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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.

Political Gastronomy: Food and Authority in the English Atlantic World. By Michael A. LaCombe. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. pp. 224. Cloth, $49.95.)

I like to read food history and histories of colonial America, though I am no means an expert in either, so it is hard for me to place this book in the context of the historiography of either subject, though it definitely contains original arguments and research, as in topics I have not read about before.

Keeping this in mind, my initial reaction to the beginning of Political Gastronomy was that is read very much like other histories of the relationships between Indigenous people, colonists, and food. By this I mean the way colonists depended on the Indigenous people for food during their initial settlement. The prototypical example, Jamestown, is used here. This all seems like familiar history.

What LaCombe does so well is give a deeper history of these relationships, exploring how things like ritual and honor played a role in what LaCombe might call food politics. One of the most interesting points LaCombe makes is how leaders’ ability to provide subordinates with food related to their political legitimacy as leaders. He says:

First, to accuse a leader of misusing the food supply was a potent charge, one that portrayed him as corrupt and tyrannical. But the potency of this accusation grew from the fact that misusing the stores was more than a metaphor for tyranny: it questioned a man’s fitness to govern at the most basic level. For the early modern English, the bonds of reciprocal obligation that underpinned political relationships were rooted in food – finding, hunting, or growing it; distributing it to subordinates, guests, and dependents; and consuming it – more than in any realm of social life (133).

Controlling and distributing food judiciously defined a man’s honor, and therefore the legitimacy of his leadership. Most of the examination we get of this aspect of food culture comes from the English side of the equation. LaCombe is able to examine the colonists and even the English back home apart from Indigenous peoples, probably relating to the availability of sources. Indigenous peoples almost only feature in the context of their relationships with the colonists. Still, it is interesting to see how important food culture was to both sides, sometimes in not unfamiliar ways.

I think you could use this book in an undergraduate class to extract information about colonial relationships as well as the role of food as a cultural artifact. It would work well in an undergraduate or graduate survey of colonial American course, keeping in mind that is needs to be contextualized in the wider discourse. Again, I am not sure were this books falls in the historiography of food history and/or colonial history, but I think it has some important arguments to make and just because it tackles a familiar subject doesn’t mean it has nothing interesting or new to say.

How Writing Made Us Human: 3000 BCE to Now. By Walter Stephens. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023. 532pp. Cloth, $39.95.)

During graduate school, I took a course on the history of technology in society. This class was not concerned with more the more “technical” aspects of technology, like engineering for example. Rather it was interested in technologies as systems and artifacts and the way they interacted with culture and society, and how they evolved over time. We also talked about “failed” technologies, like the Supersonic Transport (SST). It was an interesting class and was valuable as I moved forward in my own studies of technology and space colonies.

In How Writing Made Us Human, writing is clearly a technology based on Kranzberg’s six laws of technology, and when Stephens tries to draw the line between the “technical” aspects of writing and what he deems the emotional development and impact of writing on writing, he begins to slip and lose his focus. According to Kranzberg, technologies encompass all facets of that technology’s definition; not just technical details, but how technologies interact with society and culture as well. Stephens, as mentions, claims he is not writing a technical history, meaning engineering in a very simplified term, but he also writes about writing as a technology in a sociocultural way, even if he doesn’t intend it (Stephens, xiii). Technology, according to Kranzberg, applies to both facets of an artifact and/or process. You can’t separate one from the other. Stephens claims to be writing an emotional history of writing, which Kranzberg would say again is part of the wholistic artifact and process (Stephens, xii).

It may be helpful to recap Kranzberg’s six laws*: 

1. Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral (545).
2. Invention is the mother of necessity (548).
3. Technology comes in packages (549).
4. Although technology might be a prime element in many public issues, nontechnical factors take precedence (550).
5. All history is relevant, but the history of technology is most relevant (553).
6. Technology is a very human activity and so is the history of technology (557).

To me, writing meets all this criteria as both and artifact and a process. I don’t think you can elide one aspect of writing when naming writing a technology. What you can try to do is say you’re going to focus on one aspect that of that technology, as long as you acknowledge the wholistic process/artifact.

This is something Stephens does in the Preface, and it should cover his bases, but the difficulty is that definitions of technology can be sloppy, and in is book he slides between one side and other because it can be hard to separate all the components when they rely so heavily on each other.

He is writing a history of the history of writing, a historiography of writing, and this means he explores writing to the very beginning of the technology, tracing its evolution over time (this is technology bit) as seen through what his historical actors wrote about the history of writing, or how they developed their own histories of writing (Stephens, xii). I was impressed that he was able to trace this trend as far back as 3000 BCE. I never thought that people would have begun writing about writing from the very onset of the technology. Through this history, Stephens’ historical actors explore and reify their own mythological or historical experiences. I would never thought of using mythology as a way to understand the history of writing. Those were my favorite chapters in the book.

At the end of the day, I am not sure how I feel about Stephens’ argument. I am too caught up over the debate about what technology is and what constitutes it, and I am confused by Stephens’ desire to compartmentalize a complicated set of interactions. Writing about the history of writing and the history of the history of writing are separated only by degrees. You really can’t do one without the other. This was also a rather top down history, which I am not criticizing – to incorporate more points of view would have made this study impossible. But it does leave the door open for others wanting to explore the vernacular, or different socioeconomic class responses to writing, or how writing’s role in culture changed after the invention of the printing press. I was disappointed there wasn’t more on the printing press in this book. It added to the technology in writing; Kranzberg would argue that the technology of writing necessitated the invention of the printing press, and the printing press was part of a technological package, a technological subset of the technology of writing. 

