The Chancellorsville Campaign

The Chancellorsville Campaign of early May 1863 was one of the most strategic military operations in any theater of the American Civil War. Union Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker and his powerful Army of the Potomac were miraculously defeated by the outnumbered Confederate Army of Northern Virginia under the leadership of Gen. Robert E. Lee and Lt. Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson. In a daring flank march and attack, the Rebels crushed the federal Eleventh Corps on May 2 and over the next several days hammered the rest of Hooker’s army back across the Rappahannock River. Northern morale sank, Copperheads gained momentum, and German Americans, feeling the sting of nativism, began to question their role in the Union. The initiative in the East once again passed to the South, creating conditions for what became the Pennsylvania Campaign. But Jackson, wounded accidentally by his own men, died, destroying the fragile command team Lee had carefully built over the previous year. His loss was a turning point in the war.

Mind the step: did Hooker's judgement clinch Darwin's disenchantment?

The decade from 1844 to 1854 in which Charles Darwin first published two books and then studied barnacles for the final eight years has long been a puzzling digression from the development of his theory of evolution. This essay proposes that it was a conjunction of two quite different activities: a three-year pause initiated to assess and hopefully finalize the editorial completion of his 1844 Essay for publication, followed by a step-change decision to redirect his primary research activity in late 1847. A disenchantment hypothesis is proposed; it presents the step-change decision as a consequence of weighing up the accumulated unencouraging prospects for species-theory development in competition with the emergence of promising projections associated with a broad study of marine invertebrates. Recognition of the triumph, as Darwin initially saw it, of his Essay, followed by years of hostile inputs, opens this new route to understanding this decade. Within it Joseph Hooker emerges as a significant causal force. Many of the customary ‘postponement’ explanations of this digression can be integrated with this pause-and-step-change explanation, whereas explanation of the interval as a gap due to a pre-planned activity cannot, and is revealed to be seriously faulty.

Discovery and Patriarchy

This chapter focuses on the famous botanist and director of the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, Joseph Hooker, and his journeys in South Asia. Joseph Hooker’s journeys provide a typical case study of a significant shift in the network of exchange from a diversity of people engaged in botanical “discovery” to a white, male-dominated profession. While professional botanists such as Joseph Hooker relied on indigenous knowledge about cultivation, soil erosion, adaptation and medicinal uses of plants collected in British holdings, local collectors who performed the majority of the work increasingly became silent partners in “discovery.” Botany and the expansion of Empire are intimately tied during the mid-nineteenth century and the hardening of the colonial categories of race, class and gender is evidenced by this shift towards botany as an exclusionary science. The professionalization of botany led to the exclusion of women and colonial subjects from the science of discovery.

PLANT SPECIES DESCRIBED BY GEORGE BENTHAM AND JOSEPH HOOKER IN HENDERSON AND HUME'S LAHORE TO YĀRKAND

Five plant species (Apocynum hendersonii Hook.f. (Apocynaceae), Deyeuxia anthoxanthoides Munro ex Hook.f. (Gramineae), Hololachna shawiana Hook.f. (Tamaricaceae), Iphiona radiata Benth. (Compositae) and Saussurea ovata Benth. (Compositae)) were described from specimens collected by George Henderson on the political mission to Yarkand (now in Xinjiang Province of China) in 1870. The names, with accompanying descriptions and illustrations, appeared in Lahore to Yārkand by Henderson and A. O. Hume. An exact publication date of 1 April 1873 is established for this work of relevance to avian as well as plant taxonomy. The typification of the plant species names to specimens in the Kew herbarium is reviewed. Four new lectotypes are proposed.

The natural history review (1854–1865)

The natural history review was a quarterly founded in 1854 by Edward Perceval Wright, then an undergraduate student of zoology at Trinity College Dublin. Its first editorial committee (1856–1860) held traditional views of natural history. By 1860 The natural history review had failed, ostensibly for lack of subscribers, and Wright put it in the hands of Thomas Henry Huxley who, together with Joseph Hooker, John Tyndall and others, was then looking for a vehicle to disseminate the agenda of what Huxley later called “scientific naturalism”. Against advice from his friends, Darwin, Lyell and Hooker, Huxley accepted the editorship, preserving the title but giving The natural history review a new direction by replacing the former editorial team with some of his like-minded colleagues. Extant correspondence between several of these comprises dozens of letters in which The natural history review (1861–1865) was discussed. By the end of 1862 Huxley had given up on it, but the periodical survived until July 1865 with Hooker at the head. Throughout this second series, Charles Darwin exercised an unofficial, effective, and to today's eyes, ethically questionable editorial role. The natural history review ceased publication under Hooker in 1865. Competition from other publications, the lack of a clear purpose and the prevalence of ideology over business sense in the editor-in-chief were the likely reasons for its repeated failures.