DLPS Faculty and Staff Book Gallery. 8.
https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/dlps_book/8
Comments
Charles H. Smith is Professor of Library Public Information Services at Western Kentucky University. His research interests include biogeography and evolutionary theory, systems theory, bibliography, and Alfred Russel Wallace. He has published four books, nearly a hundred journal articles and reviews, and currently maintains the website The Alfred Russel Wallace Page at http://www.wku.edu/~smithch/index1.htm