This was an interesting book, and I learned a lot of about the role writing played in the West from 3000 BCE to present (though the chapters became more condensed as Stephens moved forward in the timeline, perhaps a reflection of how difficult it is to create a general survey about how widespread and differentiated writing has become as we move from the religious elites to a vast popular audience, not to mention word processors and the internet). If I was a professor of a history of technology in society class, I would definitely assign this book, as I think it raises a lot of important questions about the nature of technology and how we study it. Its shortcomings or confusion is what make this book a valuable tool for teaching and learning. And it still has a lot of good things to teach us about how people have thought about writing over time. 

Mountains of Fire: The Menace, Meaning, and Magic of Volcanoes. By Clive Oppenheimer. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2023. pp. 357. Cloth, $27.50.)

Sometimes, when I want to take a break from history or academic writing, I read works of popular science. To me, volcanoes are fascinating, but I know almost nothing about them. So I picked up this book looking for easy to understand information about volcanoes and their history. Unfortunately, at the end of the book I felt like I knew the same amount about volcanoes as when I picked it up.

A lot of books in this genre are intimately intertwined with the author’s own scientific journey, from how they discovered the subject to where study of that subject has led them. In the case of Mountains of Fire, that means a physical journey around the world as Oppenheimer details where his experimentation took him. As such, this reads as more of an adventure story than one of popular science. He goes to some pretty interesting places, like North Korea and the Antarctic. I had no idea there were volcanoes in either of those places, and I found Oppenheimer’s visits there to be very interesting. As he says of his visit to volcanologists in North Korea and their inability to communicate and collaborate with the rest of the international scientific community “made me realise how science can suffer in seclusion” (134-135).

What I walked away from was the physical difficulties Oppenheimer encountered when attempting to study various volcanoes. He details difficulties in scaling them, difficulties in keeping adequate provisions, difficulties staying warm, difficulties in staying cool, difficulties of conducting science in a warzone, difficulties setting up camps and research stations where the volcano wouldn’t lop globs of lava onto their campsites. He also goes into details about the process of obtaining permission to visit certain sites, most notably in Africa, where he ran into human danger as well as volcanic ones.

This is an adventure story more than a scientific or historical one. As such, I walked away with a feeling of disappointment. If you want to read about what goes into studying volcanoes but not necessarily their history or the outcome of some experiments, this is the book for you. Unfortunately it wasn’t really what I was looking for. The Lost City of Z by David Grann is a good example of adventure writing in the present and in the past (though it is about archeology and not science). If you are looking for a book in this genre, that is the one I would recommend to you.

A History of Cookbooks: From Kitchen to Page over Seven Centuries. By Henry Notaker. (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. pp. 384. Cloth, $39.95.)

As mentioned in a previous post, I picked up this book expecting it to be a cultural history. What I got was a literary history of cookbooks, which wasn’t bad in and of itself. I learned a lot about how cookbooks have or haven’t changed over the last centuries, and reading about cookbooks from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries was fascinating, but I was disappointed there wasn’t more about the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For example, Notaker discusses as how cookbooks became more gendered toward the female as history progressed, however, he does not discuss the history of cookbooks in the 1950s and 1960s, in which cookbooks aimed primarily at white middle-class women constructed one facet of the idea of home. As I said, he does discuss gendered cookbooks and how they prescribed certain behaviors for women not only as cooks but also has heads of the domestic sphere in the household. I do think, however, it would have been fascinating to see his take on the cookbook literature of mid-century America, or even Europe, as I have no idea if cookbooks aimed at homemakers in America crossed the Atlantic or vice versa.

I found Notaker’s brief coverage of wartime cookbooks to be informative. It never occurred to me before that cookbooks might have been a way to generate nationalism (even if recipes in them came from somewhere else), especially during wartime. “Whether it was the intention of authors or not,” Notaker writes, “the books inevitably became tools for official propaganda” (261). I knew about freedom fries, but I did not know there was a long history of cookbooks and food culture being used during wartime to create a feeling of national belonging.

As I said, this is a literary study. It focuses most on not only what cookbooks contained, but how they were expressed and the needs they changed to meet or influence the world around them. His authors are mostly anonymous, which may reflect a paucity of sources in terms of recording authors’ names. But Notaker does a good job of tracing change over time. I recommend this read for people interested in investigating the form and content of cookbooks over time. I am not sure how I would use this book in a course but it would be suitable for an audience of undergraduates, who might groan at the length.

Update`12/29/2023: It occurred to me that I left out what drew me to vintage cookbooks in the first place: the images of food. As related, the images of the food (or other related, or unrelated subjects) are just as important as the recipes or other content. Images receive very little attention in A History of Cookbooks, which strikes me as a gross oversight considering images are such an important part of cookbooks’ narratives. Images are a text too, and it seems to me that Notaker could have spent an entire chapter tracing the development of images in cookbooks. It would have been interesting to hear his thoughts on these images and to trace their kind and mutations over time.