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Fronting Maria Helena Machado's fifty-page introductory essay an iconic photograph of the young William James, wearing sun glasses, well-cut frock coat and trousers, and a fashionable hat. These, along with his patrician background, would make him a stylish addition to any gathering from the mid-nineteenth century on. The largely unknown Harvard medical student was to become a key figure in America's fin de siecle intellectual life. William was a founder of the nascent fields of psychology and comparative religion and a major influence on that most American of philosophies, pragmatism. His brother, the great novelist Henry James, would explore similar ideas through his extraordinary novels, especially their compelling "portraits of ladies." Henry James Sr. was a wealthy, eccentric Swedenborgian who oversaw a close, complex, iconoclastic and eclectically educated family.

As adjunct to, but also diversion from, his medical training, young Will sought and secured, with his father's help, a place on the Harvard Natural History Museum's Thayer Brazil Expedition. Led by the renowned Louis Agassiz, director of the museum and holder of creationist/scientific racist ideas, the expedition comprised other American princelings, among them Stephen van Rensselaer Thayer, whose financier father paid for the eponymous expedition, and Newton Dexter, an avid sportsman and crack shot. The Thayer Expedition also included the renowned geologist Charles Frederick Hartt, who did a great deal to establish his discipline in Brazil, and the naturalist artist Jacques Burkhardt. Such travel was all the scientific rage in the Anglophone world...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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