Well produced and scholarly, the book has several weaknesses, and its title innocently perpetrates two deceits. A surprising absence of retrospective evaluations by scientists presumably reflects planning policy. Notwithstanding North American in the subtitle, neither Canada nor Canadians receive appropriate attention. Failure to signal clearly that the explorations covered were almost all nineteenth-century events is unforgivable. The colonial era had its significant field scientists.
Illustrations are few, dull, and never original.
The most serious weakness by far is the absence of attempts to present the chapters as being representative of an ongoing research agenda, stress commonalities, highlight truly innovative contributions, spot lacunae, and predict ways ahead. Given that readers are left to make their own evaluations and reach their own conclusions about this still small subbranch of North American thematic history, I offer mine, though without the assurance that the evidence is representative. Since the book-length reviews of the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s, the field has diversified, as exemplified in chapters on landscape painting and on illustrations in government publications and popular magazines. The field is employing new methods of analysis, as in a study of the causes and consequences for science of the division of work space between crew and scientists on voyages of exploration. Awareness of inevitable and sometimes deliberate subjectivity is replacing innocent assumptions of objectivity, as in an excellent chapter on the creation of a national geography in the early republic.