Gulf South borderlands history is maturing rapidly. Early twentieth-century foundational studies highlighted by works such as Verner Crane's The Southern Frontier, 1670-1732 (1928) approached the past in the region mainly from a Turnerian perspective with much emphasis on colonial treaties and settlers and less analysis of colonized peoples. Subsequent works with similar themes appeared intermittently for the next sixty years or so until scholars trained in New Western and Ethnohistory paradigms produced a flurry of studies in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, exemplified by Daniel H. Usner Jr.’s Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley Before 1783 (1992). These works had a much broader focus, addressing native and African/African American peoples as significant, independent actors who helped shape life in the region as much as those colonizing it. Cameron Strang, in Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500-1850, both continues this evolution and establishes a new sophistication for studying the Gulf South's history. Primarily, while building on the work of Usner and his contemporaries, Strang illustrates the expanding scope of historians researching the region while better integrating what happened there with broader themes of North American life and U.S. expansion from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.
Strang addresses cross-cultural patterns of engagement not as the sole focus of his work but as a means of examining the pursuit of “natural” information acquisition in North America by colonizers from Europe and the nascent United States. Pursuits of knowledge on the climate, soil, flora, and fauna of the Gulf South led Atlantic coastal “scientists”, concentrated mainly in Philadelphia, to depend on both early settlers in the region and the local native and enslaved African/African American populations to acquire samples and explain natural phenomena. While the work of these peoples alternately took place through willful collaborations and hostile engagements, according to Strang, all occurred in the context of imperialism, with results typically leading to additional settler expansion. Much information gleaned from the efforts helped establish an early American scientific literature that more often than not benefitted the United States and marginalized non-white populations who often undergirded the process.
This book covers a significant period (350 years) across seven thematically-oriented chapters. In them, as well as an introduction and epilogue, Strang addresses his topic through studies of violence, exchange, narratives of science, astronomy, loyalties, identities, ethnography, slavery, geology, corpse desecration, and knowledge formation, among other factors. He strives to explain the influences of Spanish, French, English and U.S. colonists as well as native peoples of various affiliations (Seminoles receiving the most treatment) as vital to the above exercises, generally through transitory joint-efforts. A similar approach is taken with enslaved peoples in the region, though the source base is thinner in this regard and few individuals receive attention. By the book's conclusion, Strang successfully has shown that while most attempts to gain natural knowledge in the Gulf South were not coordinated, often stemmed from competition, and occasionally involved violence, over the years detectable patterns emerged for how this information could be obtained and synthesized to promote both science and territorial boundary creation.
Strang's evidence for his claims primarily comes in the form of “detailed case studies”, (20) which are generally useful in validating his points. Depictions of the map produced by the Tawsa Indian Lamhatty, the astronomical studies of planter William Dunbar, and the mostly nameless and countless African American slaves who often provided the labour to acquire natural knowledge possible, demonstrate the interrelated efforts of all populations in the region. While these case studies blur together at points and predominantly focus on late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century individuals, together they provide more than enough evidence to substantiate the book's arguments.
Readers will find other aspects of the book to be thought-provoking and problematic. Some may consider the author's definition of natural knowledge overly expansive with few constraints, and thus applicable to almost anything. Others will question the heavy emphasis on later years to the detriment of content on the pre-eighteenth-century period. Many will be skeptical of the author's assertion that “Some of the early republic's most prominent men of science enthusiastically promoted the scientific achievements of Gulf South blacks” (211) based on the evidence provided. Historians of early national Florida, among others, may challenge the statement that “The Second Seminole War was the defining moment of the Florida Seminoles’ ethnogenesis” (289), an application of the origin-concept to this native group at that time has typically defied consensus.
Nevertheless, most readers will learn much from Strang's study and appreciate the gaps it fills. The Gulf South borderlands provide an alternative setting for evaluating North America's development in a variety of areas. By emphasizing their role in creating scientific data and ways of obtaining it, Strang magnifies one such area. The chief value of his work, however, lies in how it transitions Gulf South studies into a phase where deciphering the interaction of populations is not the principal objective, but instead a means of understanding multiple, other aspects of borderlands society from both a regional and continental perspective.
