Frontiers of Science

Natural knowledge” (“a catchall term that embraces science as well as other approaches to studying nature”) was a sought-after commodity in the multicultural exchanges taking place in the territories that Cameron B. Strang identifies as the Gulf South borderlands (now the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida), particularly from the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century (p. 8). Strang argues that the particular and significant history of this frontier has been overlooked in standard histories of science, and he points to a series of sometimes-eccentric but always-compelling actors—Indians, Africans, Europeans, and emerging North American nationalists—to illustrate their investigation and intersecting uses of plants, topographical information, peoples, and even the heavens. His inquiry into their natural-knowledge interactions is set against the backdrop of often-violent territorial and political confrontations on sites contested by the Spanish and French, and the expanding young nation. It provides a welcome counterpoint to an earlier historiography that focused on urban centers as they accumulated information and established visible institutions for science. Men and a few women situated between the Caribbean and North America negotiated their multicultural space by emphasizing its possibilities in ways that were locally relevant and not closely defined by the categories and techniques brought by outsiders. Using an impressive array of manuscripts and rare books, Strang traces the lives of ambitious and curious Indians, traders, soldiers, translators, missionaries, planters, and others who utilized their personal experiences, direct observation, and a diverse range of informants to establish a fundamental understanding of the lands they occupied, however temporarily

Archaeology · Counterpoint · Frontier · Historiography · Multiculturalism · Natural (archaeology · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · American Environmental and Regional History · American History and Culture · Archaeology and Natural History · History · Law