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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.

The Settler Sea: California’s Salton Sea and the Consequences of Colonialism. By Traci Brynne Voyles. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. pp. 362. Cloth, $60.00. Paper, $30.00.)

The Settler Sea is an environmental, social, culture, and racial history of the struggle over the meaning of the Salton Sea, a large body of water in Southern California that has many different meanings to many different groups of people. As the physical environmental nature of the sea changed over time depending on how different groups used it and conceptualized it, these groups struggled to define the identity of the sea and to control its use for divergent needs. From the Indigenous Peoples who called it there sacred home to the white tourists who used it as a trendy spa, the Salton Sea provided spiritual and economic meaning to many different groups of people. Voyle’s argument is worth quoting at length:

These forms of intersectional analysis suggest that the Salton Sea’s story is not simply a staid narrative of environmental decline, in which humans endlessly, and universally, destroy nature. The Settler Sea tracks a more nuanced argument: that the function of social power built into settler colonial processes – racism, sexism, classism, heteropatriarchy, ableism – are themselves environmentally ruinous. In this formulation, oppression of humans is a primary threat to the nonhuman world. Here the central line of thinking in environmental justice studies and some major works of environmental history…that environmental problems compound social inequities – is inverted to argue that social inequities also cause vast environmental problems. The morass of devastating environmental conditions at the Salton Sea illustrates how the dispossessive and exploitative conditions inherent to settler colonialism in this part of California have restructured the natural world in deeply troubling ways. (7)

The most important characters in this book, beyond the sea itself, are the Cahuilla people, whose physical and spiritual connection with their native lands, including the basin of the Salton Sea, drives the narrative. The Cahuilla had adjusted to the periodic evaporation and the flooding of the Sea. They treated the land as sacred. The arrival of settler colonialists and the racism they brought altered this relationship as they wrested away the Cahuilla’s scared lands and invested the Salton Sea with their own meaning, a dumping ground for toxic materials brought from redirecting and attempting to tame the Colorado River and building canals that emptied waste in to the Salton Sea. Settlers forced Indigenous Peoples to alter the landscape around the Sea, either by threats of violence or poverty or both. Settlers forced them from their homes and took their land, leaving them unmoored. The redirection of the Colorado River as a means to irrigate farmland in the Imperial Valley left indigenous homes underwater and besieged by toxic runoff that polluted the sea and threatened their already precarious way of life. This exploitation began a battle to reclaim that land that they are still fighting today. Voyles also demonstrates that Chinese, Mexicans, and prisoners also worked to build up the infrastructure around the Salton Sea. The Sea had different meanings to all these different peoples.

One thing I struggled to understand was the relationship between the pollution of the Sea and its continuing use. The influx of toxic chemicals and die off of animal and plant species seemed to work in tandem with the recreation of the Sea as a tourist mecca. How could tourists ignore the unpleasant (an understatement) deteriorating environmental conditions around them? Eventually the sea destroyed the tourist infrastructure, including the railroad nearby, but I had trouble determining a clear nature of the changing relationship tourists had to the sea. When did environmental degradation meet its tipping point for the recreational uses of the Sea? Did it ever? I suppose Voyles would say is that the point is that commercial tourism helped degrade the environment of the Salton Sea by imposing middle-class ideas of luxury onto the landscape, changing the environment to meet their needs.

The Salton Sea was built on the oppression of Indigenous peoples, exploitation of the labor of Blacks, Latinos, and Asians. The drive to shape the Salton Sea has a dumping ground for toxic waste and a playground for white Americans built an environmental catastrophe, destroying ways of life if not life itself. People are part of the environment, so taking Voyle’s argument into account, we can see how human relationships can devastate both nature and human life. Human narratives about environments form the way humans choose to interact with those environments. In The Settler Sea, Voyles uses the Salton Sea has a microcosm to explore this phenomenon.

