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The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party. By Daniel James Brown. (Boston: Mainer Books, 2009. pp. 384. Paper, $18.99.)

As every PhD student knows, one of the biggest events in your academic career is your comprehensive exam, popularly known as “comps.” You read near a hundred books and then have to be grilled on them for two hours with no notes. A staggering challenge.

I am abnormal in that I like this sort of exercise. I spent months prepping, participated in practice sessions, and overall felt pretty good about the whole thing when I sat down for the actual exam. And things indeed were going very well, until I well and good put my foot in my mouth, like I always do.

We were talking about Facing East from Indian Country, a book about encounters between Indigenous peoples and Europeans written from the Indigenous point of view. Because we don’t have the richness of sources on the way Indigenous peoples thought about their first encounters with Europeans, historian Daniel K. Richter read the sources in between the lines and used that to determine what might have been behind these encounters. I, very naively, expressed reservations about his methods, and everyone immediately jumped on me, rightly so.

The professor that had a assigned me the book put the value of such an approach in simple terms. In all the works on Thomas Jefferson, she said, no one ever mentioned him climbing stairs. But he was surrounded by them his whole life and must surely have made use of at least some of them. Given the facts you know with perhaps some common sense, it’s possible to make credible extrapolations. Since my comps I have read many, many books about Indigenous people that make use of Richter’s method, and I even reread Facing East from Indian Country and found nothing objectionable. Unfortunately, it was too late to salvage my comps.

In the “about the book” section at then end of The Indifferent Stars Above, the interviewer categorizes the book as narrative non-fiction (10). It reads to me like journalism. Author Brown centers his story one of the members of the Donner Party, Sarah Graves, and follows her tragic journey to California, attempting to understand what made such a human tragedy possible. The book deals with sensationalistic, yes, but not outrageously so. Brown is trying to tell a story of how ordinary people react to extraordinary hardship. In doing so, Brown uses Richter’s methods, extrapolating as much from the sources as he can, even going so far as to follow Graves’s overland trail himself, as detailed in the book’s conclusion.

Being trained in academic history, it is always interesting to read books of popular history written by popular historians. What is their methodology? How do they balance readability with building notes and bibliography of sources that allow scholars and others to trace their research without losing threads of what is compelling about the narrative? I know nothing about the Donner Party, so I have to read Brown’s footnotes and sources section to trace his trail of research. And there is also that extrapolation, that successful humanizing of the story to make it transcend mere narrative, something I think most historians struggle with a great deal.

Brown succeeds in developing human characters, contextualizing them in the broader narrative of western expansion. You know what is going to happen to the characters, but Brown does not exploit this ghoulish scenario as something to sensationalize. He gives humane and measured descriptions of the cannibalism that still haunts the story of the Donner Party. The Indifferent Stars Above is about that people behind the actions, not the actions themselves. And that makes the story all the more compelling.

Could you use this book in a classroom setting? I’m not sure. As I said, there is a lot here on the nature of westward expansion. The difficulties the Donner Party faced even before becoming snow bound for that one terrible winter cover the hardships of the journey westward, and what drove so many people to take the chance of that journey. The question becomes is there enough contextualization enough to use the cannibalism as a framing device, a hook to draw in students perhaps not so excited about the underlying subject. That being said, if used I would limit it to undergraduates.

No matter who we are and how we approach history, we can never truly know how everything happened, how people felt about, how they reacted. This is a very postmodern approach to take. But there are many, many voices that can tell us their own experiences and perhaps allow us to get an approximation, even a close one, to how events unfolded. Brown’s approach is just one attempt to get at that goal and, grim reality aside, it makes his book an enjoyable read, one worth entertaining as a history even in academic setting.

The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in America. By Matthew Bowman. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023. pp. 278. Cloth, $30.00.)

My family is very literate. I was raised by a lawyer and law librarian, so reading is one of the first things I remember doing. It is customary to sit around the dinning room table and talk about what we are reading. When I told my family about reading this book, my mom was excited because she had heard about Betty and Barney Hill and wanted to read more about their abduction. The first thing my dad asked? “Did they really get abducted?”

