基本信息·出版社：William Morrow ·页码：320 页 ·出版日期：2003年10月 ·ISBN：0060002417 ·条形码：9780060002411 ·版本：第1版 ·装帧：精装 · ...
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The Stranger and the Statesman: James Smithson, John Quincy Adams, and the Makin |
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The Stranger and the Statesman: James Smithson, John Quincy Adams, and the Makin |
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基本信息·出版社：William Morrow
·页码：320 页
·出版日期：2003年10月
·ISBN：0060002417
·条形码：9780060002411
·版本：第1版
·装帧：精装
·开本：32开 Pages Per Sheet
·外文书名：陌生的政治家
内容简介 In her illuminating and dramatic biography "The Stranger and the Statesman, Nina Burleigh reveals a little-known slice of social and intellectual history in the life and times of the man responsible for the creation of the United States' principal cultural institution, the Smithsonian.
It was one of the nineteenth century's greatest philanthropic gifts — and one of its most puzzling mysteries. In 1829, a wealthy English naturalist named James Smithson left his library, mineral collection, and entire fortune to the "United States of America, to found ... an establishment for the increase & diffusion of Knowledge among men" — even though he had never visited the United States or known any Americans. In this fascinating book, Burleigh pieces together the reclusive benefactor's life, beginning with his origins in the splendidly dissipated eighteenth-century aristocracy as the Paris-born bastard son of the first Duke of Northumberland and a wild adventuress who preserved for her son a fortune through gall and determination.
The book follows Smithson through his university years and his passionate study of minerals across the European continent during the chaos of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Detailed are his imprisonment — simply for being an Englishman in the wrong place, his experiences in the gambling dens of France, and his lonely and painstaking scientific pursuits.
After Smithson's death, nineteenth-century American politicians were given the task of securing his half-million dollars — the equivalent today of fifty million — and then trying to determine how to increase and diffuse knowledge from the muddy, brawling new city of Washington. Burleighdiscloses how Smithson's bequest was nearly lost due to fierce battles among many clashing Americans — Southern slavers, state's rights advocates, nation-builders, corrupt frontiersmen, and Anglophobes who argued over whether a gift from an Englishman should even be accepted. She also reveals the efforts of the unsung heroes, mainly former president John Quincy Adams, whose tireless efforts finally saw Smithson's curious notion realized in 1846, with a castle housing the United States' first and greatest cultural and scientific establishment.
Book Dimension: 8.6 x 5.9 x 1.1 inches
作者简介 Nina Burleigh is a journalist and the author of A Very Private Woman: The Life and Unsolved Murder of Mary Meyer. Burleigh's journalism career covers twenty years of local and national politics, law, crime, and popular culture. She has traveled widely in the United States, covering American elections, and in the Middle East, reporting from inside Iraq during the 1990s for Time and other publications. Her articles have appeared in Time, People, US Weekly, the Washington Post, Elle, and New York magazine. Burleigh lives in New York and Paris with her husband, Erik Freeland, a photographer, and their children.
编辑推荐 In her illuminating and dramatic biography "The Stranger and the Statesman, Nina Burleigh reveals a little-known slice of social and intellectual history in the life and times of the man responsible for the creation of the United States' principal cultural institution, the Smithsonian.
It was one of the nineteenth century's greatest philanthropic gifts — and one of its most puzzling mysteries. In 1829, a wealthy English naturalist named James Smithson left his library, mineral collection, and entire fortune to the "United States of America, to found ... an establishment for the increase & diffusion of Knowledge among men" — even though he had never visited the United States or known any Americans. In this fascinating book, Burleigh pieces together the reclusive benefactor's life, beginning with his origins in the splendidly dissipated eighteenth-century aristocracy as the Paris-born bastard son of the first Duke of Northumberland and a wild adventuress who preserved for her son a fortune through gall and determination.
The book follows Smithson through his university years and his passionate study of minerals across the European continent during the chaos of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Detailed are his imprisonment — simply for being an Englishman in the wrong place, his experiences in the gambling dens of France, and his lonely and painstaking scientific pursuits.
After Smithson's death, nineteenth-century American politicians were given the task of securing his half-million dollars — the equivalent today of fifty million — and then trying to determine how to increase and diffuse knowledge from the muddy, brawling new city of Washington. Burleighdiscloses how Smithson's bequest was nearly lost due to fierce battles among many clashing Americans — Southern slavers, state's rights advocates, nation-builders, corrupt frontiersmen, and Anglophobes who argued over whether a gift from an Englishman should even be accepted. She also reveals the efforts of the unsung heroes, mainly former president John Quincy Adams, whose tireless efforts finally saw Smithson's curious notion realized in 1846, with a castle housing the United States' first and greatest cultural and scientific establishment.
目录 Acknowledgments
The Body Snatchers
The Duke and the Widow
Nobody's Child
Choosing Science
Discoveries and Revolutions
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文摘 A Sample Chapter
The Body Snatchers
Alexander Graham Bell did not spend the Christmas season of 1903 in the festive tradition. Instead the inventor of the telephone and his wife, Mabel, passed the holiday engaged in a ghoulish Italian adventure involving a graveyard, old bones, and the opening of a moldy casket. They had traveled by steamship from America at their own expense and made their way down to the Italian Mediterranean by train. The entire route was gloomy, as befit their mission. The feeble European winter sun dwindled at four o'clock every afternoon and rain fell incessantly, but the Bells were undeterred. There was little time. They were in Europe to disinter the body of a minor English scientist who had died three-quarters of a century before and bring it back to America.
The couple arrived at Genoa a few days before Christmas and checked into the Eden Palace Hotel perched on the edge of the medieval port. The hotel was a pink, luxurious resort in summer, but in winter, drafty and exposed. The city itself spilled down the steep hillsides to the edge of the sea, a shadowy warren of fifteenth-century cathedrals and narrow, twisting alleys that had seen generations of plague, power, and intrigue. Once an international center of commerce and art, with palazzi and their fragrant gardens stretching to the water's edge, Genoa in winter at the turn of the twentieth century was a grim place with a harbor full of black, coal-heaped barges.
A steady rain had been falling on France and Italy for days, in Genoa whipped almost vertical by the tramontane, icy winds that blow down from the Alps into the Mediterranean in the winter. Mabel Bell had been hoping to alleviate the dolefulness of the duty by touring the city, but because of the weather she was unable to walk the alleys and visit the pre-Renaissance palazzi once inhabited by Genoa's doges. She was forced to sit in the grand lobby of the Eden Palace Hotel, watching the palms beyond the
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