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This essay focuses on the history of psychometry, the science of soul measuring. For its founder, Dr Joseph Rodes Buchanan, the soul was simultaneously an object for anthropological research and a measuring instrument capable of revealing human character, interpreting natural history, and demonstrating the reality of an immortal soul. Psychometry taught that human souls, especially those of women, were capable of acting as instruments because they could feel the mysterious energies that people and objects radiated. Although orthodox male scientists rejected the visions of sensitive women as the antithesis of reliable data, psychometric researchers believed that the feelings of women were both the instruments and information that made their science possible. Psychometry promised to revolutionize science by insisting that sympathy and subjectivity, not detachment and objectivity, ought to undergird research. Yet as male experimenters worked to prove psychometry’s effectiveness, they almost invariably cast themselves as detached observers accurately recording the data provided by their female instruments. Thus, despite pushing for scientific reform, the methods and discourse of male psychometric experimenters eroded their field’s core arguments about connectedness and subjectivity and, instead, reinforced the notion that detachment and objectivity were essential to legitimate science. Challenges to objectivity could prove just how thoroughly it dominated scientific discourse and practice. Still, some psychometers, particularly women who practiced at home, were untroubled by the fact that their research was predicated on subjective feelings, and psychometry remained a viable pursuit among spiritualists even as it faded from the realm of science. Psychometry emerged and, ultimately, fractured amid tensions between widespread enthusiasm for sciences that emphasized spiritual connectedness and the mounting pressure to legitimize scientific knowledge through the language and practices of objectivity.

This chapter examines natural knowledge among natives and newcomers from the 1500s to the mid-1700s. It suggests that European-Indian encounters generated new knowledge, patronage relationships, and webs of exchange that affected intellectual life among both groups. The chapter includes sections on conquistadors in sixteenth-century Florida, patronage networks in Florida’s mission communities, cartography and the Indian slave trade, and the networks through which Europeans and Indians exchanged specimens and commodities. In short, Europeans and natives valued knowledge and the experts who produced it as sources of power and, from the 1500s through the 1700s, learned about their mutually new world during encounters involving violence, geopolitical competition, and exchange.

Although the Second Seminole War marked the effective end of the Gulf South as a borderland, encounters instigated by imperialism in the Southwest continued to affect the pursuit of knowledge in America. The rise of the Smithsonian Institution and the extension of U.S. governance into the West were interrelated processes: territorial expansion influenced the Smithsonian’s foundational mandate and early activities, while the Smithsonian organized, facilitated, and patronized an array of expansion-promoting scientific projects in collaboration with federal officials. The relationship between the conquest of the Southwest and the emergence of the Smithsonian reflects that violence, competition, exchange, and encounters with the environment and history were still inextricable from knowledge production at both the local and imperial levels.

This chapter introduces the history of knowledge in the Gulf South and why it matters to American intellectual history on the whole. It also presents the book’s main argument, which is that encounters in America’s borderlands shaped the production, circulation, and application of natural knowledge within these contested regions and, more broadly, throughout the empires and nations competing for them. The expansion of European powers and the United States were the primary motors that drove these encounters. Between the 1500s and the mid-1800s, Spanish, British, French, and U.S. imperialism brought hitherto unconnected individuals, nations, and environments into intellectually productive (though often physically destructive) contact. These expansion-instigated encounters, moreover, resulted in new material, social, and political circumstances that influenced how people created and shared natural knowledge.

U.S. expansion into the lower Mississippi Valley from 1795 to 1810 evinced and inspired many of the ways that officials and experts in the early United States used astronomy to promote territorial growth. Yet Anglo-Americans did not simply export scientific practices to the United States’ new territories. Peaceful and violent encounters among Spaniards and Anglos, masters and slaves, inhabitants and administrators, and whites and Indians all shaped the practice of astronomy in the Gulf South and, moreover, influenced how astronomy and imperialism overlapped in the United States on the whole. Geopolitical competition motivated the work of the Spanish and U.S. commissions of the Florida boundary survey (1798–1800), violence against slaves enabled astronomers like William Dunbar to perform disciplined observations, and interimperial exchanges of data made José Joaquín de Ferrer y Cafranga a prominent figure in the United States’ scientific community.

This chapter focuses on the Second Seminole War (1835–1842) and how whites and natives both developed new knowledge about the Seminoles as a unique ethnic group through violence against each other’s dead. On the one hand, Euro-Americans looked to native skulls to add scientific legitimacy to assertions that the Seminoles were a clearly defined ethnicity whose supposed predisposition for violence and lack of ancestral bonds to Florida justified their removal. On the other hand, the collection and circulation of white scalps strengthened the Seminoles’ understanding of themselves as a distinct people and allowed them to rebuild complete communities—ones that integrated the living, the multiethnic dead, and Floridian land—despite the trauma of the war.

This chapter studies how individuals in the lower Mississippi Valley fashioned identities as men of science. It focuses on the 1790s to the 1810s, an era when several empires and other groups competed for power in the region. Local experts tried to benefit from circulating information among a variety of actual and potential patrons, and, in the process, they manipulated and blurred the boundaries between the United States’ scientific community and those of other polities competing for the borderlands. The chapter includes case studies of the Spanish naturalist and spy Thomas Power, the Scottish planter and astronomer William Dunbar, and the French engineer and slave trader Barthélémy Lafon. Their stories reveal how territorial expansion both added to, and exacerbated deep tensions within, the United States’ scientific community.