My dad likes to ask me questions like that about the books I read. I went through a phase where I read several books on cannibalism and my dad’s first question was always, “Did they really eat people?” And like any good historian, I parroted back that whether or not they really ate people was less important than understanding what historical actors thought about the act of cannibalism, how they folded it into their cultures and let it drive their actions.

To many this approach is not satisfying or might seem disingenuous, but that is how we are trained. Of course we want to know if cannibalism was a real instead of constructed phenomenon, and the answer is probably that in some cases it was a little bit of both. But beyond the actual details of what happened, which we may never know, we can learn so much more about cultures and historical actors than we otherwise could if we simply focused on the action itself.

Keeping that in mind, The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill is a great book. As Bowan lays out in the final paragraph of the book, addressing whether or the Hills’ abduction really happened, he says:

…I am taking the Hills’ story and making something new with it, translating it into the language of the historian, making it a story of the American Cold War period, and directing it toward American concerns in the early twenty-first century, a time when conspiracy and distrust roam freely. That I am skeptical of such impulses but sympathetic to their causes might be evident to the reader, but, again, it would not have satisfied Betty and Barney Hill, who remained to their deaths convinced that, in fact, they had made contact with life from another star (223).

I spent a lot of time researching alien encounters in primary sources for my dissertation, and Bowman echoed my sources in describing the Hills’ story as the first one of actual abduction. But none of the authors I read really dwelled on their story. Bowman has curated enough information about the Hills to present a book-length work on their experiences, and what they mean when contextualized in their own historical context. As I emphasized, Bowman is not really interested in determining whether or not the Hills’ abduction story is true. He is more interested in how they reacted to the experience they had and how that reaction fits into the history of UFOs and then how the phenomenon specific to the Hills and as related to Americans can teach us about Cold War America in the 1960s and 1970s.

One of the most important things I learned from this book is that Betty and Barney Hill were an interracial couple at a time when interracial marriage was still illegal in 17 states. Their racial difference is something none of my primary sources had ever mentioned (if they did I did not pick up on it), but Bowman makes it one of the central aspects of his book. Betty experienced the abduction as positive, and Barney as negative. Bowman speculates this could have been because of the racial discrimination Barney experienced in his life. He then uses this framework to explore race relations in American in the 1960s and 1970s. He provides biographies of Betty and Barney that situate them in their own historical moment and explains that the racial discrimination Barney experienced throughout his life may have colored his experience with his abductors, a negative and humiliating experience compared to Betty’s positive one. Bowman writes,

The Hills’ turned to psychology and hypnosis to search for the truth behind the abduction, to legitimate an outrageous event with what the Hills believed was science, though most would consider it a soft science. Bowman explains:

“It was in the interests of both [Barney Hill and Walter Webb] to present their ideas and interpretations as something other than what [George] Adamski [who also believe he had communicated with extraterrestrials] was doing. To label their work ‘science’ was to make something respectable (83).”

Benjamin Simon agreed to hypnotize the couple, and carried out several sessions with each of them, during which the Hills corroborated the details they had previously expressed and expanded upon them. Bowman writes,

Bowman writes:

For Barney, the experience was destabilizing and terrifying, a story of haunting persecution and the fear of captivity marked by his self-consciousness as a Black man in America. The emotionally charged reactions to the tapes [of the Hills’ hypnosis sessions] evoked in him testified to that, as did the anger he expressed toward Simon for doubting him (129).

Bowman also provides an interesting examination of the New Age movement in the 1970s, when Betty Hill turned to a disparate new community in which to share her belief in alien and abduction and her own personal stories about it. She gained legitimacy here that the scientific culture and government of the day would not give her.

