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The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of Enslaved, from Womb to Grace, in the Building of a Nation. By Daina Ramey Berry. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017. 212pp. Cloth, $27.95, Paper, $18.95.)

The most succinct expression of Berry’s argument comes in the Notes on Sources. Berry writes:

My work merges the economic patterns of enslaved appraisals and sales with the testimonies of the enslaved. It illustrates the ways in which black people were commodified from birth through death – and beyond (some enslaved bodies were harvested as cadavers for nineteenth-century medical education). I also argue that enslaved people held internal values, soul values that often escaped commodification.

This the point where I confess that I am not a scholar of slavery, just someone who has an abiding interest in the subject. If I was a scholar of slavery, I might be able to tell you how this books fits into the historiography of slavery and in economics and medicine. The most striking chapter in The Price for Their Pound of Flesh is chapter 6, “Postmortem: Death and Ghost Values.” Berry demonstrates that the bodies of the enslaved continued to retain value even after death, both monetarily and as scientific subjects through the abhorrent use of their bodies in medical schools. To me, this subject, mentioned in passing in other works, is laid bare in careful detail missing from previous studies. Berry provides an expanded explanation of how medical schools stole slaves from their graves to conduct medical experiments on them. She also demonstrates how even the bodies of the enslaved executed for rebellion or other “crimes” became commodifiable objects passed down through generates as a macabre keepsakes.

The Price for Their Pound of Flesh is an important supplement to books like Walter Johnson’s Soul by Soul. Berry’s book mixes economic and cultural history to present a well-rounded history of how enslavers and enslaved thought about the monetary valuations of their bodies. Importantly, by vesting their life with their own culture and values, slaves managed to appraise their bodies in non-monetary terms, as something that transcended economic value. That is an novel and important component of the how we should view how enslavers and enslaved struggled over how to value slave’s bodies.

North of America: Loyalists, Indigenous Nations, and the Borders of the Long American Revolution. By Jeffers Lennox. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022. 378 pp. Cloth, $30.00.)

Despite being our neighbor to the north, Jeffers Lennox believes that Canada’s presence and role in the American Revolution and the founding of the American nation has been overlooked. From before the Revolution to the end of the War of 1812, the desire to incorporate Canada into the emerging United States (prior to the Revolution, and through the grey area of the Articles of Confederation, which Lennox refers to as the “united States,” to the early Republic to western exploration to the War of 1812) remained an important goal for American policymakers.

In North of America, policymakers play the main role in demonstrating the pervasiveness of the desire to annex Canada. Because Lennox believes the story of Canadian incorporation is a novel one, he starts at the very top, so this is a history of great men. I think this approach is fine for now, but I would definitely be interested in a sequel that deals with the relationship between Canada and America on the ground, and in the role this relationship played in culture. How did Americans who lived across the often contested border from friends and relatives view to what Lennox portrays as an indefatigable desire to incorporate Canada into the United States. What kind of propaganda did they imbibe and react to? What newspapers did they read and write? How did they feel about their respective governments? How did they view the role of Indigenous peoples in the defense of Canada – and how did they respond to interracial violence? How did the “ordinary” Americans view Canada?

My other point of contention is the lack of discussion about the role of slavery. It is mentioned several times in passing but I do not think it gets the attention is deserves. Lennox does not, for example, explore the debate that would surely have occurred in Congress should the increasingly abolitionist provinces of Canada be incorporated into the Union. There are few dissenting American voices in this book, and nearly no southern ones (besides the views of presidents presented more as federal representatives than southerners). I would find it odd if no lengthy debates occurred in Congress about upsetting the balance of powers by admitting new Canadian territory into the United States. Sadly, Lennox’s omission of these debates lead us to believe they didn’t occur, which I find hard to believe. I will also point out here that this is a northern history – the voices of Southerners on anything, not just including race, are mostly silent. This seems like and oversight to me.

Lennox set out to prove that Canada played an important role in the founding and building of the new nation of the United States, and I think he does this. But it is far from a complete picture and begs other scholars to flesh out Lennox’s arguments, or contradict them. This is an important book, but its topic has the promise to be much more.

The Longbow, the Schooner, and the Violin: Wood and Human Achievement. By Marq De Villiers. (Toronto: Sutherland House. 307pp. Cloth, $34.95).

