Today we welcome a guest post from Cameron B. Strang, author of Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500-1850, just published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and UNC Press. Frontiers of Science offers a new framework for approaching American intellectual history, one that transcends political and cultural boundaries and reveals persistence across the colonial and national eras. The pursuit of knowledge in the United States did not cohere around democratic politics or the influence of liberty. It was, as in other empires, divided by...