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Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North. By Sarah Handley-Cousins. (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2021. pp. 186. Cloth, $35.99. Paper, $29.95.)

Amputations may be the most well-known disabilities suffered by Civil War veterans, and because of this, Handley-Cousins chooses to focus on other war-caused disabilities to examine the way disability and manhood interacted during and after the Civil War in the North. Disabilities that soldiers and health officials could not prove occurred unequivocally as a result of the war that obviously continued to impair soldiers ability to support themselves and their dependents after the war often went unsupported. She explains:

Rather, as the impairment most closely associated with the war, amputation did not generally raise the same questions about legitimacy and worthiness as less straightforward ailments. We will instead explore the ways in which soldiers, civilians, and institutions grappled with disorders that did not easily fit into existing cultural narratives of manhood and sacrifice. Centering our attention on such bodies reveals a very different story about Civil War wounds, one where disabled soldiers were just as likely to be used, rejected, separated, and distrusted as they were to be honored. (3)

As stated, the definition of disability was deeply imbricated with the definition of masculinity. According to this definition, a true man was independent and could work and support his family on his own. To qualify for a pension, the disabled needed to prove that they were incapable of working, which then put them in direct conflict with the definition of what it meant to be a man. Soldiers who had suffered obvious wounds, most likely amputation, often had less trouble receiving pensions and were less likely to be perceived as lacking in manhood. For men like Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, a disability did not necessary mean complete debilitation. By force of will, Chamberlain continued to work following his discharge, but was consistently plagued by a severe and chronic wound that somehow had not managed to kill him. But Handley-Cousins calls it an invisible illness – it was literally hidden by his clothes – so pension granters did not award him the same legitimacy he might have earned had his wound been more visible. Also, Chamberlain’s refusal to let his disability prevent him from carrying out masculine duties worked against him when applying for a pension increase.

The most frustrating of Handley-Cousins’s chapters was the one on mental illness. Handley-Cousins begins the chapter by stating that she will not be using modern diagnoses to diagnose the soldiers interned in mental institutions, which is fair, but she swings to far to the other side in not reporting contemporary diagnoses made by the doctors in the institutions or exploring how doctor’s in the postbellum North defined mental illness. The chapter is frustratingly short. If the federal government was so unwilling to issue pensions to soldiers with invisible disabilities, who was paying to support the mentally ill in these asylums, and who determined when these invisible illness was enough to necessitate admission and continuing treatment? How were veterans treated? What could be her most convincing chapter belies a thorough examination of her subject.

This book is often frustratingly brief. Kudos for briefly comparing the Northern response to disabilities to the Southern one. An entire book could probably be written about that. But not enough here is expounded upon. Black soldiers warrant some mention, but it is not even clear to me if they were eligible for pensions, let alone the struggles they might have faced in attempting to receive them; if this process was different for Blacks and whites. Blacks appear ever so briefly as subjects of medical experiments, but I feel that the number of Blacks experimented on and desecrated in death probably compared significantly to whites and could be explored more here. And how did the war effect the mental illness of Blacks? Did they go to institutions too? Unfortunately, Blacks largely disappear from the narrative after Handley-Cousins finished her chapter on medical experimentation and display. The role of disabilities in the lives of Northern Civil War Blacks deserves much more attention.

A brief read that makes an important argument. I only wish Handley-Cousins had expounded more on her arguments and presented more evidence to support them. This book reads as an introduction to a much vaster and richer topic.

Wonder Woman: Omnibus. By George Perez. (DC Comics, 2022. pp. 640. Cloth, $100.00.)

I love Wonder Woman, and I came to her the way I’m sure a lot of her fans did: through Patty Jenkins’s 2017 film Wonder Woman starring Gal Gadot. I think it is one of the best superhero movies ever, and it is definitely one of the better feminist films ever. Wonder Woman was an agent in her own story. Plus the hair and sword. Ever since She-ra, I have been a sucker for women with good hair and a sword. But beyond that, Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman managed to blend what are thought of as traditionally masculine and feminine traits. Blazingly independent when fighting for what she believes to be right, capable of standing on her own and possessing belief in herself and her own abilities, she still values teamwork and desires to bring out the best in every person around her. I think the movie’s self-aware charm can be best summed up in Etta Candy’s quip, “Specs? And suddenly she’s not the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen?”

