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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.

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!

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.

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.