Thomas Jefferson thought size mattered and could contribute to American pride in the early Republic. Jefferson took umbrage at Frenchman George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon’s magisterial international best-selling Historie Naturelle. In the process of describing the mineral and animal kingdoms, de Buffon argued that plants and animals found in both the old and new worlds were degraded, smaller in the new world than those in the old world. Jefferson and others were thus fascinated with mastodon bones found in the early Republic, bones that signaled a gigantic animal that had roamed, and perhaps roamed even yet, in the American west.
We’ll talk about how Jefferson, American naturalists, museum leaders, and regular people became enamored of the mastodon in the early republic as they sought to define themselves against Europeans.
