The first science book written in British North America was the work of the botanist William Bartram (1739-1823), a Philadelphia Quaker. Still in print, the book is usually referred to as Bartram’s Travels, but its full title, in the commodious style of the eighteenth century, is

The book was an important influence on a number of English Romantic authors, notably Coleridge. Read a century after Romanticism, its vistas of the past are now not just vividly evocative but poignant: the battle of the alligators; the virgin forests of magnolia filled with the cry of the now extinct Carolina parakeet.

And if you read Bartram you’ll learn too that what the title calls extensive territories were home to a fully developed culture, now extirpated. About that your reading matter is this ephemeral item dating from May 23, 2021.