Abstract This studio-based thesis study discusses historical research as a motivation for art creation. Incorporating historical research on the naturalist and explorer William Bartram this paper explores the ways history may serve as inspiration for art-production. This paper also examines how making art may act as a form of research. Additionally, it explores how this strategy may be implemented in the classroom, with the intention of leading to greater engagement and understanding by students within their research area as well as their artistry.

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Although the wilderness preservation movement has emerged as a political force relatively recently, man's desire for retreat and renewal in untamed wilderness environments has a rich history in North America. Using contemporary guidetooks, diaries and journals, this study examines the early nineteenth century "Fashionable Tour" from New York City to Niagara Falls and combines description of the most important "natural wonders" en route with an analysis of their cultural meaning and value. There are two major themes. (1) Although pompous religiousness of language suggests conventional religiosity, pilgrims were overwhelmed with feelings of reverence, awe and wonder when face to face with natural wonders. (2) The extravagance of the New World's natural wonders influenced American and European images of the American experiment. Romanticism and Scottish Common Sense Realism are the intellectual and aesthetic background for this study. After some preliminary observations and definitions, I review the widespread importance of these two movements in early America and their points of contact with American sensibilities. Significant iconological moments in the lives of three leading Americans -- John Bartram, Samuel Mitchill and Timothy Dwight -- who donned their tourist habits to visit the Catskill Mountains, illustrate both the diversity of these influences and the beginnings of the Fashionable Tour. Analysis of the tour itself begins with chapter three. From their steamboat, tourists divided the Hudson River Valley into five "reaches" symbolizing grandeur (the Palisades), repose (Tappan Sea), sublimity (the Highlands), picturesqueness (the Hillsides) and beauty (the Catskills). In the first four reaches (chapter 3), the sublime Highlands dominate the landscape. But the "view from the top'' and Kaaterskill Falls at Pine Orchard in the Catskills were the most significant natural wonders in the Hudson Valley. Chapter five introduces Part II: West to Niagara Falls. The overwhelming effect of ongoing European settlement on the wilderness -- on flora, fauna and native Americans -- differentiates the unpredictable trip west from the predictable trip north. At Albany, tourists left their luxurious steamboats and transferred to stagecoaches and/or canalboats. Cohoes Falls, Little Falls and especially Trenton Falls, N. P. Willis' "Rural Resort," highlight the journey from Albany to Utica and suggest greater wonders to come. Images of the wilderness west of Utica comprise chapter seven. "Soft" pastoral landscapes, as in the Finger Lakes Region, did not arouse the intense response that major wonders such as the "view from the top" and Trenton Falls did. Niagara Falls was the climax and conclusion of the pilgrimage. The "greatest natural wonder" known and accessible to early nineteenth century tourists, Niagara elicited a torrent of enthusiasm and verbiage. After a detailed examination of tourist expectations and anticipations, descriptions and dreams, I focus specifically on the religious sentimentality which laced images of Niagara Falls. Pilgrims, responding with awe and protestations of "indescribableness," found evidence to support their popular religiosity. The trip from New York to Niagara was not just a relaxed holiday, but a highly focussed pilgrimage for persons seeking mystery and majesty in the sublime and the beautiful. Niagara, and to a lesser extent the other natural wonders; along the Hudson and across New York State, became religious shrines in early nineteenth century America.

Writers of early American texts frequently express astonishment at the abundance of swarming things found in nature, from rustling clouds of insects to ponds teeming with fish to forests of countless trees. They report feeling overwhelmed, fascinated, and threatened by the dynamic, formless grouping of the swarm, in which the distinction between part and whole is lost in a blur of motion. In this dissertation, I trace these experiences of swarming across religious tracts, natural histories, philosophy texts, and historical fiction to argue that the swarm is crucial for understanding early American ways of relating to the environment. Scholars of the colonial period have long maintained that settlers viewed the American continent as a vast and empty land, available for settlement and resource extraction, and that the settler mind sought to manage the perceived chaos of their new surroundings through the application of European systems of thought and order. I argue, however, that the experience of the swarm indicates another kind of environmental relation, one in which the viewer and the natural world become ecologically entangled. In this entanglement, settlers found their preconceived ideas challenged, forcing them to revise or generate anew their theories of the world. While these ecological experiences of the natural world appear in texts by the settler writers Jonathan Edwards, Hector St. John Crèvecoeur, William Bartram, and James Fenimore Cooper, the ideas that develop through the swarm are influenced by or overlap with the epistemologies of the Native American peoples who inhabited the lands these settlers occupied. The project also addresses Indigenous modes of environmental relation and philosophies through Haudenosaunee cosmologies, Maskoke origins stories, and the work of the Tuscarora writer David Cusick. Overall, this dissertation offers an epistemological history of the colonial period that not only revises long- accepted characterizations of the settler mindset but that also takes seriously the histories of Indigenous philosophies as early American intellectual movements. In detailing experiences in which the mind and the natural world are not in fact separate entities, my work presents alternative modes of environmental relation and offers suggestions to today’s urgent need to rethink our orientation toward the natural world.

This thesis uses ecofeminist and human-animal studies lenses to explore human animal and nonhuman animal relations in early America. Most ecocritical studies of American literature begin with nineteenth-century writers. This project, however, suggests that drawing on ecofeminist theories with a human-animal studies approach sheds light on eighteenth-century texts as well. Early American naturalist travel writing offers a site replete with human and nonhuman encounters. Specifically, naturalist William Bartram's travel journal features interactions with animals in the southern colonial American frontier. Amateur naturalist Elizabeth House Trist's travel diary includes interactions with frontier and domestic animals. Sarah Trimmer's Fabulous Histories, a conduct manual that taught children acceptable behavior towards animals, provides insight about the social regulation of human and nonhuman relationships during the late eighteenth century, when Bartram and Trist wrote their texts. This thesis identifies and analyzes textual sites that blur the human subject/and animal object distinction and raise questions about the representation of animals as objects. This project focuses on the subtle discursive subversions of early Euroamerican naturalist science present in Bartram's Travels (1791) and the blurring of human/animal boundaries in Trist's Travel Diary (1783-84); Trimmer's Fabulous Histories (1794) further complicates the Euroamerican discourse of animals as curiosities. These texts form part of a larger but overlooked discourse in early British America that anticipated more well-known and nonhuman-centric texts in the burgeoning early nineteenth-century American animal rights movement.