European University Institute Library

Frontiers of science, imperialism and natural knowledge in the Gulf South borderlands, 1500-1850, Cameron B. Strang

eng

Includes bibliographical references and index

government publication of a state province territory dependency etc

illustrationsmaps

index present

non fiction

Frontiers of science

bibliography

1022987364

Cameron B. Strang

imperialism and natural knowledge in the Gulf South borderlands, 1500-1850

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 natural world in the context of competing empires and an expanding republic in the Gulf South. People often dismissed by starched northeasterners as nonintellectuals--Indian sages, African slaves, Spanish officials, Irishmen on 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 across the colonial and national eras. The pursuit of knowledge in the United States did not cohere around democratic politics or the influence of liberty. It was, as in other empires, divided by multiple 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 how to recover a continent for science.--, Provided by publisher

Introduction : the significance of the frontier in American knowledge -- Violence, competition, and exchange in the early colonial era -- Knowledge, weakness, and narrative in the late eighteenth century -- Astronomy and U.S. expansion in the Lower Mississippi valley -- Allegiance, identities, and national scientific communities -- Ethnography and intelligence in the time of conquest -- Deep history, deep South : slavery and geology in the antebellum era -- Skulls, scalps, and Seminoles -- Epilogue : how the west was known