In recommending this book, I think it would work in a graduate environmental history class. But the books cannot be limited to that. It could also be used in a class examining westward movement, or a history of Indigenous Peoples. One of the appeals of Voyles book is the layers of narrative she presents, finding multiple points of interest that weave together a comprehensive history of human relationships to the Salton Sea and how those relationships changed over time and depending on which group was interacting with the Sea and each other. Studying different groups of people does not separate them, however. Instead, Voyles shows how all the different characters in The Settler Sea are related to each other. That’s why I think it would be better suited for a graduate class. There is a lot to pick apart here, and her jumps in time and subject are sometimes confusing. For students learning how to write history at a higher level, it is a useful case study.

Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums. By Samuel J. Redman. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016. pp.373. Cloth, $42.00. Paper, $22.95.)

The subject of returning looted Native American remains to their tribes has been a topic of discussion in the national news for the last few years, with good reason. The Smithsonian Institution in particular has come under fire, as it still has thousands of human remains in its storage facilities. As Redman points out, only about 3,000 remains have been repatriated.

I don’t really have much to say about this book other than I found it to be extremely disappointing. Redman states right off that he is not going to detail recent controversy over the Smithsonian’s possession of the remains. Fair enough. But the history he presents is repetitive and surface and does not really provide a starting point for where these controversies arose, as I think any conscientious historian should. Writing history doesn’t mean you get to ignore the present. In fact, you have to address it or else your work is not contextualized and has no meaning.

Redman does not provide much new information. I learned that anthropologists became obsessed with collecting human remains as part of the discipline of physical anthropology in order to make discoveries about race. The only problem is that Redman never defines race, nor does he provide the most cursory overview of the state of race science in the nineteenth to eighteenth century, when this work is based. He simply states that physical anthropologists at that time studied race. Even with knowledge of race relations during this period, I felt completely distanced from the text. He also does not explicitly define physical anthropology directly – you have to really hunt for it (and part of it is buried in a footnote) – which is a major oversight considering his book focuses on physical anthropology. You can look it up, but without knowing Redman’s particular working definition, there is still a disconnect from the text.

The idea for this book had so much promise, but Redman’s failure to deliver analysis over straight up narration with a narrow focus, no context, and a slippery timeline, made this book a disappointment. I wouldn’t recommend using it in class except maybe in a graduate class where students can take the time to dissect what works and what doesn’t work. It would be well-suited for a history of science and technology, or a public history class, where it can be compared to in the same genre. In that case it may be instructive.

The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary. By Sarah Ogilvie. (New York: Knopf, 2023. pp. 370. Cloth, $30.00.)

The Dictionary People is an enjoyable book that takes the reader on a tour of the writing of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) by exploring the lives of the people who contributed. Ogilvie describes it as a product that the editors of the (OED) crowdsourced to hundreds of people around the world. These contributors read a variety of works to track down new words and their etymologies and then submitted them for inclusion to the OED. Some contributors provided thousands of submissions all on their own, but Ogilvie also gives space to those who may have contributed less words but presented more fascinating portraits.

This book would be great for an undergraduate class on how to write history. Ogilvie spends some time in the introduction detailing her sources, and a bit about her methods. Ogilvie does real historical sleuthing to discover the biographies of those included in her book, and her fortuitous discovery of editor James Murray’s address book and detailed notes therein lays bare how sometimes historical research is all about serendipity. But these detailed descriptions of research method fall by the wayside as her narrative progresses. I wish she had talked more about the methods she used to discover extensive biographical information about her subjects. That would make this book a perfect teaching tool.

The other thing that confused me a bit was how exactly the Oxford English Dictionary worked as an artifact in and of itself. Her descriptions of the OED do not include much information on what made up the OED, where they idea for it came from, and even how editors turned submissions into entries. Ogilvie does not clarify how those who submitted were chosen or self-selected. I also struggled to determine if contributors picked their own books to read from, or if Murray or another editor assigned the books. I know in many cases Murray sent books to the contributors to read, but Ogilvie did not make it clear if that was always the case. She may have made these choices because these subjects already discussed at length in The Professor and the Madman, but I don’t know if that’s the case, as I have not read that book.