Anyway, after falling in love with that movie, I began to investigate Wonder Woman’s history. I wanted to understand where she came from, and that meant turning to the comic books. I have a tortured relationship with comics and graphic novels. I am a very textual person, so I often struggle to stop and actually look at the images and visual presentations put forth in comics and graphic novels. So I have to really pace myself and slow down. And I will admit, I did not read any of the older comics, as in, nothing before the 1980s. And to my disappointment, I didn’t like nearly any of these depictions of Wonder Woman. Too much action, not enough story and character development. This especially true of the most recent comics, though I haven’t started the 2023 reboot, so that could be different. But I left the comics feeling disappointed. How could such a great movie have come out of such weak source material?

Then I began to read George Perez’s 1980s Wonder Woman. I bought the first, big omnibus and finally sat down with it after struggling through all the other Women Woman comics I read. And I finally found the comic I was looking for. Enough action to be a superhero comic, but enough character development to be a graphic novel. Wonder Woman’s existence does not revolve around Steve Trevor, whose love interest in this incarnation is Etta Candy. She fights female villains just as strong and capable as she is. And she has the best sidekicks, Professor Julia Kapatelis and her teenaged daughter Vanessa. There is a trove of strong, interesting, multi-faceted, independent women. They drive change. And while Wonder Woman is as emo as ever, she is here allowed moments of happiness and triumph that don’t always focus on the physical battlefield. They are both a part of her.

Though I will complain that in the last comic included in the omnibus, Julia Kapatelis excuses a bad attitude as a symptom of menopause. Really, George? Really?

Is George Perez’s version of Wonder Woman perfect? No, that place is reserved for Adrianne Palicki’s 2011 take on Wonder Woman.* But it is my favorite version that I’ve encountered. I’m currently on the second omnibus, and unfortunately it has been disappointing so far. Too much action, too little character development. And it starts with a disjointed sequel to a Justice League comic not included in the omnibus that makes finding your bearings very difficult. If there’s another thing I don’t like about modern comics it’s all the crossovers.

But I digress. Am I a new Wonder Woman initiate? Certainly. Am I missing the point of most of the Wonder Woman comics I haven’t liked? Possibly. Will I keep exploring the character to see what I can find? Absolutely. Wonder Woman is the kick ass, independent, fearlessly feminine and masculine superhero I have always looked for (again, outside of She-ra). She is a superhero who ultimately battles to demonstrate how human she is without also losing her identity as a demigod from an island paradise ruled by a race of warrior women. She is complex, and she is always exploring that complexity head on, refusing to compromise her beliefs and who she is unless presented with alternative evidence. She is not averse to change for the better. And she always believes in the better. It’s what makes her Wonder Woman.

*Watch here. I highly recommend it. It may get yanked soon, so do it now!

Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees. By Jared Farmer. (New York: Basic Books, 2022. pp. 482. Cloth, $35.00.)

The history of elderflora, the name Jared Farmer gives to the longest lived trees on Earth, is the history not only of nature and the environment, but is also the history of human beings and their relationship to nature as individuals, as care-takers, and simply as co-evolving living beings. Elderflora is really Farmer’s investigation of how human-caused events are effecting elderflora through climate change. It is important to note that Farmer does take a global view of elderflora. While Farmer does take care to cite when certain trees are emblematic and intrinsic to Indigenous culture and identities, this is still a Eurocentric work. I think Farmer is following the scholarship and the history of the study of elderfora, which has been dominated by scientists in the West until very recently. But more work can be done on how native populations co-existed with and managed elderflora, and how they relate to them today. How do Indigenous Peoples view climate change?

One thing Farmer does bring to light is that the environment is always changing, it has been for billions of years, and can do so without human input on an everyday scale. That does not change, however, that human activities are now swiftly influencing the earth, introducing human-produced climate change. One thing Farmer seeks to understand is about how this climate change will effect the elderflora that have lived through thousands of years of change to serve as living testaments that can be compared to and measured against human history, in our own self-centered way. Humans and trees have been co-evolving for millennia.

I found one of Farmer’s most interesting chapters to be the one that chronicled how those who collected tree segments used a tree’s lifetime to measure the progress of human events. Samples taken from felled trees appeared in museums and private collections around the world and their custodians would display them with placards or strings aligned with certain rings that marked the occurrence of certain human events, for example, the fall of Rome. In this way human beings reinforced relationships to nature that measured the scale of its existence on a human timeline, putting forth that this nature only matters as it relates to events in human life. But these are imposed definitions. For Farmer, it is just as important that dendochronologists and other tree scientists use tree cores to track changes in the Earth’s environment over millennia. This can tell us how to understand evolution and the development of Earth’s environment, however, the focus always shifts back to humans, as the environmental history recorded by trees can help us understand our prospective future rocked by human-caused climate change.

Farmer relates a conversation he held with Doug Larson, “the scientist who documented Canada’s oldest trees, [and] started out as a lichenologist” (302). I found it extremely illuminating in terms of how scientists who study the deep past view nature and biology. The following exchange ensues:

I [Farmer] queried Larson: Are you moved by lichens? ‘Oh yeah,’ he replied immediately. ‘They’ve put up with far more [than trees]. You can have a nuclear war and they’ll do fine. Lichens and cockroaches –  perfect food chain! When environmentalists says humans are going to destroy the Earth, that’s arrogant. There’s nothing that’s going to destroy the Earth. We might destroy ourselves; we might influence the food chain.’ (302)

Nature changes with our without us. And humans have long been doing things to change the Earth, at the expense of some species over others. But so has nature. If climate change continues, Earth might not be destroyed, in Larson’s terminology, but it will most likely look very different, and it could very likely be without us to see what a new Earth looks like. For Larson, we are just blips on the timeline. For Farmer, the existence of elderflora proves that humans and nature are inextricably connected, and to steward the health of one is to steward the health of the other. Trees can teach us as much about ourselves as they can about themselves.

I am not sure this is the message Farmer wants me to walk away with. So much of his story is about human’s discovery of the past, and how that is shaping our understanding of the future and more, how we might be able to use that knowledge to positively effect the future, to steer us away from a looming disaster. I believe the climate change is real, and I believe we must to something to stop it or alleviate its symptoms, that we are responsible for rehabilitating the nature we have so debilitated over the centuries. But this provokes a laundry list of questions. Who or what is worth saving? Is there actually ideal balanced nature that we can return to, or do we have to make sacrifices to save the parts that we deem worth saving? What do we do about the massive imbalance of environmental degradation between the developed and developing worlds? What should the future look like? Scientists, historians, politicians, and their constituents, no matter race, gender, or class, must work together to answer these questions. For Farmer, studying elderflora may help answer these questions. If we study the natural world and the history and stories it can tell us, we will learn about our own nature. And that is worth saving.

Pushing Cool: Big Tobacco, Racial Marketing, and the Untold Story of the Menthol Cigarette. By Keith Wailoo. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2021. pp. 396. Cloth, $30.00.)

“Why do Blacks like menthol so much? (5)”

In Pushing Cool, Keith Wailoo traces how cigarette companies created menthol cigarettes as a flavor marketed across race as a healthy alternative to supposedly harsher non-mentholated cigarettes, to ones championing black identity. Cigarette companies deliberately targeted blacks through urban marketing campaigns to racialize menthol cigarettes. Further, when anti-smoking activists such as health experts and government officials called cigarette companies out on their horrific racist practices, cigarette companies retaliated by saying that Blacks made a personal choice to smoke menthols and to ban them was insulting to Black’s intelligence as consumers, not to mention that it violated their right to freedom of choice.

One thing I didn’t know was how deeply imbricated cigarette companies were with Black culture. These ties extended beyond racialized advertising in Black urban enclaves and reached its tentacles into Black advocacy groups and politicians. For example, by funding the NAACP, cigarette companies gained a modicum of control over Black politics by winning them supporters among those they financially backed. I don’t want to deny Black agency here, however, this practice emphasized that Black communities remained divided over the role cigarettes and cigarette companies played in their lives. Did Blacks smoke menthols because they were manipulated by targeted advertising, or was smoking menthols simply a matter of personal preference?

Wailoo comes down heavily on the side of the argument that targeted advertising by cigarette companies led Blacks to smoke menthols and therefore created the public health crises that result from heavy smoking. Just as practices priming young consumers to smoke cigarettes, advertisers appealed to Black desires as observed by extensive market research, to create a Black population primed to smoke menthols. His extensive use of industry sources forced into the public sphere supports his thesis that calculating cigarette agencies deliberately targeted Black smokers through advertising and their support of Black causes, culture, and politicians.

This was a great book, but it left me desperately wanting a cigarette, even though I haven’t had one in years. That is how deep cigarettes dig their claws into you – even when you’re reading about how bad for you they are, you still want one.  To me, Wailoo taps into the insidious nature of cigarettes and other tobacco products. Savvy advertising in the face of a bevy of restrictions is still enough to overcome prejudices against smoking, especially in populations consistently targeted to become customers. Wailoo’s use of industry sources is damning, but the question does remain of the role of Black agency. The battle over menthols has in many ways revolved around this question. Pushing Cool is an excellent industrial/business history, and would do well in a class on the history of technology. Cigarettes are technologies, and this book traces menthol cigarette’s trajectory from being advertised as a racially-neutral, health-based cigarette, to a racialized phenomenon.

The Tame and Wild: People and Animals After 1492. By Mary Norton (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2024. pp. 438. Cloth, $37.95.)

There are lots of weaknesses in Brian Fagan’s The Intimate Bond: How Animals Shaped Human History (2014). This book is not about how all animals shaped all of human history – it focuses on domesticated animals, mostly in Europe and North Africa, with a detour into China in one of his many chapters on the horse. So undomesticated animals are excluded from this history, as are animals in the Western Hemisphere, where, yes, there were not as many domesticated animals. However, this not mean that animals in the Western Hemisphere, domestic or not, did not form intimate bonds with the Indigenous peoples of those continents. Fagan makes the mistake of saying:

Now, for the first time [since animals were domesticated], animals became individual property – something to be cherished, valued, and counted – to be given as calculated gifts, not necessarily as currency in the sense we would use the word today, but as part of the equation of survival and wealth accumulation that became central to human life in ways unimaginable among hunters and foragers (67).

This is where Mary Norton’s The Tame and the Wild comes in to undercut Fagan’s myopic vision of human-animal relationships by demonstrating that hunter-gatherer societies in the Americas did, in fact, have intimate bonds with the animals around them. They may not have domesticated them, but they did engage in a process that Norton calls familiarization: 

Familiarization differs from domestication in that familiarized animals were not bred in captivity – at least before encounters with Europeans – but rather animals found or captured in the wild…these pithy definitions underscore a bond between tamer and tamed, organized most fundamentally around the nurturing relationship of the feeder and the fed (131).

Further:

If predation is the process by which one pursues and consumes another being, familiarization – or feeding and therefore taming – is how one turns a wild being into kin (132).

To familiarize an animals was to tame it, to acclimate it to human interaction and mutual dependency. Indigenous Peoples of the Americas used familiarization to tame wild animals and incorporate them into society for a variety of uses, including acting as hunting partners, or as pets. As Norton explains, Indigenous Peoples would not prey among animals they fed, they would only consume wild animals that they had not familiarized. To Europeans used to raising livestock to a kill and eat, this refusal to eat the flesh of those they fed was foreign, strange, and, as defined by the European relationship between livestock and their owners, uncivilized.

Chapter by chapter, Norton refutes the argument that because the Americas did not have a proliferation of animals able to be domesticated, that Indigenous peoples only had relationships to animals that involve hunting and killing them. One of the most useful examples of this is the way Indigenous Peoples would tame parrots or monkeys, making gifts of them to Europeans. Indigenous Peoples also approached initial encounters with European animals as one of familiarization, and built relationships with animals like horses and pigs based on taming instead of domesticating. Virginia DeJohn Anderson has written extensively on the role of European domesticated animals in the colonization of North America in Creatures of Empire. The Tame and the Wild is the Central and South American corollary to Anderson’s work. 

Norton makes a powerful argument when introducing the idea of familiarization vs. domestication, and I want to include it here in its entirety, because it is what made this book really stand out for me:

The scattered and fragmentary nature of the sources touching on early modern taming practices is the primary reason why this study employs capacious geographical and temporal parameters. The lack of attention paid to the history of familiarization is also rooted in the fact that scholars – among them Jared Diamond – have misleadingly interpreted taming practices through the teleological lens of domestication. In other words, they have assumed taming wild animals was a “stepping stone” to “full” domestication. By aggregating fragmentary traces and avoiding a teleological view of domestication, the importance and complexity of familiarization as a mode of interaction can come into view (132).

In this argument, Norton reveals that we still view animal-human relationships through the lens of European colonists. The colonization argument claims that domestication of animals is not just concomitant with the rise of Western “civilization,” it is a prerequisite for it. The West’s contemporary scholars can write about Indigenous People’s relationships with the animals they hunted because this human-animal relationship was familiar to them, even though the way Indigenous people’s viewed and carried out hunting diverged sharply from how Europeans approached it. Other Indigenous relationships with animals have been erased from history because they simply do not conform with how Europeans/Westerners understand the “proper” relationship between humans and animals. Familiarization is not domestication, and this means that Indigenous People’s lose their identities to the tellers of the dominant narrative of human-animal relationships and therefore civilization.

Norton’s arguments and the evidence she presents are much more eloquent and informative than the summary I have given here. Her research refutes the Euro-centrism of Fagan’s writing, and even of Anderson’s, though it also fits nicely with Anderson in providing a counternarrative to Anderson’s focus. The two books can work together, even as Norton carves a new and important place for her scholarship. By uncovering the process of familiarization in the way Indigenous Peoples approached the animals around them, Norton gives us a new understanding of the history of how human and animals have interacted over time, the fact that these animals and humans in the Americas did have intimate bonds prior to European contact, even if these animals weren’t domesticated. European colonization ripped at these bonds and forced domesticated animals on the Indigenous Peoples, even if they still did find ways to incorporate animals into their own cultural understanding, much to the chagrin of their colonizers.

How people interacted with animals was important culturally, socially, and politically. It defined who was civilized and who was not, who fit in and who didn’t, who had and who lacked power. Norton’s work fills a historical vacuum, demonstrating how to research and write a history of a topic that has been aggressively forgotten, even to the current day.

Measuring Manhood: Race and the Science of Masculinity, 1830-1934. By Melissa N. Stein. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. pp. 534. Cloth, $94.50. Paper, $27.00.)

Reading this book was one of those times I wished I am more familiar with the historiography of race and sex/gender. Then I could tell how to situate this book in this historiography. For example, the fist chapters on race and gender during slavery read to me as very similar to other books I have read. However, because I am not familiar with the historiography, I can’t tell if Stein was an early contributor to this field, or if she is not necessarily making contributions that are new.

I found the narrative from the Civil War on to be similarly repetitive. For example, after emancipation and the passage of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments, the threat of black men as gendered actors became much more threatening to the white establishment because now they had citizenship and could vote. But Stein links this threat to manhood specifically because black women, like all women, did not win the right to vote and therefore were not a political threat to white dominance. Is this argument novel?

I suppose the most well-argued point on the centrality of black manhood and its relationship to white narratives of sex and gender came in the section on lynching. Black men became ciphers through which whites viewed Blacks’ supposed unsatiable appetite for white women. Any perceived slight or pursuit of white women by black men was a crime punishable by public torture and death. Some authorities proposed castration as an alternative to lynching, but in actuality, whites simple incorporated castration into lynching, making lynching a sexual spectacle of retribution against black men. While other writers have written about lynching and gender, the difference of opinion among whites on how to punish Black men was new to me. 

Stein is upfront in representing her sources as the writing of elite white scientists. Through their writing she is able to trace static or change over time. She does focus on scholar and NAACP leader Walter White in the last chapter, including black voices in her narrative. I feel like the book may have been stronger if she had included more black voices as a counterpoint to whites, though Stein may reply that this focus would be outside the scope of her work. Therefore, Stein opens the door to other scholars to complete this research to compliment hers. This is one strength of the book.

On its own merits this is a interesting book with some limitations. For example, it wasn’t always clear when white scientists focused on men specifically or Blacks in general. For me, unlike for Stein, simply using male gendered pronouns in elite scientists’ work did not necessarily mean a focus only on men. Male pronouns are often gender default, so assuming males as the normative default gender can also subsume women under this label. Stein’s argument that white scientists’ use of male pronouns to mean only men was weakest in her chapters on slavery, but became more convincing as the Civil War and Reconstruction eras became specifically focused on Black men as citizens who needed to be policed to keep them from crossing the color line. As Stein points out, this meant regulating Blacks’ sexual access to white women, more often then not resulting in violence.

I suppose I should probably sit this one out, but I wanted to share my reactions. This book would be useful in a graduate course on gender and race, where students can parse the scope of Stein’s work and the role of manhood and race from slavery to the eve of the civil rights movement. It will be up to them and the more knowledgeable educators to determine Stein’s place in the historiography of the subject and the usefulness of her narrative within its own limited scope.

There also needs to be an analysis of the sources she used, and the note on sources at the end of the book and her extensive bibliography provide great places to start. One great thing about this book is that the research is always transparent. Like I said, it is begging for a sequel based on a Black counterpoint. 

The Science of Abolition: How Slaveholders Became the Enemies of Progress. By Eric Herschthal. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. pp. 326. Cloth, $32.50.)

The Science of Abolition proports to be a book that offers a new view of the role science played in antislavery and abolitionist thought. Herschthal wants to move beyond the examination of race science to postulate how other sciences affected abolitionist rhetoric and how participants in the movement shaped that rhetoric to their own means. In the introduction to The Science of Abolition, Herschthal makes his distinction that his historical actors are not scientists, but men of science, saying

Becoming a man of science required little formal training and a fair amount of networking and self-fashioning; gaining entry to the right social networks; adopting the proper tone of deference and gentlemanly decorum, publishing in respectable journals; finding wealthy patrons. In addition, before the 1830s, being a man of science was rarely a full-time job and more a learned hobby. The most prominent men of science in this period…supported themselves with other activities…(4).

Herschthal makes the argument that abolitionists used sciences other than racial science to argue against slavery. Defining the science of abolition, he says:

Though proslavery racial science of this period is well known, few scholars have explored the vast array of scientific knowledge beyond racial science that also bore on the question of slavery – from ideas rooted in chemistry and geology to those based on medicine, demography, and engineering. More to the point, few have realized that antislavery advocates, as much as their proslavery adversaries, relied on scientific discourse to defend their views. Taken together, this antislavery scientific discourse amounts to what I call the science of abolition – a wide range of scientific arguments that helped legitimate the antislavery movement and that ultimately cast slaveholders as unscientific and premodern: the enemies of progress.” (2).

But the lines between proslavery and antislavery advocates are blurred. Herschthal spends several chapters outlining how many abolitionists soft-pedalled their rhetoric due to the fact that they either had close ties to slaveholders or because they didn’t want to support an abolitionist regime that might alienate potential followers, North and South, or both of these regions. For example, Benjamin Silliman, Yale’s first professor of chemistry, owed funding for his position in part to slaveholders. But the gradual cutting of ties with these abolitionist sponsors and a gradual view of emancipation seems to come a bit quickly at the end of the book.

It was interesting to trace the progression of abolitionist thought. Herschthal starts with abolitionist’s beliefs that colonization was the only solution to the problem of abolition. The science he uses here had elite white men of science promote Sierra Leone as a colony ripe for agricultural success, whereas the reality of the colony’s land turned out to be deficient in providing nourishment and self-sufficiency for colonists.

