LAUSR.org creates dashboard-style pages of related content for over 1.5 million academic articles. Sign Up to like articles & get recommendations!

Liquid Landscape: Geography and Settlement at the Edge of Early America

Photo from wikipedia

geology. Strang highlights the significance of Gulf Coast enslavers and their networks for naturalists in Philadelphia, and by extension, the central role violence – and especially plantation slavery – played… Click to show full abstract

geology. Strang highlights the significance of Gulf Coast enslavers and their networks for naturalists in Philadelphia, and by extension, the central role violence – and especially plantation slavery – played in American intellectual life. We see how the collection of geologic specimens relied on the labor of enslaved people, and how theoretical arguments at the vanguard of geology were being used by some to argue for the expansion of slavery. The final chapter of the book focuses upon the Seminole War, which, as Strang frames it, was “fought over and against the bodies of the dead” (p. 287). Strang traces how war shaped the practice of American science, but also how violence toward the dead, especially through rituals accompanying scalp collecting, contributed to the formation of a shared identity that has helped Florida Seminoles “resist subjugation through the nineteenth century and beyond” (p. 322). This final chapter illustrates the broad thrust of the book – that knowledge was generated and circulated by more diverse individuals and communities than our current narratives seem to acknowledge or incorporate, and that all of this occurred within a social world structured by imperialism and violence. Given the multicentury reach of Strang’s project, readers of this journal might be particularly interested in Frontiers of Science because of the context it provides for transformations often placed later in the century. In particular, it suggests that historians should look earlier, and further east, for the features and roots of the imperial expansion that defined much of the latter part of nineteenth-century U.S. history. Strang concludes by articulating the stakes for expanding who is part of American intellectual history in the past and in our present. He writes, “If America’s intellectual history continues to be told essentially as a story about Anglos working in isolation from the rest of the continent... it will also remain easy for huge portions of the population to rally behind a narrow version of America’s cultural past and use this vision to justify ongoing exclusion and inequality” (p. 344). In Frontiers of Science, Cameron Strang makes a compelling case for revisiting – and recentering – howwe think about the sites, vectors, and contexts for knowledge production in early America. Putting U.S. imperialism at the center opens up new throughlines to follow and new questions to pursue, and fits well with recent scholarship focused on U.S. empire in the long Progressive Era.

Keywords: geography; early america; strang; geology; century; history

Journal Title: American Nineteenth Century History
Year Published: 2020

Link to full text (if available)


Share on Social Media:                               Sign Up to like & get
recommendations!

Related content

More Information              News              Social Media              Video              Recommended



                Click one of the above tabs to view related content.