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.
Author(s): Cameron B. Strang
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Year: 2018
Language: English
Pages: 376
City: Chapel Hill
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Abbreviations and Short Titles
INTRODUCTION: The Significance of the Frontier in American Knowledge
CHAPTER 1. Violence, Competition, and Exchange in the Early Colonial Era
CHAPTER 2. Knowledge, Weakness, and Narrative in the Late Eighteenth Century
CHAPTER 3. Astronomy and U.S. Expansion in the Lower Mississippi Valley
CHAPTER 4. Allegiance, Identities, and National Scientific Communities
CHAPTER 5. Ethnography and Intelligence in the Time of Conquest
CHAPTER 6. Deep History, Deep South: Slavery and Geology in the Antebellum Era
CHAPTER 7. Skulls, Scalps, and Seminoles
EPILOGUE: How the West Was Known
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
Y
Z
