Biologists and the promise of American life: from Meriwether Lewis to Alfred Kinsey

Introduction: Toward a cultural history of American biology

PART I: NATURALISTS AND NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: Natural history and manifest destiny, 1800-1865

Culturing fish, culturing people: Federal naturalists in the Gilded Age, 1865-1893

Conflicting visions of American ecological independence

PART II: SPECIALIZATION AND ORGANIZATION: Prologue: Whitman's American biology

Life science initiatives in the late Nineteenth Century

Academic biology: searching for order in life

A place of their own: the significance of Woods Hole

PART III: THE AGE OF BIOLOGY: Prologue: A view from the heights

The development of high school biology

Big questions

Good breeding in modern America

Epilogue.