Missions for Science traces the development and transfer of technology in four Atlantic regions with populations of predominantly African ancestry: the southern United States, the Panama Canal Zone, Haiti, and Liberia. David McBride explores how the pursuit of the scientific ideal, and the technical and medical outgrowths of this pursuit, have shaped African diaspora populations in these areas, asking:

--What specific technologies and medical resources were transferred by U.S. institutions to black populations centers and why?

--How did the professed aims of U.S. technical projects, public health, and military activities differ from their actual effects and consequences?

--Did the U.S. technical transfer amount to a form of political hegemony?

--What lessons can we learn from the history of technology and medicine in these key geographic regions?

Missions for Science is the first book to explain how modern industrial and scientific advances shaped black Atlantic population centers. McBride is the first to provide a historical analysis of how shifting environmental factors and disease-control aid from the United States affected the collective development of these populations. He also discusses how independent black Atlantic republics with close historical links to the United States independently envisioned and attempted to use science and technology to build their nations.

McBride looks at the impact of scientific and technological development on people of African descent and under the influence of the US. He presents four case studies: the American South, the Panama Canal Zone (where black labor was imported), Haiti (an overwhelmingly black Caribbean nation, occupied for much of its history by the US), and Liberia (an African nation founded by the US as a refuge for freed deported slaves). . . . Recommended .

An important contribution to the history of the African Diaspora and to the history of U.S. foreign aid and public health projects.

McBride looks at the impact of scientific and technological development on people of African descent and under the influence of the US. àRecommended.

A broad and probing look at race, disease, and labor in the black Atlantic, from Haiti and Liberia to the former slave states of the American republic.