Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence

Louis Agassiz arrived in America in 1846 with nothing but his European credentials and boundless ambition, and within years, he had remade American science itself. This collection of letters, journals, and intimate narrative, compiled by his wife Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, traces the making of a legend: the young Swiss naturalist who deciphered the secrets of ancient glaciers, built the first great American museum of comparative zoology, and trained the scientists who would define American academia for generations. We see Agassiz at his electric best, captivating students, befriending presidents, enlisting an entire nation in his specimen-collecting crusades, while his correspondence reveals the private man behind the public spectacle: his financial struggles, his academic battles, his devotion to his remarkable wife. The book illuminates a pivotal moment when American science shed its colonial dependence and came into its own, told through the voice of the woman who knew him best.