Introduction. Diminishment: Partial Readings in the Casualties of Natural History; 1. Sketching American Species: Birds, Weeds, and Trees in Audubon, Cooper, and Pokagon; 2. “Because I see – New Englandly – ”: Emily Dickinson and the Specificity of Disjunction; 3. Coral of Life: James McCune Smith and the Diasporic Structure of Racial Uplift; 4. Thoreau's Dispersion: Writing a Natural History of Casualties.