Curious Species: How Animals Made Natural History

Can corals build worlds? Do rattlesnakes enchant? What is a raccoon, and what might it know? Animals and the questions they raised thwarted human efforts to master nature during the so-called Enlightenment-a historical moment when rigid classification pervaded the study of natural history, people traded in people, and imperial avarice wrapped its tentacles around the globe. Whitney Barlow Robles makes animals the unruly protagonists of eighteenth-century science through journeys to four spa...