When you study what appears to be an outrageous idea and try to make it a subject of academic or popular scholarship, people react just as my dad did to this book. Is it real? or could it happen? My dissertation was on space colonies, and I spent years studying space colony proponents writing about a fantastical idea that they believed would happen, and that this inevitably could be proved with hard science. When people learned about my topic they always wanted to know if I thought space colonies could happen. And my answer was always no. At least not as Gerard K. O’Neill and others imagined. Reading so much about the incredible hostility of space to any human life, some of which was detailed by proponents of space colonies, I came to be increasingly convinced that they could not happen. Historians have opinions too.

But the difficulty when writing about such a subject is, how do you remove yourself from your criticism or disbelief and provide a fair examination of the phenomenon you are studying? I suppose this is a fair question to ask of any work of history, no matter the topic. Here Bowman does an admirable job of walking this tightrope. He believes that the Hills believed they had been abducted, and that their experiences related to the abduction were real to them. He examines how their cultural environment helped prime them for how they experienced their abduction, and how it drove their actions afterward. He also describes outsiders who believed the Hills’ story and made their own narratives about it. Even James Earl Jones made a TV movie about the Hills’ experiences. There are reasons to doubt, but that doesn’t mean the first story of alien abduction is not crucial to understanding the people at the heart of the narrative and the historical moment they found themselves in.

This book is short and very readable. I think it would be a perfect book to use in an undergraduate class on the history of the 1960s and 1970s. It has a fascinating hook and seamlessly integrates a boarder historical context. Bowman is one of the first historians to seriously take on this topic in this timeframe. He presents an excellent example of how historians hoping to explore space and more esoteric, tangible, or directly related subjects should be written. I wish I had had this book as a model when I was researching and writing my dissertation. Just because a topic is decisive and may even seem not of this world does not meant it is not a valid topic of historical study.

The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal About Aliens – and Ourselves. By Arik Kershenbaum. (Penguin Books, 2020. 356pp. Cloth, $24.99. Paper, $18.00.)

Imagining a place outside our own, a place in space, has gone hand in hand with imagining that beings other than ourselves might inhabit that place. Scientists agree that the laws of physics are universal (as far as we know). But what exobiologists, now called astrobiologists, have debated for decades is not only whether or not there is life somewhere else in the universe, but whether or not there are universal laws of biology that can apply to all life, so that we should know what to expect if we find that other life.

Most exobiologists in the 1960s and 1970s hedged their bets on the idea of whether or not there are universal laws of biology. After all, the only example we have of life is ourselves and the life on this planet. In The Zoologists Guide to the Galaxy, zoologist Arik Kershenbaum claims that there are universal laws of biology embedded in evolution and natural selection. All life, he argues, comes from natural selection, and therefore when considering extraterrestrial life, things like sociability and language would have developed among intelligent extraterrestrial species, indeed intelligence itself, would be common across all life, no matter where it originated. Extraterrestrials may evolve to fit in environments different than ours, but they would have the same objectives as humans and animals on earth do: the desire to survive and pass our genes onto the generations that come after. Only genes that promote this goal would be selected for and passed on.

To propagate an intelligent species, according to Kershenbaum, extraterrestrials must naturally select for not only physical but cultural traits to promote not just regeneration, but a desire to work together to build a better society and perhaps then seek out other lives among the stars. The biggest thread throughout Kershenbaum’s argument for universal laws of biology among intelligent species is the need to cooperate to achieve complicated goals.

I bought this book because it has good reviews on Amazon, and I was looking for a light read. What I ran smack into was a book that could have been transported from the works written in the 1960s and 1970s that I read for my dissertation discussing alien life: Carl Sagan, the Drake Equation, SETI. As mentioned, scientists with an interest in extraterrestrial life claimed and offered an ostensible reluctance to speculate about the nature of extraterrestrial life and generally agreed that the only way to determine if there are universal laws of biology would be to discover extraterrestrial life and study it, compare it to what we know. Writers like Sagan couldn’t help themselves though – they made many speculations about what extraterrestrial life might be like. And their arguments should draw just as much critical thought as Kershenbam’s do.

