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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.

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.

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.