This book is a light read, an enjoyable example of popular history done right. We as professional historians have something to learn from Ogilvie’s research methods and her ability to write popular history and make important contributions to historical methodology.

Slavery, Fatherhood, and Paternal Duty in African American Communities over the Long Nineteenth Century. By Libra R. Hilde. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020. pp. 400. Paper, $37.50.)

In Libra R. Hilde’s masterful history of the role of enslaved and reconstruction era fathers, Hilde finds agency for men and how they related to and sustained their families. Contrary to popular conceptions, Hilde reveals that enslaved fathers took an active part in their children’s lives, even in aboard marriages. The way these fathers treated their children earned them deep respect, as informants to the WPA interviews in the 1930s revealed. No matter how little a role slave fathers played in their children’s lives, they took on a great importance emotionally for their children.

Hilde demonstrates that enslaved fathers participated in and provided for family in differing ways. Whether providing food for their families to supplement plantation diet, buying their families into freedom, enlisting in the military, or providing their children with an education, enslaved fathers provided for their kin and, though always reminded by whites of their lack of power, still managed to sustain families emotionally and physically. They endured the same hardships as mothers when enslavers sold their children away, and would work for years to attempt to buy their families’ freedom.

Hilde contrasts the dedication of the enslaved fathers to the neglect of white slavers for their children with the enslaved, often mixed race mulatto women rated as highly desirable for concubines. Many children of miscegenation lacked fatherly support, as enslavers often refused to recognize their children in a way that would have affirmed parental duties. These two chapters serve an important bolster to Hilde’s argument about the presence and importance of black fathers versus the callous and economical calculations of enslavers. While some whites acknowledged their children to a degree, many of them exploited enslaved women as concubines and then sold their children to reap a profit.

Enslaved fathers claimed as much agency as they could in a world perpetuating bondage and a lack of any and all rights. Hilde demonstrates not just their presence, but the importance of the actions they took in challenging the structures of slavery and discrimination, systems predicated on white men as gatekeepers to respectability and honor, a threshold they did not allow Blacks to cross, whether in bondage or in freedom. As we have seen in previous reviews, this balancing act centered around Edmund Morgan’s “American Paradox.”* Hilde writes:

Poor whites were willing to forego potential class solidarity and the opportunity to make economic gains in favor of a rigid racial hierarchy. The elite accorded working-class men and women access to “whiteness” in return for their needed assistance in keeping African Americans subjugated. (284-285)

In this way, poor whites concluded with the slave-owning class to perpetuate a system of bondage based on race and driven by economic dictates. Even within this system, black men found ways to uplift their families and fight against dominant narratives describing them as absent or neglectful, even dysfunctional. They put their families above all else.

But even though the majority of Black men in Hilde’s book cared for their families, some exercised agency in different ways. Men who escaped slavery by running away had conflicted feelings about leaving their families. Trying to escape with a family was difficult. Children lacked the stamina to keep up the necessary pace, large groups moved more slowly and were more visible. Some men, unwilling to surrender their agency and unable to protect their loved ones from the brutality of slavery, ran away as a way to protest against the conditions of their enslavement in a family context. They could no longer stand by and watch enslavers abuse their families. They felt emasculated and dishonored, and so they ran so they would no longer have to face the humiliation of being unable to protect their families from abuse.

Paternal agency was important for men and women. Hilde reinserts enslaved fathers back into the narrative of family under slavery and reconstruction. Even when not physically present, enslaved fathers left deep impressions on this children. Children born of miscegenation suffered from a lack of paternal care, as their fathers often refused to acknowledge them or, at the end of the day, viewed them as financial assets. Either way, enslaved fathers played an important role in their families’ lives, and Hilde demonstrates this by arguing against a traditional narrative of absence that continues to this day. In this way, Hilde gives enslaved fathers agency that they have long been denied.

