The influential 19th century intellectual Alexander von Humboldt was a Prussian polymath, geographer, naturalist, explorer, and proponent of Romantic philosophy and science who visited the United States in 1804 to meet President Thomas Jefferson, whose writings Humboldt had taken to heart. Smithsonian American Art Museum curator Eleanor Jones Harvey, author of Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature and Culture, illuminates Humboldt's efforts to influence American cultural values through the visual arts, sciences, literature, and politics.