Travels into North America, Volume 3 (of 3)

In 1748, a student of Carl Linnaeus stepped off a ship in Philadelphia and began walking into a North America that no longer exists. Pehr Kalm spent two years traversing the colonies and wilderness of the eastern seaboard, and what he recorded in this, the third volume of his travels, is nothing less than a portrait of a young continent on the verge of transformation. Here are the forests that once covered this land, the plants and remedies the Lenape and other Native nations taught to European newcomers, the farms and settlements that would soon become the battleground of a revolution. Kalm writes with the patience of a man who understands that observation is a form of reverence. He catalogs plant species, records agricultural practices, describes the textures of daily life among French Canadians and Indigenous peoples, and reflects on how the land itself shapes the people who inhabit it. This is foundational American natural history, written when the country it describes was still a question. For anyone curious about what was here before, this is an irreplaceable window into a vanished world.