Kingsland, Sharon E. (Advisor)
Thode, Simon (Author)
The dissertation addresses an historiographical neglect in histories of US science: the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century concerns over humanity's place in nature. It focuses on the role of the observational sciences in the development of the United States, specifically its trans-Appalachian frontier, between 1763 and 1814. It argues that maps and texts produced on expeditions into the west, using practices in astronomy, geography, military reconnaissance, land surveying, and natural history, helped inhabitants of the young nation understand and organize the world in which they lived. Despite a diversity of intentions, those who ventured into the North American interior shared a common set of scientific tools, both physical and intellectual: instruments, cartographic conventions, systems of classification, authoritative literature, and networks of informants. Through a process of observing unfamiliar lands, they created natural knowledge which circulated back to more populated eastern communities. Representations of the landscape found in reconnaissance reports, maps, and topographical descriptions were composed by, and addressed to, members of scientific societies, government functionaries, travelers, and common settlers. Over time, these works came to reproduce a common set of geographical features and natural productions that, through the expectations of readers, became what I have termed the archetype of a region. The archetypical landscape of the trans-Appalachian West allowed US citizens to comprehend the wilderness, in order to use it as an object in commercial, military, legal, and political pursuits. Employing practices from the colonial past, this science made a vast new world understandable by reducing it to a series of regions with shared features and specimens. In the end, this process helped connect the commercial and political ideas of the nation to the geographical and physical descriptions of territory, in essence making the conception of the American nation inseparable from the landscapes described within archetypical and authoritative texts. Chapters cover types of scientific observational practice, uses of military reconnaissance through the period, changes to civilian surveying in the Old Northwest, popular forms of knowledge used by western settlers, and changing representations of the Old Southwest in geographical texts through the first three decades of US settlement.
...MoreDescription Cited in Dissertation Abstracts International-A 75/02(E), Aug 2014. Proquest Document ID: 1467534612.
Book
Inglis, Robin;
(2008)
Historical Dictionary of the Discovery and Exploration of the Northwest Coast of America
(/isis/citation/CBB001033370/)
Article
McCorristine, Shane;
(2013)
“Involuntarily We Listen”: Hearing the Aurora Borealis in Nineteenth-Century Arctic Exploration and Science
(/isis/citation/CBB001320858/)
Chapter
McGhie, Henry A.;
(2013)
Images, Ideas, and Ideals: Thinking with and about Ross's Gull
(/isis/citation/CBB001500478/)
Article
Peters, Rosemary A.;
(2009)
Mapping the Desert: Arthur Rimbaud, Charles de Foucauld, and the Société de Géographie, 1884--85
(/isis/citation/CBB001034164/)
Article
Groeben, Christiane;
(2004)
Impact of Travels on Scientific Knowledge: Ralum (New Britain): A Research Station (1894--1897) Sponsored by the Naples Zoological Station
(/isis/citation/CBB001036113/)
Book
Withers, Charles W. J.;
(2010)
Geography and Science in Britain, 1831--1939: A Study of the British Association for the Advancement of Science
(/isis/citation/CBB001034352/)
Book
Wolfgang Steinicke;
(2021)
William Herschel Discoverer of the Deep Sky: The epochal work of the greatest visual observer and his talented sister Caroline
(/isis/citation/CBB218557286/)
Article
Appelbaum, Nancy P.;
(2013)
Reading the Past on the Mountainsides of Colombia: Mid-Nineteenth-Century Patriotic Geology, Archaeology, and Historiography
(/isis/citation/CBB001202055/)
Book
Fryxell, Fritiof;
Anderson, Richard C.;
Salstrom, Phil;
Salstrom, Paul;
(2010)
Ferdinand Hayden: A Young Scientist in the Great West, 1853--1855
(/isis/citation/CBB001251899/)
Article
Junqueira, Mary Anne;
(2012)
Os objetivos da circunavegação da U.S. Exploring Expedition (1838--1842): longitude, mapeamento náutico e instituição das coordenadas geográficas modernas
(/isis/citation/CBB001420571/)
Book
Glover, Denise M.;
Harrell, Stevan;
McKhann, Charles F.;
Swain, Margaret Byrne;
(2011)
Explorers and Scientists in China's Borderlands, 1880--1950
(/isis/citation/CBB001214669/)
Article
Matthew R. Halley;
(2023)
The forgotten history of Oreortyx pictus (mountain quail), discovered by the Lewis and Clark expedition, 1806
(/isis/citation/CBB125017860/)
Book
Maximilian of Wied, ;
Witte, Stephen S.;
Gallagher, Marsha V.;
(2008)
The North American Journals of Maximilian of Wied
(/isis/citation/CBB001023203/)
Article
Morey, G. B;
(1999)
Newton Horace Winchell, the George Armstrong Custer Expedition of 1874, and the “Discovery” of Gold in the Black Hills, Dakota Territory, U. S. A.
(/isis/citation/CBB000111716/)
Thesis
Robinson, Michael Frederick;
(2002)
The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture, 1850--1910
(/isis/citation/CBB001562504/)
Article
Froggatt, Peter;
Walker, Brian M.;
(2012)
From Precocious Fame to Mature Obscurity: David Walker (1837--1917) MD, LRSCIi, Surgeon and Naturalist to the Fox Arctic Expedition of 1857--59
(/isis/citation/CBB001200784/)
Book
Starbuck, Nicole;
(2013)
Baudin, Napoleon and the Exploration of Australia
(/isis/citation/CBB001201503/)
Book
Klaver, J. M. I.;
(2009)
Scientific Expeditions to the Arab World (1761--1881)
(/isis/citation/CBB001034377/)
Book
Day, David;
(2013)
Antarctica: A Biography
(/isis/citation/CBB001421625/)
Book
Hill, David;
(2013)
The Great Race: The Race between the English and the French to Complete the Map of Australia
(/isis/citation/CBB001201480/)
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