When I took a History of Technology course in graduate school, we always started out each class by naming the technology in the book we had read. They ranged from cigarettes to vaccines to nuclear power plants to cars to the SST. In The Longbow, the Schooner, and the Violin: Wood and Human Achievement, the technology at hand is wood. In his introduction, De Villiers states that he hopes the essays based on the subjects in his title will stand alone, and they do, so much so that they almost seem disjointed from the rest of the text (x). The book is at is most revealing and enjoyable when De Villiers writes about the history of wood and forests in the chapters that intersperse the eponymous essays.

Unfortunately, De Villiers tries to include so much information in these chapters that they just read like long lists of tree types or wood types and or whatever the case may be. In the violin chapter he even states “The following far-from-complete list is comprised of violin makers whose work is widely recognized as outstanding” (229). There follows one of the dizzying lists that begs the question: is this list necessary?

But that is perhaps, nitpicking. The only chapter that really falls on its face is the one on schooners, which merely describes how schooners were built will placing them only in scanty context. He does much better in the chapters on longbows an violins. But again, the most enjoyable and important part of the book is his work on the history of wood and forests, ranging from perhaps lesser known topics like whether trees can communicate with each other and read human minds, to the more familiar controversy over how to maintain modern forests, for example, through the use of controlled burns or re-seeding. I think it would be better if the book had been marketed on those chapters.

This book might be passable in an introductory history course for undergraduate students in environmental history, but its lack of contextual historicizations means it pales next to competitors like Changes in the Land. Still, it is a good start for someone looking for a casual read with important educational overtones.

How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America. By Clint Smith. (New York: Little, Brown and Company. 297 pp. Cloth, $29.00, Paper $18.99.)

Teaching White Supremacy: America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity. By Donald Yacovone. (New York: Penguin Random House. 327 pp. Cloth $26.00, Paper $20.00.)

“The history we teach is the product of the culture we create, not necessarily of the actual history we made.” – Yacovone, p. 277. 

Reception. Every historian wants it, but history more often than not does not cooperate. The way people reacted to the events in their histortical moment, political, social, economic, culture, has too often been deemed not important enough to chronicle in the record. This has certainly changed over the last century, but even for historians who seek out reception, it remains elusive, forcing the scholar to expand their search to new source bases, some perhaps pushed aside by other scholars as not being important enough or objective enough; but luckily that opinion seems to go against current trends.

Both How the Word is Passed and Teaching White Supremacy aim to investigate how slavery has been taught in American schools, but each takes a different approach. Smith’s sets his book in contemporary America, traveling north and south to investigate how slavery is taught today, or was taught as of 2021. Yacovone examines text books from throughout American history to prove that the North and South worked together to present a historical narrative devoid of the horrors of slavery and driven by the narrative of the Lost Cause in order to perpetuate national reconciliation following the Civil War. 

Smith has an advantage over Yacovone. By setting his book in the present day and visiting sites related to slavery and how they present narratives of remembering and forgetting, he is able to get at the problem of reception. His experiences take the foreground: he is the one receiving the narratives of slavery. And less he be accused of bias, taking slavery-oriented tours of plantations, prisons, the New York City slave tour, and even a visit to a slave factory in Africa, he also attends a white supremacist rally. He interviews tour guides to better understand the resistance they come up against when they feature narratives of black experiences of the past, and he also interviews tour and event participants, including those at the aforementioned white supremacist rally. The people he polls are a small sample size, but the organic nature of his examination makes the experiences of tourists that more pressing when contrasted with the history of slavery they are enthusiastically or reluctantly imbibing.

What is the best way to teach slavery? Smith is an educator as well as an author of this historical work, and he says “I have come to realize that those conversations [about the history of slavery] with my students, now a decade ago, about how we might begin to understand our lives in relation to the would around us were some of the earliest sparks of this book. I tried to write that sort of book that I would have wanted to teach them. I hope I made them proud” (293). For Smith, reception is just as important as how slavery is taught. The two are inextricable.

One topic Smith does not discuss, which might seem a glaring omission but might also have been a deliberate choice, is how slavery was and is taught in American schools. Perhaps reception might have been to difficult to achieve there. It certainly would have made his book a lot longer. I can only speculate, but it might have something to do with the fact that he attempts always attempted to find sources outside himself, and those that are public facing, like plantation and prison tours, and history walks. Getting reception concerning school teaching and textbooks might have posed a problem he thought better left to other authors. 

