"A Most Astonishing Genius for Calculations": Arithmetical Prodigies, the Science of the Mind, and Human Difference in the Early Republic.
In the early republic, two socially marginal, illiterate, and innumerate prodigies capable of astounding feats of mental arithmetic captivated audiences on both sides of the Atlantic: Thomas Fuller, an enslaved Virginian, and Zerah Colburn, the eight-year-old son of a poor Vermont farm family. To ac...
| Publicado en: | Journal of the Early Republic Vol. 42; no. 3; pp. 389 - 421 |
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| Formato: | Artículo |
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University of North Carolina Press
Fall2022
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=174427780&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 174427780 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 02751275 ERP jtl: Journal of the Early Republic issn: 02751275 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Fall2022 vid: 42 iid: 3 pid: 2027 pub: University of North Carolina Press artinfo: ui: 174427780 10.1353/jer.2022.0069 ppf: 389 ppct: 32 formats: fmt: – @attributes: type: T – @attributes: type: P size: 6.7MB tig: atl: "A Most Astonishing Genius for Calculations": Arithmetical Prodigies, the Science of the Mind, and Human Difference in the Early Republic. aug: au: Thornton, Tamara Plakins su: Gifted persons Mathematical ability Fuller, Thomas Colburn, Zerah Gauss, Carl Friedrich, 1777-1855 Thought & thinking Buxton, Jedediah United States history, 1783-1815 sug: subj: Gifted persons Mathematical ability Fuller, Thomas Colburn, Zerah Gauss, Carl Friedrich, 1777-1855 Thought & thinking Buxton, Jedediah United States history, 1783-1815 keyword: Arithmetic Benjamin Rush Calculation Enlightenment science Enlightenment thought Faculty psychology Genius Human difference Mathematics Memory Numeracy Phrenology Prodigies Psychology Race Race theory Science of the mind Social class Thomas Fuller Zerah Colburn ab: In the early republic, two socially marginal, illiterate, and innumerate prodigies capable of astounding feats of mental arithmetic captivated audiences on both sides of the Atlantic: Thomas Fuller, an enslaved Virginian, and Zerah Colburn, the eight-year-old son of a poor Vermont farm family. To account for the remarkable performances of such humbly situated prodigies, learned observers like Benjamin Rush and Dugald Stewart mobilized the contemporary science of the ostensibly universal human mind to construct and legitimize hierarchies of human difference, most explicitly race, less obviously class. The prodigies' unfamiliarity with letters and numerals raised a fundamental question: how did they do it, or in the context of the reigning model of the mind, which faculty enabled them to do it? In reply, men of learning passed over the exalted faculties of reasoning and imagination to the appropriately humble faculty of memory. That choice made sense in light of how most people learned and applied arithmetic. Given that computational skill in this era functioned alongside literary, artistic, and scientific achievement as the mark of a group's potential for genius, it also averted the attribution of genius to Fuller and Colburn by establishing a congruence between a rank-ordered ladder of faculties and a hierarchy of human groups. In the riddle of the calculating prodigies, Enlightenment thinkers thus established an intellectual grounding for an explicitly racial science of the human body by covertly ranking the "universal" human mind. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y custom: Copyright of Journal of the Early Republic is the property of University of North Carolina Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites without the copyright holder's express written permission. Additionally, content may not be used with any artificial intelligence tools or machine learning technologies. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. item: Journal of the Early Republic holder: University of North Carolina Press dt: @attributes: year: 2022 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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