Beggars and Kings: Marginalized People in the Discourses of Early American Scientific Societies (2022)
Seeman, Erik (Advisor)
Nero, Andrea (Author)
Seeman, Erik
State University of New York at Buffalo
Physical Details: 338
Language: English
Through their membership in scientific societies, eighteenth-century American gentlemen served as gatekeepers of participation in scientific inquiry. Early American scientific societies excluded poor to middling white men, Indians, blacks and women, yet these outsiders continued to practice science outside of formal organizations. These excluded groups also participated in the societies as sources of knowledge and subjects of inquiry, making them vital to the work of organizations like the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In their discourses on these outsider groups, the societies used scientific reasoning to mark blacks, Indians, the lower classes and women as inferiors. Although cognitively-dissonant, the scientific elite were desirous of the knowledge of those they felt beneath them, particularly when it originated from black and Indian communities, who were depicted as “primitive” or “savage.” These gentleman scientists often took knowledge from outsider groups without giving them credit for their ideas. By being the first to publish, the white men of the societies gained authorship and authority over the knowledge developed by women, Indians, blacks and the lower sorts. Through their efforts to colonize knowledge on the American continent, elite men created positions of authority for themselves within the realm of science. The work undertaken by society members under the guise of science helped solidify systemic inequality in the early United States through their promotion and circulation of sexist, racist and classist material that worked to define the ideal American as white, wealthy, formally-educated, well-connected and male.
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