One conclusion exobiologists reached that is especially relevant to Kershenbaum’s thesis is their belief that life on earth evolved as a series of lucky accidents transmitted through the generations by natural selection. Rewind earth to the beginning and start all over, and genes naturally selected the second time around might develop into a completely different end state. Kershanbaum attempts to acknowledge this idea, but he is stubbornly wedded to his belief that nature will always naturally select for certain traits, especially in terms of intelligence. There are universal laws of biology.

It is okay to speculate on these things. The human mind is curious and likes to solve puzzles. Whether or not there is extraterrestrial life and how it will compare to life on earth has been debated for centuries. But we know so little even about life on own planet, that is seems a stretch to say we can determine universal laws of biology without finding other life. Until then, everything is mere speculation, and that speculation can be fun and interesting. But we can’t say with any certainty that it is anything other than speculation.

Perhaps I have read too many works by those who speculated about (extraterrestrial) life in the 1970s, but from where I sit we are facing the exact same problem, and we have just as few answers. Kershenbaum wants to break new ground, wants to share his ideas with a wider audience. But for all his lip service to acknowledging a certain variability in natural selection, he fails to convince me that his thesis holds weight. For him, all extraterrestrial life must evolve cooperation and sociability, all extraterrestrial life must evolve language, even if we can’t understand its form or content, all organisms with these traits will develop into cooperative societies and will come together to build culture and eventually take on projects like exploring the stars.

We just don’t know this to be true. There seems to be the assumption that cooperative alien societies would not destroy themselves a la the L variable in the Drake Equation. And because they have not destroyed themselves, perhaps they will have no interest in destroying us either. This ignores the many coercive systems on earth that have made large work projects possible that often involved the gross destruction of the environment and human life. This breakdown occurs often. Perhaps it is a universal law of biology.

Maybe I am not being fair. This book was not meant to be a scientific treatise. But there are so many holes in the argument it is hard to not pry it apart. I believe it is good to speculate, to imagine what could be here and elsewhere. But we need to take this book with a big grain of salt. It is okay to read it and enjoy it for fun. But taking the work as the last and most authoritative word on the subject is perhaps not the best way to approach this book. We must challenge it with our own knowledge and beliefs, our own hypotheses. That is science. That is what makes us human. That is what this all about.

Update 12/24/2023: In my original post I forgot to mention one thing that is prevalent among the exobiologists/astrobiologists that contemplate and pontificate on extraterrestrial life: many are credentialed scientists. Carl Sagan had a PhD from the University of Chicago and taught first at Harvard and then at Cornell. A lifelong participant in SETI, Sagan helped NASA design the records placed on the Pioneer and Voyager probes meant to communicate knowledge about earth and the human race through the medium of science, which they proposed would be driven by universal laws any intelligent extraterrestrials might be able to understand. Remember, they believed that laws of physics and mathematics were universal, and that even if extraterrestrials didn’t speak the same language as us, they would still be able to understand the more “objective” part of the message. Sagan and others used pulsars meant to help an extraterrestrial species help locate the origin of the records, earth.

Frank Drake received a PhD in astronomy from Harvard University. When not participating in attempts to find extraterrestrial life in the universe, particularly by participating in SETI, he became the Dean of Natural Science at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He also participated in developing the Pioneer and Voyager records. Many other participants in the search for extraterrestrial life have similar academic and professional credentials.

Arik Kershenbaum’s biography is the first thing you see when you open his book, and the first knowledge about the author revealed in this biography is that he is a “zoologist, college lecturer, and fellow at Girton College, University of Cambridge.” Further, “He is a member of the international board of advisors of METI.org, a think tank on the topic of messaging extraterrestrial intelligence.”