During the 1830s, slavery shaped the practice, patronage, and application of geology in America. Plantation slavery—and the labor, patronage, and networks it provided—enabled collections and observations that defined the Gulf South’s geohistory while emerging geotheories inspired new means of justifying and furthering slavery. Slavery allowed Charles and Sarah Tait to offer patronage and recognition to northeastern naturalists, excavate and package the fossils needed to characterize the Gulf South’s geohistory, and circulate specimens and data through the networks built around the cotton trade. Rush Nutt drew on uniformitarian geotheory to legitimate African American slavery and proposed new geo-engineering techniques that would encourage the expansion of plantation agriculture. These case studies suggest some of the ways that slavery and science strengthened each other in the early United States.

This chapter analyzes ethnographic writings about and by the diverse peoples of the Gulf South in the early 1800s. It argues that ethnography in the United States developed amid the encounters brought about by U.S. imperialism and defined contested hierarchies of mental ability that Anglo-Americans used to legitimate their supremacy. Many Anglo-Americans performed ethnographic observations during and after the United States’ conquest of the Gulf South that seemed to reinforce the hypothesis that nonwhites had inherently inferior brains and could never achieve equality in the nation’s political and intellectual communities. However, blacks, natives, creoles, and even a few Anglo-Americans used ethnography to challenge the new order that U.S. rule was making, and they tended to favor the increasingly old-fashioned perspective that all men were created equal.

Some two hundred years before the publication of William Cronon's Changes in the Land, the widely acknowledged "key text" of early American environmental history, Indians in the Spanish American borderlands were looking to the environment to help interpret the history and legacv of European-Native encounters.1 In one account, Indians told a hunter who had found a mineral deposit in Spanish Louisiana that the ore was "the white peoples" treasure, "and that amongst these mountains of Oar a noise was often heard like the explosion of a Cannon . . . which the Indians said was the Spirit of the white people working amongst their Treasure."' A similar tale recounted how "an uncommon Animal [was] seen by the Natives in a lake in . . . New Mexico. It is compared to the upper part of the body of a Spaniard with his broad brimmed hat. The Indians express a dislike or abhorrence of the place . . . and assert that the departed Spirits of the first Spaniards who conquered their Country dwell in the lake."3 Such stories record Natives'-or, perhaps, the Anglo-American recorders'- enduring associations among death, Spaniards, precious metals, and the environments where all these things converged. These environmental histories, it seems, offered a fitting lens for interpreting key aspects of the early contact era.Why ought environmental historians to pay more attention to early America and the Atlantic world, and why, in turn, should early Americanists (and we define that term in its broadest terms, hemispherically) become more invested in telling stories about ecologies-about plants, animals, rivers, climates, and all that? This is the question that we asked ourselyes as we proposed and organized this special issue of Early American Studies. After all, these are fields that do not necessarily jump to the mind as easy allies. Scholars such as Peter Mancall have commented on the irregular (if undeniably growing) appearance of environmental history in the major journals of early American historv and the equally rare sightings of early Americanists at venues such as the annual conference of the American Society for Environmental History.4 Covering a time and place before the advent of the sorts of scientifically minded sources that inform a great deal of more modern environmental historv' and without an obvious stake in the sort of moral project imagined for environmental historians Avho seek to influence policy and public opinion about natural catastrophes both forecast and already occurred-who seek nothing less than saving the world, according to Donald Worster-studies of early American environments have lacked the energy that has made the field one of the most dA'namic today.5Yet the environment mattered to the peoples of early America. At the most obvious level, this was because they realized their health and wealth were caught up in environmental circumstances as diverse as the population of white-tailed deer, Avinter frosts, urban miasmas, and rising floodAvaters. Decades and centuries of priA'ation and suffering created colonial communities attuned to local emdronments, and millennia of experience created indigenous communities with a deep knowledge of American places. But early Americans' engagement with the environment was also narrative and historical: they told stories in which the relationship between man and nature was central to explaining the past, present, and future conditions of peoples and places.This should challenge us as we consider the genealogy of environmental history as a practice, for it suggests that environmental history has deeper roots in early American history than might often be appreciated. The standard historiographical periodization of environmental history tends to place its origins in the twentieth century or, according to some borderlands scholars, Frederick Jackson Turner's thesis of the 1890s. As Alfred Crosby put it, American environmental history got momentum in the mid-twentieth century because the legacy of the Turner thesis had ensured that "the historian of the frontier was . …

In January 1765, Charles Mason visited Lancaster, Pennsylvania, during winter holiday from his work on the Maryland-Pennsylvania boundary line. “What brought me here,” wrote Mason, “was my curiosity to see the place where was perpetuated last Winter the Horrid and inhuman murder of 26 Indians, Men, Women and Children, leaving none alive to tell.” The dead were Conestoga Indians who had “fled to the Gaol” in Lancaster in a vain effort to escape the Indian-hating vigilantes known as the Paxton Boys. The Paxton Boys broke into the jail and brutally executed and dismembered the Conestogas, peaceful dependents on the Pennsylvanian government and erstwhile neighbors of the Paxtons. “Strange it was that the Town though as large as most Market Towns in England, never offered to oppose them, . . . no honor to them!” The Paxtons, it seems, were not alone in their anti-Indian sentiments.