DeWitt Clinton and Amos Eaton

Book excerpt: How did geology and politics inform scientific ideas and contribute to New York's prominence in the early nineteenth century? David I. Spanagel explores the origins of American geology and the culture that promoted it in nineteenth-century New York. Focusing on Amos Eaton, the educator and amateur scientist who founded the Rensselaer School, and DeWitt Clinton, the masterful politician who led the movement for the Erie Canal, Spanagel shows how a cluster of assumptions about the peculiar landscape and entrepreneurial spirit of New York came to define the Empire State. In so doing, he sheds light on a particularly innovative and fruitful period of interplay among science, politics, art, and literature in American history.