Download The Book That Changed America: How Darwin's Theory of Evolution Ignited a Nation AudioBook Free
The compelling story of the effect of Charles Darwin's booklet On the Origin of Varieties on the diverse band of American freelance writers, abolitionists, and public reformers, including Henry David Thoreau and Bronson Alcott, in 1860. In early 1860, an individual copy of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Varieties was read and reviewed by five important American intellectuals who seized on the book's assertion of a common ancestry for many creatures as a powerful debate against slavery. The booklet first came into the hands of Harvard botanist Asa Grey, who would lead the deal with for the theory in America. Grey passed his closely annotated copy to the child welfare reformer Charles Loring Brace, who noticed value in natural selection's idea that mankind was destined to endure intensifying improvement. Brace then created the booklet to three other friends: Franklin Sanborn, a key supporter of the abolitionist John Dark brown, who grasped that Darwin's depiction of regular struggle and countless competition perfectly described America in 1860, especially the ongoing conflict between pro- and antislavery pushes; the philosopher Bronson Alcott, who resisted Darwin's insights as a risk to transcendental idealism; and Henry David Thoreau, who used Darwin's theory to redirect the work he would pursue till the finish of his life regarding types migration and the interconnectedness of nature. The Booklet That Changed America offers a remarkable narrative account of the prominent information as they grappled during the period of that 12 months with Darwin's dangerous hypotheses. In doing so, it provides new perspectives on America prior to the Civil War, showing how Darwin's ideas become powerful ammunition in the argument over slavery and helped improve the reason for abolition by giving it scientific credibility.
