Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500-1850

by Cameron B. Strang

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781469640488
Publisher:	Omohundro Institute and UNC Press
Publication date:	06/13/2018
Series:	Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	376
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Cameron B. Strang is assistant professor of history at the University of Nevada, Reno.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

A mind-bending and deeply important book, Frontiers of Science pulls intellectual history and the history of science in the early American republic away from elite literate men on the East Coast. On the Southern borderlands, the reader meets a striking array of men and women as full characters contributing to global ideas about nature in an imperial age.—Kathleen DuVal, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill



Cameron Strang's fascinating Frontiers of Science argues that the clash of empires in the colonial and early national American South animated a wide range of knowledge projects, from cartography and astronomy to geology and ethnology. Strikingly, Strang shows that these were not merely the hobbies of elite white men but involved a wide and unruly cast of characters often left out of histories of science in early America.—Adam Rothman, Georgetown University



Frontiers of Science is a landmark book that will reorient our understanding of early American science and empire for years to come. Strang brilliantly takes us beyond the laboratories and gardens of the Northeast into the borderlands where knowledge was forged through dramatic encounters between Indians, Africans, and Europeans, profoundly shaping the early Republic.—James Delbourgo, Rutgers University

Editorial Reviews

Uses individual case studies to explore the interconnections and intrigue in the Gulf southwest as Americans forced out those competing for control. . . . Recommended.—Choice Reviews



[A] powerful and clear-eyed assessment of both the history and historiography of U.S. science . . . . So carefully and thoroughly researched and situated that it is difficult to know how Strang could have added more to this challenging, crucial contribution to the field.—Western Historical Quarterly



A superbly researched and original history of science in early America.—American Historical Review



Strang unearths enduring legacies of imperialism, slavery, and violence amid a patchwork of shifting allegiances. . . . Frontiers of Science explodes a view of American science drawn from a limited focus on the urban Northeast. . . . A must-read for Americanists and historians of science alike.—Reviews in American History



Among the most ambitious and imaginative studies written so far in this budding field of early American history. . . . It took an especially adventurous and versatile historian to cross the national and linguistic boundaries required to reveal the scope, intensity, and specific contours of imperial dependence on American knowledge.—William and Mary Quarterly



Detailed, comprehensive . . . Frontiers of Science is at once a history of competing empires and of colorful personalities.—Journal of Southern History



In Frontiers of Science, Cameron Strang creates a new framework for understanding the history of natural knowledge in early North America. . . . One of the many strengths . . . is Strang's meticulous archival research as he followed the "interesting" (6) and "bizarre" (7) stories of a very diverse cast of historical figures.—Southwestern Historical Quarterly



It is not just the ample and striking new evidence that Strang provides that makes this book original and noteworthy. At least as important are the innovative conceptual frameworks he uses and the sophisticated arguments he makes. . . . It is undeniable that Frontiers of Science has provided scholars with a vital and persuasive reframing; it seems likely to become a major landmark in reshaping the historiography of early American science.—Isis



Strang's captivating study Frontiers of Science challenges long-standing historical consensus on the relationship between knowledge creation and empire in early America. . . . Strang's numerous stories . . . reflect the exhaustive and downright impressive scope of his research. . . . [and succeed] in recovering important voices, many of them non-Anglos, in shaping and contesting knowledge from early contact through the early republic.—H-AmIndian Reviews



While the convergences of empire, science, and race might seem familiar to some, Strang's ability to illustrate the longue duree, the precariousness, and the complexity of these interrelated processes over the course of three-and-a-half-centuries – while considering a host of Euro-American empires, peoples, and source bases – is simply astounding. . . . [A] monumental contribution.—Journal of Early American History

From the Publisher