Most of the books I read during my time as a graduate student regarding slavery and gender were on women. The history of enslaved women is crucial to our understanding of the gendered and lived enslaved experience. Even Hilde’s book details a history of enslaved women’s experiences, especially in the chapters about how female enslaved women related to their masters and sexual abusers. But Hilde’s book is important precisely because she understands the complicated relationships paternal duty interjected into slave families. This book is crucial to understanding a more complete picture of how slave families worked, especially through the life of enslaved male’s role in family and slavery. It is a new take on an important subject. I would recommend it for undergraduate or graduate classes on slavery, as it paints a more complete picture of the abhorrent institution of slavery and how it warped even the most intimate of relationships.

*Morgan, Edmund S. “Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox.” The Journal of American History 59, no. 1 (1972): 5–29. https://doi.org/10.2307/1888384.

Berkeley: A City History. By Charles Wollenberg. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. pp. 224. Paper, $26.95.)

In 2009, I packed my bags and drove all the way across country from the East Coast to my new home in Oakland. I came to the Bay Area knowing nothing about its history. I landed a job at a used bookstore in Berkeley, and one of the first things I noticed about much of Berkeley was how much history was embodied in its buildings, its landscapes, and its human features. But I never really investigated the city beyond my every day lived experiences.

Fourteen years later and back in Virginia, I came across Berkeley: A City History online, and decided to buy it, wanting to know more of the place that changed my life in just two short years. Wollenberg’s book is a brief and concise history of the growth of the land and people in Berkeley from a region inhabited by Indigenous peoples to the modern city it is today. He makes sure to include the diversity that still characterizes the city.

While informative, I found most of Wollenberg’s narrative to be very surface, and I am guessing he intended it to be that way. I would love to read a deeper analysis of Berkeley’s history, one that focuses even more on the diversity of its inhabitants, from pre-colonial times to present. How has affluent white and poor minority populations living so densely packed together influenced the history of the city? How have national chains affected the proliferation of local business even into the twenty-first century? The used bookstore I worked at was actually a chain (which I didn’t know until after I applied) but Berkeleyites often mistook it for a used bookstore like Moe’s and this made them proud to patronize our business. Berkeley is full of fiercely independent people who want to keep businesses local and the arts flourishing. They pride themselves on the academic cornerstone of UC Berkely in their midst.

If you are looking for a compact history of one of the San Francisco Bay Area’s, and perhaps the country’s, most important cities, this is a good book for you. It leads the door open for more focused and detailed history of student protest (that has already been written about), race relations, class relations, deeper dives into urban and suburban history, the history of urban/mass transit, and many more subdisciplines.

Stark Mad Abolitionists: Lawrence, Kansas, and the Battle Over Slavery in the Civil War Era. By Robert K. Sutton. (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2017. pp. 276. Cloth, $24.99.)

Stark Mad Abolitionists is a brisk and informative read about the efforts to transform Kansas into a free state upon its induction in to the United States. Sutton is at his strongest when, in the initial chapters, he describes the efforts of Northerners like Amos Adams Lawrence to transplant anti-slavers from the East to the West to create a voting population willing to support Kansas’s entry into he Union as a free state. Kansas was not to be a utopia, but it appears in the initial chapters to be a promised land built on white immigrant belief that slavery should not be permitted in the state of Kansas, despite the violent efforts of nearby Missourians who packed the state legislature with pro-slavery Missourians who did not even live in Kansas. I knew that Kansas became a free state, but Sutton still had me biting my nails as he detailed the violent back and forth.

When the Civil War enters the narrative, Stark Mad Abolitionists becomes a battlefield history, describing the Civil War in Kansas. Sutton is a good writer, and keeps the pace brisk, so this part of the book almost reads like a thriller. It has its stock characters: the heroic free-state Kansans and the evil Confederate guerillas. Again, this was edge of your seat reading. The analytical punch is gone, however, which is too bad, because Sutton is capable of clearly and cogently expressing complicated ideas.