This is where Yacovone comes in. He attempts to determine how Americans taught slavery by examining a wide array of textbooks from across decades of American history. What he finds is disconcerting but not surprising: most textbooks in the North and South, attempting to inculcate white supremacy, either elided the history of slavery or attempted to place it in an positive light. It stands alongside David Blight’s Race and Reunion in emphasizing how textbook authors avoided taking a critical or at least truthful look at slavery in an attempt to reconcile the North and the South following the Civil War. 

In fact, Yacovone says the problem of white supremacy found its most fertile ground in the North, not the South, and Northern textbooks played a larger role in disseminating the narrative of the Lost Cause and white supremacy than did textbooks in the South. Yacovone acknowledges that Northern texts most likely proliferated because the North had more publishing houses than the South, but it doesn’t excuse the lack of history of slavery and Blacks in those textbooks, and their support for white supremacy as a way to unite the nation through a shared education on that subject.  He says, and it is worth quoting at length:

“Rather than Southern slavery, however, it was Northern white supremacy that powered the more enduring cultural binding force, planted along with slavery in the colonial era, intensely cultivated in the years before the Civil War, and fully blossoming after Reconstruction. Inculcated relentlessly throughout the culture and in school textbooks, it suffused Northern religion, high culture, literature, education, politics, music, law, and science. It powerfully resurfaced after the Civil War and Reconstruction to reassert control over the emancipated slaves to become the basis for national reconciliation, exploded in intensity with renewed immigration in the 1920s and ’30s, and endured with diminishing force to the present day. It succeeding as the superstructure of democratic society by allowing normal political conflict to proceed with the assurance that the assumed dangerous mudsill class (once controlled by enslavement) could pose no threat to the social order. Hence democratic equality rested on racial inequality and malleable definitions of whiteness. Moreover, it offered something more alluring than wealth, more effective than politics, and far more appealing than education. For even the poorest of its adherence, indeed especially for them, white supremacy imparts a sense of uncontested identity and, as the American philosopher and social critic Susan Neiman wrote, an otherwise unattainable level of ‘dignity, simply for belonging to a higher race.'” (6) 

Yacovone’s argument isn’t necessarily new, but he is good at reiterating what other historians have said before him. He also expands his investigation outside of textbooks to narrate the changing trends in race-based thinking in the United States as history moved from the antebellum period, to Reconstruction, to the Civil Rights Movement. But he has one key ingredient missing: reception.

Without question, it is easy to believe that there simply are no sources that detail reception of the textbooks Yacovone investigated. It is easy to imagine that no one thought reception important enough to write down. Yacovone relies mainly on tracking how many editions publishers published each textbook to track popularity and usage. He also tracks their longevity to demonstrate the popularity of the ideas they taught. He attempts to link these trends to historical events, and demonstrates changes in the popular narrative by tracking them against trends in the subject matter and narratives in textbooks. Teaching White Supremacy is a solid piece of scholarship, but it feels like it is missing a piece. Could Yacovone have gotten closer to reception by boarding his source base, trying to find sources documenting how teachers made choices about what to teach, or perhaps finding book reviews or sources from educators about what they taught in their schools? These sources simply may not exist, but they are worth investigating to build on Yacovone’s work.

So each work has its strengths and weaknesses. Smith is able to probe reception of the subjects he chronicles, while Yacovone writes solid history of changing or static conceptions of slavery in American culture and specifically in American textbooks. They need each other to tell a complete story. Read in tandem, they reveal an American narrative of slavery fraught with disunion, but perhaps in investigating these topics, they bring us one step closer to a consensus that refuses to let Americans off the hook for the shameful way we have taught slavery and race throughout so much of our history. 

The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts: The True Story of The Bondswoman’s Narrative. By Gregg Hecimovich. (New York: Ecco, 2023. 353 pp. Cloth, $40.00.)

