Frontiers of Science: 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 observe...