This book is a good starting point for the topic of the coming of the Civil War to battleground states like Kansas, but Sutton’s account begs to be fleshed out. Women appear in his narrative, though mostly as victims. I would love to read a history incorporating more of their voices. Sara Robinson is an especially interesting character. I would also like to hear more about the roles Blacks played in Lawrence. As Sutton writes, Lawrence was a major stopping point on the Underground Railroad. There has to be a rich history of the enslaved seeking freedom just ready to be told. For a book about the battle over slavery, Sutton only represents white voices. Surely there are stories from the Black point of view yet to be told.

This would be a good book for an undergraduate class looking for a case study of the coming of the Civil War. Lawrence represents in a microcosm the conflict playing out in the United States at large prior to the Civil War. I would treat it more like a textbook, as it does present some analysis but falls back into almost pure narrative as the book progresses. It is also a good read for someone like me, who knew nothing about Lawrence, Kansas other than the two times I stayed there during cross-country moves and Sex in the Heartland, by Beth Bailey. If you are looking for a short, informative read on place and the Civil War, this book is for you.

Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves During the Civil War. By Bruce Levine. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. pp. 252. Cloth, $80.00. Paper, $19.99.)

At the heart of this great little book is an investigation of who would get to control the narrative of why the South embarked upon the Civil War, and if it was possible to change that narrative given changing circumstances. This book details a narrative not so much between North and South as it does about contentions over the narrative within the South itself. Arming slaves in exchange for their freedom struck at the very core of how the Confederacy conceptualized itself, its status in the war, and its motivations for going to war and continuing to fight it, even when it was becoming clear that the only realistic prospect was loss.

Faced with a Northern army with access to a myriad of available recruits in comparison to the South’s dwindling forces, Southern officers began calling for the arming of slaves as early as 1863. But these suggestions slammed into a controversy over the meaning of the South’s core principles and motivations for going to war that would not subside and indeed, continued on after the Civil War as the South (successfully) tried to create a victory out of the inarguable military defeat.

As Levine writes it (correctly so), the South went to war to maintain the Southern plantation system and the institution of slavery. They saw slavery as too integral a part of their economy and culture to ever surrender it willingly. This belief in the sanctity of slavery and its ability to elevate the class of all whites in the South is laid bare by Levine in a argument reminiscent of Edmund Morgan’s American Paradox*”:

Nor, critics continued, was slavery’s demise a problem for slaveowners alone. Defenders of the peculiar institution had long represented it as the only way to enforce the prized privileges and dominant position of the white race as a whole. Slavery’s breakdown therefore threatened the vast numbers of whites who never owned a slave (53).

Whites of all classes embraced slavery, even if they were not slave owners, because a permanent, legal black underclass meant that no white person could sit at the bottom of the ladder. This pillar meant that all whites invested themselves in slavery because it protected their own class status. Also, in principle, all whites had the possibility of owning slaves, which would elevate their status as well. Thus, it was necessary to maintain slavery not just to protect the current planter class, but to keep a path of upward mobility available to those who didn’t own slaves (yet) who might otherwise chafe under planter rule.

As Levine writes it, slaveowners found the possibility of arming slaves to be so distasteful, disturbing, and destabilizing not just because once armed, slaves might turn on their former masters, but because it undermined everything they had built the Confederacy upon. Southerners had gone to war to protect their right to own slaves in existing slave states and to expand slavery into the territories to avoid political imbalance that they felt might spell abolition in the United States. To arm slaves and promise them emancipation for their participation on the side of the Confederacy flew in the face of everything they had believed about the war effort. Though they hid behind a smokescreen of paternalism to consistently assert their slaves’ happiness and loyalty, they knew that arming and emancipating slaves would cause as great a blow to the Confederacy as did the Emancipation Proclamation. Even when they did finally pass a law to arm and emancipate slaves in 1965, as the situation weighed heavily in the North’s favor, slaveowners by and large refused to participate in the muster.

