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Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500-1850 (Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American … and the University of North Carolina Press)

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Description

Cameron Strang takes American scientific thought and discoveries away from the learned societies, museums, and teaching halls of the Northeast and puts the production of knowledge about the flora and fauna in the context of competing empires and an expanding republic in the Gulf South. People regularly dismissed by starched northeasterners as nonintellectuals–Indian sages, African slaves, Spanish officials, Irishmen at the make, clearers of land and drivers of men–were also scientific observers, gatherers, organizers, and reporters. Skulls and stems, birds and bugs, rocks and maps, tall tales and fertile hypotheses came from them. They collected, described, and sent the objects that scientists gazed on and interpreted in polite Philadelphia. They made knowledge.

Frontiers of Science offers a new framework for approaching American intellectual history, one that transcends political and cultural boundaries and reveals persistence around the colonial and national eras. The pursuit of knowledge in the US didn’t cohere around democratic politics or the influence of liberty. It was once, as in other empires, divided by more than one loyalties and identities, organized through contested hierarchies of ethnicity and place, and reliant on violence. By discovering the lost intellectual history of one region, Strang shows us tips on how to recuperate a continent for science.

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