Why is this important? All these scientists, including someone has famous as Sagan, hid behind their academic and professional credentials when speculating as to the nature of extraterrestrial life. But there were others from outside science postulating their own theories about intelligent life in the universe. Erik von Daniken, famous for popularizing the idea of what has become known as visits from “ancient astronauts” or “ancient aliens” did not have this shield to hide behind, he was a layman, he did not use the scientific method, and therefore his ideas had no weight in the scientific community. But his enduring popularity demonstrates that not everyone needed “legitimate” credentials to win over a loyal audience. Von Daniken portrayed himself as an archeologist, a historian of the ancient world, and attracted millions of interested readers and spawned movies and television shows you can watch to this day. And von Daniken achieved this fame by claiming to be a scientist, even though there are many, many flaws in his investigations and the presentation of his conclusions. This attempt to use science both hard and soft to legitimate his ideas just further demonstrates how important these credentials were to winning over a credulous audience. He portrayed a layman who could take on big science. He was accessible.

This popularity flew in the face of what scientists like Sagan were trying to do. They hoped to postulate on extraterrestrial life from a position based in science, a position that belied any doubts or criticism. Believe me because I have these degrees, because I have had these experience, and these things are what make me legitimate, these things are what make my theories worth believing. Even if I have just as little knowledge about extraterrestrial life that you have because at this point it is a universal unknown. My powers of deduction are superior to yours because I have an advanced degree, because I have spent my professional life working on this puzzle with other similarly credentialed parties.

The Drake Equation is a classic example of scientists trying to deduce whether or not there is life elsewhere in the universe using what appeared to be the scientific method. It consists of a series of variables meant to help estimate how many intelligent, communicating extraterrestrials there are in the universe. From Wikipedia, that Drake Equation is:

where

• N = the number of civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy with which communication might be possible (i.e. which are on the current past light cone);

and

• R_∗ = the average rate of star formation in our Galaxy.
• f_p = the fraction of those stars that have planets.
• n_e = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets.
• f_l = the fraction of planets that could support life that actually develop life at some point.
• f_i = the fraction of planets with life that actually go on to develop intelligent life (civilizations).
• f_c = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space.
• L = the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space.

As the equation progresses, each variable becomes more and more speculative. Fifty odd years later, we have barely started to gain the ability to determine the third variable, ne, even though an argument could easily be made that we have barely made progress on the first variable, R*. That is one thing the Webb telescope is aiming to do, and in the short time it has been observing the universe it has already challenged our understanding of the way the universe, specifically galaxies, are formed.

Yet Drake and others believed they could still guesstimate at the correct number for each variable and select for the presence or absence of extraterrestrial intelligent life. What better way to legitimate your search mathematically and scientifically than to break down the problem into a mathematical equation? This equation might have been incomprehensible to a lay audience, but that was part of the game. Science can often gain legitimacy by being opaque. Scientists are the only ones who understand this concept, therefore they are the only ones who can explain it to me. This speculative equation holds weight because the experts say it does. Their prestige means they are trustworthy and objective and therefore their conclusions are valuable and impregnable. Scientists are reliable narrators who should be venerated for explaining complex concepts in ways I can understand.

Drake and others did admit that the equation came to be increasingly speculative, but that didn’t stop them from using it to calculate the odds there might be intelligent life somewhere out there, given they didn’t (or we didn’t) destroy themselves first.

This brings me back to Kershenbaum. He is just part of a long history of speculators using scientific and academic credentials to provide legitimacy to his entirely speculative theories on what life would be like on other planets. It will be like life on earth, he says implicitly and explicitly, even though it might have some qualities we might not expect or might struggle to recognize. Life and biology have universal qualities that we can extract from the only example we have. But I, Kershenbaum, have these qualifications that make me legitimate, that means my speculations hold objective weight. I am just following the bread crumbs.

It may not seem fair to pigeonhole these writers. And besides, as I said, this speculation and curiosity are what make us human. But we must also be vigilant of the sources we receive our information from, no matter their credentials and charisma. We must understand when the authors are engaged in speculation. We must challenge their conclusions, no matter how many degrees they have. Sagan, Drake, and their colleagues might be closer to von Daniken than they are willing to admit. Thought experiments are good, they grow our brains, but at the end of the day we still need to be honest about our goals, our assumed meanings, and leave open the door for new information and new surprises.