Slaves also saw through the eventual Confederate attempts to arm and free them. They accurately pointed out that even though they as soldiers might be freed, their families would not be. Without allotments of land, they would have no way to support themselves and would end up working for their old owners, free only in name. Even as slaveowners resisted mustering slaves so as not to sacrifice their property, slaves saw the writing on the wall and refused to be lured by limited promises of freedom.

Ultimately the North won and the South lost, and arming Southern slaves did not make a difference in the military outcome. But yearslong debates over arming black slaves played a large role in how the Civil War would be remembered in the North and the South. The particulars of the campaign to arm slaves may be mostly forgotten, but visions for a postwar future in the South hinged on attempting to find ways to keep freedman in bondage as laborers in the South, even in freedom. Levine writes, “Inseparable from the this conflict over the future status of black Americans was the struggle over how to remember the South’s (and the nation’s) past.” (164) As my dad likes to point out, the North won the war but lost the peace. The South wrested the history of the Civil War from the North, and in the name of reconciliation, the North went along with it.

I knew nothing about this topic when I picked up this book. Levine is a good writer. He uses a lot of direct quotations, which can be a problem, but in this case Levine wove the quotes seamlessly into the text. He allowed his historical actors to damn themselves. I think this would be a great book to read in a graduate class on the Civil War or military history. It is also very valuable for the insights it offers beyond the military debate. This is not a battlefield history. It is about a proposed military tactic and the political, cultural, and social debates it inspired. It is about a historical battle over narrative.

The only thing I would have liked to see more of were sources from the enslaved or Union blacks about how they felt about arming Confederate slaves. Black voices do appear in the book, but they come toward the end, filtered through whites. I understand this drawback might be related to a limitation of sources. It might also have been interesting to hear more about what Northern reactions were to the proposed arming of Confederate slaves. Did they know about it at all? If they did, what did they think about this tactic? Silencing Northern voices in a way tips the balance, perhaps unintentionally, toward the Southern point of view. Slaveowners and Southern actors are the only ones who get a say.

In all a great, thought-provoking book.

*Morgan, Edmund S. “Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox.” The Journal of American History 59, no. 1 (1972): 5–29. https://doi.org/10.2307/1888384.

The Mosquito: A Human History of our Deadliest Predator. By Timothy C. Winegard. (Dutton: 2019. pp. 485. Paper, $18.00)

As stated by Raughley Nuzzi in his review of The Mosquito on goodreads, “This was an extremely disappointing book.” In his review he hits on all the main points I wanted to bring up on my own, with some additions. I thought I would go point by point and offer my own thoughts as supplemental material, . After the rave review blurbs on the inside cover, I was surprised to find this book severely lacking in analytical content and even something as simple as footnotes/endnotes. I was hard to consider the book a work of popular history, let alone actual scholarship. Here are my elaborations:

A “Western/American-centric approach.” Like Nuzzi, I was hoping for an examination of the mosquito’s role in world history. The title, after all, declares the book a “human history,” which includes areas outside the West. I can only imagine how fascinating it might have been to read about how Asia dealt with mosquito, if they faced the same diseases and came up with different or similar methods of combating mosquitos as those in the West did. Instead, this is a history of western civilization that offers no real value to the historical narrative. Winegard will narrate events (mostly wars, another of Nuzzi’s criticisms) and then tacks on at the end that this many people died from mosquito-borne diseases and therefore they caused the outcome of the war or events.

Correlation is not causation. This is my own criticism, and it tacks onto the point I made above. Winegard is very good at racking up body counts (the origins of these numbers are mysterious, as I will cover in my next bullet) but he doesn’t really do anything to prove mosquito-borne illness was a responsible for the course of the events. He will detail an event or environment, throw in a body count, and say that since so many people died of mosquito-borne illness, these diseases were the reasons for the outcomes. There is no data to back up that these correlations are causations. They could just be coincidences. Or perhaps they did play a role, but rarely is an historical event decided by just one factor. Here is an example of what Winegard has to say about the outcome of the Civil War:

“Given manpower considerations, malarious mosquitos helped drain southern military strength, promoted a northern victory, preserved the Union, and dismantled the institution of slavery.” (331)

Winegard is making the claim that mosquitos single-handedly decided the outcome of the Civil War and ended slavery. This is just one egregious example of Winegard pinning entire historical outcomes on the mosquito alone. Again, there is no real data provided to back up these claims, which leads to my next point.

Citing Sources. While Winegard does use asterisks to make asides, not once does he provide any footnotes or endnotes. There is a long bibliography at the end of the book, and there are “notes” at the end, but no indication as to which notes go with which claims. Winegard admits it can be difficult to pin down statistics in history, but his book goes beyond statistics to making the claims I detailed above. Without proper footnotes it is impossible to trace the path of his research and review sources that might support his argument. As a PhD in history, I am surprised he was able to get away with his. Yes, this a work of popular history, but if you are going to make an argument that one insect altered the course of world history many times, you need to lay your research bare.

Voice. As Nuzzi mentions, Winegard’s voice can be jarring. This is a work of popular history, so a more conversational tone might be expected, and I don’t have a problem with that. It is why I sometimes pick popular history over scholarly history. But Winegard does not pull it off. He is constantly making jokes that simply fall flat. I feel like an editor should have stepped in here and reined him in. When he is just narrating events he usually does just fine, but every time he makes a joke, usually about contemporary issues, it pulled me out of the book and left me irritated. The jokes are unnecessarily disruptive.

Race. Winegard makes the point again and again that Blacks had immunity to mosquito-borne diseases because they encountered them in Africa or had developed genetic resistance to mosquito-borne disease and therefore were protected. They had been seasoned. He believes that this is why enslavers wanted to employee Africans – their immunity made them a cheap, natural-borne fit for laboring in mosquito infested environments. And it is true that enslavers at the time believed that Africans had a greater resistance to mosquito-borne disease, and that was one reason they believed they made better workers. Unfortunately for Winegard, these myths have proven to be just that – myths. Africans died at the same rate as whites, and as to seasoning, every time slaves entered a new environment, they had to undergo the seasoning process again, just like whites did. I found it very off-putting that Winegard kept emphasizing this argument. Even if some slaves had a certain level of resistance, it certainly wasn’t dominate enough to provide a suitable bulwark against disease in a large population.

War. As mentioned by Nuzzi and other reviewers, Winegard’s west-centric narrative focuses on wars and military history, and from the author bio it looks like that may be what his background is in. His narrative follows the progression of wars in the West, where it may be easiest to trace statistics on mosquito-borne illness. But this focus loses out on what might be other facets of his book, such as a cultural history of the mosquito, or as Nuzzi relates, “a revelatory work on epidemiology and anthropology.” As I said earlier, this book reads as a narrative history of the West oriented around war that has the mosquito randomly interjected to prove that it has been our greatest killer, again, with no facts or sources to back that up.

Hyperbole. In his introduction Winegard states,

“The mosquito has killed more people than any other cause of death in human history. Statistical extrapolation situates mosquito-inflicted death approaching half of all humans that have ever lived. In plain numbers, the mosquito has dispatched an estimated 52 billion people from a total of 108 billion throughout our relatively brief 200,000-year existence.” (2)

Where do these numbers come from? He adds a note that the statistics can be hard to land on precisely and that there are many different factors that must be included from making estimates, but he cites no sources at all on where these humungous numbers came from. Most importantly, do they come from a reputable source(s)? Perhaps I missed the source for these numbers, but even so, it should not be that hard to find.

As you can see, I had many issues with this book. After 485 pages, I still didn’t feel like I’d learned anything new, except maybe of Winegard’s implicit disdain for Rachel Carson. I can’t recommend this book for scholarly or pleasure reading. It is simply too problematic.