As extolled in a recent New York Times review, the best part of Gregg Hecimovich’s The Life and Times of Hannah Craft is how how he lays bare the research process he used to discover the identify of the author of the The Bondwoman’s Narrative. Every historian is responsible for making their research process transparent, to detail their methodology so future scholars can trace the same historical trail to either affirm an historian’s conclusions, offer challenges, or add new and important information. The stakes were high for Hecimovich, but I think he does a good job of foregrounding the methods he used to explain how he discovered Crafts’ identity. This alone makes his book an invaluable source to help us understand how to pursue such difficult history.

My faults with Hecimovich therefore lie in more technical details, as I am nowhere near an expert in this topic and cannot offer a counternarrative or corroborating evidence to evaluate the veracity of his discoveries or his narrative. What I do take issue with is how the book was written from a technical standpoint. Hecimovich jumps between time periods with little indication of what time he is landing in, and the immense cast of characters can be extremely difficult to keep track of. I often times had to read a passage several times to figure out its subject. These may seem like minor quibbles, but I think, especially when keeping track of who is who in relation to one’s ability to verify the role of each historical actor, it is important to make this observation.

My other recommendation would be to read The Bondwoman’s Narrative before you read this book. Hecimovich also jumps between which parts of the novel he is describing, and without having the textual context that would come from reading the novel, I often found myself a bit lost.

Overall, however, I think this book is important because, as I stressed earlier, it lays bare the historical research process, especially important when facing such a difficult group of sources. Hecimovich writes that Crafts’ work “bears surprising similarities to that of the famous author Harriet Beecher Stowe – only, from the other side of the color line,” and Hecimovich spends an entire chapter on this comparison (153). He places Craft as a slave educated in reading and writing with an unusual access to reading material in the personal library of her enslaver. Focusing on the connection between these two novels allows Hecimovich to speculate on Craft’s literary heritage.

This comparison might raise more questions than it does answers, and Hecimovich is forthcoming in his extrapolations, though without losing his convictions about the origins of the novel and Crafts’ identity. By laying his historical process so bare to the reader, he invites future researchers to test his hypothesis, and to use similar transparency when writing about their own chosen topics.

Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840. By Rana A. Hogarth. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017. 193 pp. Paper, $27.95.)

At the end of Rana Hogarth’s treatise on the intersection between black bodies and the origins of scientific racism as seen through the lens of the medical profession in Early Republic and antebellum America, Hogarth states, “Throughout this book, I have refrained from offering judgment on the efficacy of physicians’ treatments or the correctness of their theories in the past. In doing so, I have tried to draw attention to the process through which physicians produced medical knowledge about blackness” (193).

Though I understand the historian’s inclination to probe the meaning of historical phenomena over the search to discover correctness of the subjects we study, I believe in this case the omission of factual truths about how diseases affected blacks and whites to be the greatest weakness of this book. Omitting facts about how yellow fever, for example, affected blacks and whites as opposed to just examining how different thinkers conceptualized the root of black pathology weakens Hogarth’s narrative, as, in their absence, it is entirely impossible for the reader to truly understand the baselessness of white medical partitioners’ claims. The truth here is just as important in breaking down the constructedness of white perceptions of supposedly different responses to illness between blacks and whites.

Hogarth’s work is only half done in this book. It is possible to investigate the history and meaning a social construct without sacrificing an examination of what the historical record actually says about facts. If we don’t know or cannot ascertain reliable facts that is one thing, and should be highlighted as such. But if we do have reliable facts about the subject of our work, as in the case of Medicalizing Blackness, it makes our work all the stronger because we can contrast the meanings and outcomes of misconceptions with the truth those forces tried to hide.

All history, at the very end of the day, is guesswork. One thing Hogarth emphasizes over and over is how scarce sources were able for her study, making most of what she reads from the few existent sources read like guesswork. I also find it hard to believe. As Katherine Johnston’s The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World demonstrates, there are ample sources available to construct a compelling narrative about the medical construction of race while investigating instead obfuscating historical facts. Johnston pairs an investigation of a social construct by not only laying bare ideas about race, but also by comparing these ideas with the realities on the ground that refute or support them.

Medicalizing Blackness explores important historical actors in the supposedly scant sources Hogarth employees, but this book begs further exploration. If the source base is not there, it might be impossible to corroborate the claims Hogarth makes in the historical narrative. I applaud Hogarth for taking this subject on, but I am also glad that we have Johnston’s work to give us a better picture of what it meant to be black and enslaved and encounter disease in antebellum America.