Frontiers of science : imperialism and natural knowledge in the Gulf South borderlands, 1500-1850

Resource Information

The work Frontiers of science : imperialism and natural knowledge in the Gulf South borderlands, 1500-1850 represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in European University Institute. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Frontiers of science : imperialism and natural knowledge in the Gulf South borderlands, 1500-1850

Title remainder

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

Statement of responsibility

Cameron B. Strang

Creator

• Strang, Cameron B

Contributor

• Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture

Publisher

• Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture

Subject

• Europe -- Colonies | History
• Nature study -- Gulf States -- History
• Nature study -- Political aspects -- Gulf States
• Borderlands -- History
• United States -- Territorial expansion | History

Language

eng

Summary

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.--

Assigning source

Provided by publisher

Government publication

government publication of a state province territory dependency etc

Illustrations

• illustrations
• maps

Index

index present

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography