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American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation. By Edward  J. Larson. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2023. pp. 358. Cloth, $32.50.)

In American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, Edward J. Larson sets out to chart the simultaneous trajectories of the quest for liberty and the institution of slavery at the birth of the United States. This is not a new topic, and there isn’t really much that is presented here that is new. The book skews heavily toward political and legal sources, also not a new tactic. Enslaved characters are seen through white eyes. Maybe that is the fault of a paucity of sources, but it leads room for further research or perhaps points back at reading other work already done.

Larson focuses on politicians and generals, great white men who made decisions shaped thousands, millions, of enslaved’s lives, and continue to shape race relations in America to this day. There is nothing here that really gives the enslaved a voice, despite frequently inserted anecdotes about slaves like Phillis Wheatley and Ona Judge, and free Blacks like Benjamin Banneker. The majority of the text feels like Black voices are lost in Larson’s narrative. Their stories are told through the eyes of their enslavers. Whites and their contentious battle over the fate of slavery is what is on view here.

The strength of American Inheritance is that it collates a body of scholarship on the conflicting values of liberty and slavery between late colonialism and into the early republic in a way that may be digestible to a reader newly interested in the topic, or one looking for a broad overview. Larson’s arguments are cogent without getting too bogged down in specific details, a good read for someone with a more casual interest. But, as noted above, this general overview loses some of the oomph of more academically-minded, or at least more detailed, historical scholarship.

This is a very nuanced topic that still raises debates and drives violence and inequality to this day. At the time, Larson notes, such arguments over liberty and slavery drove colonial America to rebel against the British, comparing their status as unfairly taxed British colonists to enslaved Blacks. These beliefs revealed how deep personal debates over liberty and slavery were:

Patriot invocations of slavery were often not philosophical arguments based on abstract notions of freeman in a state of nature. They were intensely emotional appeals that relied for their force on a familiarity with chattel slavery and an equation of Blacks with such bondage. (51)

Then, as now, racial identities have been used to construct and galvanize ideologies surrounding liberty and oppression. By failing to adequately address the cognitive dissonance of the co-existing ideals of liberty and slavery, founding Americans refused to remove a splinter that would grow to an egregious wound as evidenced by the Civil War, a wound barely half-healed that still festers to this day. For early Americans, a strong federalist government trumped ending slavery; economic interests colored by ideological racism and distorted ideas of who was enslaved and who was not perpetuated the institution of slavery until the issue became one that Americans could no longer compromise away. The Civil War may have ended slavery, but the failure of Reconstruction and the violent backlash against the modern Black rights movements abetted by a former president (and presidential candidate) eager to manipulate racial tensions for votes has left us with a battle surrounding liberty and race to this day.

As mentioned, American Inheritance is a good synthesis of scholarship on the inextricable issues of liberty and slavery that persist into the twenty-first century. Anyone wanting to understand that backdrop of our current passionate debates involving race would use this as a good starting point, but I would encourage readers to look more deeply into the scholarship to get more specific investigation of these twinned subjects, and to perhaps find the Black voices that are missing here.

Out of the Depths: A History of Shipwrecks. By Alan G. Jamieson. (London, Reaktion Books Ltd, 2022. pp. 342. Cloth $42.00.)

When I first picked this book off the shelf I was skeptical. In my mind I was expecting a historical analysis of the meaning and importance of shipwrecks. What I saw looked like just a list of shipwrecks for 300 pages. And in a way that was what this book was, but it is written so briskly that it really pulls you into the story. There is also a lot of tension between who gets to own and capitalize on shipwrecks. Is it the nations the boats originally came from? Is it the archaeologists who want to study and historicize the wrecks? Is it the treasure hunters who use modern technology to discover and plunder wrecks that have left behind millions of dollars worth of precious metals and artifacts?  Who shares the ownership and also, though a bit less explored, who shares the blame?

I ended up really enjoying this book. It is a neat history of shipwrecks in the West. It would have benefitted more from additional examinations of shipwreck cultures from places other than the West. Though there is a section on China and some written about Japan, almost all of those doing the discovering, salvaging, and sinking, are westerners. Is there a way to write a more global history of shipwrecks, or is this really just a preserve of the West? Somehow I don’t believe that. An examination of other cultures and their relationships to shipwrecks would bring more “depth” to this pleasantly breezy read.

We Shall Be No More: Suicide and Self-Government in the Newly United States. By Richard Bell. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012. Cloth $49.00.)

We Shall Be No More chronicles who had the right to control the narrative of death and even the event of death itself in the early republic and antebellum America. The newly minted United States viewed suicide to be a symptom of the nation’s loss of control over its citizens, as the state and religion sought to maintain a monopoly on violence. Some of these arguments and tactics of moral suasion remain with us today in the form of debates over the death penalty (also discussed by Bell – suicides of convicted criminals robbed the state of the power to prosecute and control violence) or the fear that mass media was corrupting youth and glorifying suicide. Bell covers a large range of groups interested in preventing suicide, writing:

Whether the setting is the jail or the plantation, the salon or the sitting room, the revival meetings or the asylum, the true subject here is power: the power of parents over children, of masters over slaves, of the state over inmates, of ministers over their followers, of authors over readers, and even medical science over God. (41)

This is a narrative told from the point of view of those groups wanting to stop suicide and how they viewed the sin or reprobation of those who committed it. And those who reported on suicide walked a fine line between neutral reporting and sensationalism. Parents, religious leaders, politicians, abolitionists, and others all used suicide in various ways to try to manipulate their own agendas. It all came down to who could control and dictate the narrative of suicide.

For a book on such a sensitive topic, Bell avoids sensationalism to provide a matter of fact narrative about the role of suicide in the early republic and antebellum periods. Suicide served as a counterpoint to various groups’ claims of mastery over their followers and had to be manipulated to demonstrate strengths of some of these groups. As in the case of the battle between the Universalists and evangelicals over whose religion provoked more damning instances of suicide, suicide could be used as a weapon to denigrate those competing for power.

This was an interesting book, and it seems to me to provide an enriching supplement to works seeking to explore the uncertainty of the political experiment that was democracy in America. As I have mentioned before, who got to control the narrative? Suicide in this book can be seen as a way to reject that narrative and rewrite it in an independent form. It was subversive, whether intended to be that way or not. Bell makes a good case for this argument, though sometimes he strays into simple history and forgets to pull the string of suicide in until the last minute. There is a balance to be made here between contextualizing his subject and actually analyzing it and creating and argument.

The chapter on abolition was especially striking, and it made me question what we could learn about suicides if slave voices had been left in the record. This book focuses on who tried to control suicide, not those who attempted it (and succeeded), and again, this might be a lack of available sources. But I think if those sources could be found (and indeed, Bell does give examples of suicide notes) we would have a more well-rounded picture of those who chose to take their lives. It all comes down to a basic question: who had agency here? Bell sees this as a battle between those who constructed the dominant narrative and the suicides that disrupted or undermined it. Perhaps the answer is a sequel that moves forward in time, that examines how suicide played a role in postbellum America. Either way, this book adds an important examination of the role of suicide to the history of the first 50 years of American history, providing evidence of yet another contentious issue that the state struggled to control as it constructed a new nation.

Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues. By Jonathan Kennedy. (Crown: New York, 2023. Cloth, $30.00.)

Cataclysms: An Environmental History of Humanity. By Laurent Testot. Trans. Katherine Throssell. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2020 (French edition published in 2017). Cloth, $35.00.)

Both of these books, chronicling the challenges faced by Homo sapiens in the form of environmental factors, some created by man and others the product of concurrent evolution, start during the Paleolithic era and pay special attention to how Homo sapiens fueled or adapted to these threats over time. Both provide a picture of “cataclysms” coevolving with man over time, whether it be through the lifecycle of disease or the demonstratable and drastic changes our pursuit of a middle class lifestyle dependent on the use of energy sources that are driving a disastrous form of climate change.

As in the book Mosquito: A History of our Deadliest Predator, the burden of proof lies on the authors. Were changes in the earth and the Homo sapiens species correlative, causative, or both? Whereas Testot’s goal is to track how human beings were affected by the environment, and perhaps more importantly, how they affected it, Kennedy is attempting to chart how disease was determinative in the course of human evolution, traced over a time period from the paleolithic to the present day. He jumps into the fray of authors attempting to the determine why Homo sapiens, out of all the genus of Homos, came to be the only member of the genus left, even though several other Homos co-existed with Homo sapiens, even interbreeding with them, as was the case with Neanderthals. Kennedy’s answer to this perpetual puzzle is that disease wiped out Homo sapiens competitors. As to why Homo sapiens did not immediately move north and why Neanderthals did not move south, Kennedy explains:

…infectious diseases created an invisible barrier: it was impossible for Homo sapiens to migrate out of Africa because sooner or later they would encounter Neanderthals and their pathogens and get ill, and the same was true when Neanderthals pushed southward. (30)

The solution to the problem that eventually allowed Homo sapiens to colonize Europe? Interbreeding with Neanderthals, who passed genetic disease immunity to the resulting children, who, according to Kennedy, then spread the immunity quickly among other Homo sapiens. Unfortunately, this did not seem to be a reciprocal transaction, and other Homos like Neanderthals died out as a result of diseases Homo sapiens had developed immunity to. Kennedy claims we can see this advantage in DNA samples taken from the different groups.

Kennedy is at his strongest when he is discussing disease from the Black Plague on. Here we have increasingly definitive research demonstrating how disease effected societies. I’d like to say this a worldwide history, but like other work I’ve read that attempt to trace patterns through long duree of history, this work is almost exclusively Eurocentric, including the inevitable examination of the decimation of the Americas by European diseases. I am waiting for a history of the Black Death in China or the rest of Asia. Did it happen in Africa? If the sources don’t exist, why not say so?

Testot takes a similar immense scope of Homo history, but he believes environment and Homo sapiens‘ ability to manipulate it to be the determining factor in human evolution:

What makes us unique in the living world is momentum; the ability to bring about continual change is specific to humans. Human culture is constantly evolving under the combined pressure of societal choices and environmental transformations. And this culture has, in turn, long modified its environment, creating continual feedback between culture and nature, of which our bodies are the product. Humans escaped natural determinism that day we were able to use culture to make a lasting impact on our surroundings…We just have to work out when this might have taken place. (9)

Testot’s examination is interesting because of his long duree focus on the interaction between humans and their environment. As mentioned above, he examines the turning points when humans effected or responded to their environments in a way that brought about sustained change. His argument that the environment affected human evolution was a bit Lamarckian for me – he does not produce the same DNA evidence that Kennedy leverages in Pathogenesis. I understand that certain traits were selected for, but does Testot’s thesis depend upon intentionality or simply the survival of genes better adapted to meet environmental challenges? How much is genetics and how much is culture?

Ultimately, Testot baldly asserts that humans have taken our control over the environment to a dangerous extreme that is leading the environment to change in ways that may destroy all human life, maybe even all life. Evolution can not adapt fast enough to save the planet, and humans are not acting quickly enough on a human timescale to curb the changes we have made to the environment in order to bring environmental conditions to a place where we reach a sustenance level. Humans have also created a completely lopsided demographic that has driven these negative changes.

I read these books in sequence, unaware that they would be tackling similar themes and timescales in different ways. I think both authors have important points to make, but their books reveal and strengths and weaknesses of taking on human history from start to finish. Testot should be applauded for his focus on how cataclysms effected the globe (excepting Africa for the most part) – this is a first book I have read in this genre that does so. Kennedy deftly shows how Europeans adapted to various plagues they encountered in history. The question both books leave open is: as we now have the ability and power to alter the environment, how do we do so in a way that is healthy and sustainable for a global population? Testot clumsily interjects:

Species become invasive when they prosper in area where they have no natural predators. And humans have no predators at all, particularly now that we have overcome epidemics. (49)

Oops. Maybe we can forgive this, as the originally French version of this book was published in 2017. But the brief note on the English edition in 2020, Testot makes no mention of COVID-19. AIDS rates one page. For Testot, plagues are an artifact of the past, whereas for Kennedy they are not only a present danger, but also lurking in the future. They seem to reach the same conclusion though: mankind has got to do something about it, not just to a create a healthy and hospitable world, but to create equity. Both these works chronicle the struggle between nature and man, what perhaps makes us different from all other animals. It’s up to us to determine how this future will turn out.