Food on the Page: Cookbooks and American Culture. By Megan J. Alias. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. 244 pp. Cloth, $39.95.)

I have a confession to make. I love collecting old cookbooks. I ran the cooking section for a bit when I worked at the used bookstore, and we always used to pillory the old cookbooks that came through because the food looked so unappetizing. How, we wondered, could anyone be inspired to cook that? We valued these books as nothing. Now, 12 years away from the very chaotic 20-something me, I realize we missed our opportunity. We should have made a nostalgia cookbook shelf where we could squirrel away all those ridiculous cookbooks so that quirky-minded buyers could enrich their collections with, say, the Better Homes and Garden Ground Beef Cookbook. I know that audience is out there because I am that audience. I scour the selves of our local used bookstore looking for these misunderstood volumes. First my criteria was anything from the 1950s-1970s that looked disgusting. There are a lot of those. Then I expanded my search to include quirky cookbooks from the same time period, like an entire cookbook dedicated to just canned tuna, or a Scottish cookbook with a recipe for haggis. If you can imagine it, and especially if you can’t, it is out there for you.

Better Home and Gardens Meat Cookbook, 1959. From author’s collection.

My obsession with these cookbooks meant I was thrilled to discover Megan J. Elias’s Food on the Page, which promised to take an in-depth look at American cookbooks from the very late 18th century to the present. Most of all, I wanted an investigation into what exactly was going on with the food and images that accompanied the mid-century cookbooks I collect and marvel at. I was a bit disappointed. Elias does have a section on industry cookbooks, and even mentions the Better Homes and Gardens cookbooks (of which I have many, many different volumes) but there’s nothing on the images accompanying the text. In fact, Elias believes that image-based cookbooks are a relatively new phenomenon, but I have to disagree. The imagines in the mid-century cookbooks I collect are front and center, integral advertising for the recipes contained inside. Follow these steps and your food will look as (un)appealing as is pictured here.

I am probably not being very fair to Elias. I walked into her book with some very niche interests. As she states in the introduction, “Cookbooks are full of words about food, but they don’t really tell us what people eat” (1). This means they also don’t tell us about what people thought of those stomach-turning images in my cookbooks, or whether they might look more appealing when encountered as actual cooked foods or with a better photographer.

What Elias does do, and does well, is focus on how American cookbooks instructed their audiences not only on how to cook, but how to feel about the food they cooked, a moving target as fashions changed. This narrative is very interesting, but Elias is a little bit light on context. She assumes a certain familiarity with the time periods she reviews, and I had that foreknowledge, but I can see another reader struggling with putting Elias’s arguments into a historical narrative. As cookbooks changed, so did the times. We need to know more about those times, even if the relationship between the two, and who is driving that change, is not always clear. As Elias says in the epilogue:

The hundreds of cookbooks I read over the course of this project revealed to me that, like all writing genres, cookbooks exist at the pleasure of readers, serving their need for inspiration and reflection. Cookbooks can be useful for practical matters, but for the most part they serve other purposes – reinforcing class identities, establishing communal historical narratives, providing, like other kinds of fiction, a diversion from the reader’s personal experience of the usual. The cookbooks discussed here all performed at least one of these functions and sometimes all of them and more simultaneously (239).

Here Elias is hedging a bit – she is putting the readers front and center instead of the cookbook authors that star in her narrative. By leaving audiences for these cookbooks out of the scope of her work, she misses a crucial part of how these cookbooks worked in each of their time periods. Overall, this books lacks a bit of depth, as Elias moves quickly between topics and gives some only superficial treatment. A chapter naming Julia Child in the title barely discusses who she was or the reason for her popularity, only going into details about those who opposed her philosophy. Elias tends to do this throughout – privileging one point of view without really giving a clear picture of the other. And without any sort of understanding of reception, the arguments unravel a bit. I refuse to believe that there aren’t ways to know how people reacted to or drove changing trends in cookbooks. She examines many periodicals and indicates that several published reader letters. That would have been a good place to start.