Planters’ failure to embrace modern farming techniques like the plow enabled abolitionists to paint them as backward and anti-technology. Abolitionists made the argument that if planters would employ labor saving devices, they would be able to drastically lessen their dependence on enslaved labor. But for slaveholders who did try technologies like the plow, they found it unsuited to farming conditions in the American South, or found slave labor too profitable to be incentivized to change. The same may be said of the flax processing machines invented in England prior to the Civil War in America. Cotton remained the supreme product.

Herschthal also can’t quite escape the inevitability of racial science being part of the narrative of the science of abolition. He writes at length about polygenesis and monogenesis, and how this relates to “hard” science is a bit unclear. Men of science attempted to use science to prove or disprove one or the other of the theories. Men of science either claimed that science proved one race was superior to the other, or, in the case of abolitionists, that if the races weren’t yet equal, the enslaved were human and could improve over time.

One thing Herschthal does discuss but only mentions by name once, is the theory of racial uplift. Blacks and abolitionists believed that by becoming men of science and proving their intellectual and cultural equality, Blacks could prove they were equals with white men. Becoming an abolitionist and using science to argue in favor of abolition might allow Black men to gain respect from their white peers, if not from the nation at large. Uplift is always a tricky path to walk, and has caused much controversy in the Black community, especially since it didn’t work. Black men of science like Benjamin Banneker believed that by joining the community of elite white men of science he was standing in as a respected avatar for his race, not as a race traitor. Herschthal says:

“After all [Paul] Cuffe, [a free African American sailor], routinely argued that Black people needed to embrace white culture in order for whites to accept them – and that included an embrace of science.” (176).

Further,

…Black abolitionists also had reasons [to support science] particular to their communities. For many Black leaders, supporting scientific solutions merged with a larger integrationist philosophy. Embracing science signaled a commitment to the nation’s economic development, and, by extension, to the nation itself. Black integrationists, women as well as men, urged Black audiences to engage with scientific knowledge whenever they could. (240).

The armchair nature of the pursuits of men of science meant that Blacks could enter this discourse given they had the freedom and education to do so. Of course, this is did not mean that abolitionists were not also racist and that they all welcomed Black men of science with open arms. But the movement allowed for their Black entry into a community of abolition, even at a diminished status. Some Black men of science would become poster boys of abolitionist science, demonstrating that Blacks could uplift themselves at least to a certain height, if not full equality. But Herschthal explains the limits of black participation in the ultimate success of abolition, writing

But modern-day interpretations that highlight Black agency do not necessarily reflect the views of historical subjects. To many white people, both during and after slavery, emancipation came about not because of the agency of Black people, but because of the backwardness of slaveholders themselves.” (247).

The Science of Abolition portrays an important facet of the battle against slavery. One thing that is abundantly clear is how quickly abolitionists ideas could slide into racism, especially when Northerners worked with Southerners to tackle the problem of abolition. Men of science helped win abolition by firmly and consistently turning against Southern slaveowners and projecting them as technologically backwards. Slaveowners refused to take advantage of new technologies and instead clung to the morally bankrupt state of slave owning.

But it should be remembered that for decades abolitionists believed that the only way to abolish slavery was to ship all the enslaved off to overseas colonies in Africa. Blacks, in this view, had no place in America. Black and white abolitionists could actually use this as a point of agreement with enslavers, some of whom claimed to be fine with the idea as long as someone compensated them for their lost slaves. But the idea was not popular enough with either Blacks or whites to ever actually take off. Contrary to claims from men of science, Sierra Leone was largely inhospitable, and Blacks who had been in the Americas for generations did not want to leave what they considered to be their true home and the rest of their families.

I think this book makes an important contribution to arguments about science and race. I am not a scholar of slavery or abolition, but from where I sit, this book supplements what I have read about these subjects. I would like to learn more about the role of science in slaveholding. It would be interesting to learn more about ideas of divergence and convergence between abolitionists and slaveholders on science and technology in the role of slaveholding or a slave-based economy. It would also be helpful to understand more about how the populace at large felt about these scientific approaches to slavery. Herschthal focuses on elite men.

This book begs to be inserted into a historiography of slavery. It would work well in a graduate level course that can situate in that academic field.