This book is a light read, perhaps because it skims topics briefly without giving a lot of context or evenly representing opposing views. The last chapter on current food trends was especially interesting, especially as Elias poked holes in Michael Pollan’s arguments put forth in The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food. I found reading Pollan to be a mixed bag – interesting subject matter with an off-putting self-important tone, so I was interested to hear a counter to his arguments.

I think the most important takeaway from this book is that all food culture is a construction. What we eat and what we think about what we eat changes over time depending on the needs and beliefs of cooks (professional or lay) and those ingesting the food. Cooking is a culture in and of itself, and everyone involved is constantly being offered a variety of options for how they can participate in that culture. Food on the Page is a good start toward how to understand that culture, but to do so, we need to understand more than just those attempting to make the rules.

Slaves Waiting for Sale: Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade. By Maurie D. McInnis. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011. 227pp. Paper, $33.00. Cloth $99.00.)

In Slaves Waiting for Sale, Maurie D. McInnis sets out to understand the slave trade through the use of visual sources created by white male artists as they depicted various scenes brought about by that trade. McInnis focuses especially on the eponymous 1861 painting, Slaves Waiting for Sale, painted by British artist Eyre Crowe. While on a visit to the United States with William Makepeace Thackeray, Crowe witnessed a slave auction in Richmond, Virginia, that inspired the painting. McInnis claims that his painting is unique because, as opposed to depicting the sale itself, a common feature of abolitionist imagery, he depicted slaves waiting to be a sold, a wide range of emotion playing across their faces. McInnis particularly focuses on the enslaved man in the image, who with arm’s cross appears in what McInnis thinks is a surprisingly defiant position. For McInnis this painting gives us new insight into the brutality of the slave trade, as well as exploring how different visual artists represented it. 

Crowe painted this image from a sketch he took at a Richmond slave sale, an action that almost got him tossed out when slave buyers and traders noticed what he was doing. McInnis believes this painting is a singular work of art that expertly expresses the cruelty of the slave trade by highlighting how slaves faced their impending sale, clinging to their families and displaying rebellion, even if it is just expressed in a body language. As revealed in Walter Johnson’s Soul by Soul, anything that the enslaved did that might reveal the tragedy at the heart of the slave trade could tank a sale and ruin the reputation of traders and buyers. McInnis also paints an interesting picture of the Richmond slave market, something that was new to me.

What I think is missing here is a thorough examination of the origins of this image and those who made it possible. Crowe is a white male, and British, and so his painting is taken from that viewpoint. In a way he is representing what slave buyers and traders refused to acknowledge by painting a scene atypically depicted by other artists. He focus is on the human anticipation of the sale and not the rupture that was the auction itself. For McInnis, the waiting enslaved in Crowe’s painting reveal that the slave auction is only one rupture, that the enslaved have suffered rupture after rupture only to be faced with the utter devastation of the sale. 

Similarly, all the white slave traders and enslavers are men; there is no mention of how white women might have played a role in the trade outside of fears of white slavery. This sexualizes white women and marginalizes them from a world they were very much a part of, as we know from They Were Her Property by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers. It could be that McInnis simply did not find images depicting female slave owners or participants in the slave trade, however, they did take part, and a lack of at least mentioning why McInnis did not include them in his study would have been helpful.

Again, I think the focus on one artist with one viewpoint perhaps weakens the book, though McInnis does use Slaves Waiting for Sale as a way to examine other visual representations of the slave trade. The only women in the book are the enslaved women, and McInnis makes them a crucial part of pre-, present, and post-sale action. He uses the expressions on faces, body language, and clothes in an attempt to analyze their role in the sale trade and even how they might feel about their unwilling participation. 

By studying the visual abolitionist art that came out of the slave trade, McInnis introduces us to an important sensory experience of that trade. There is still work to be done by future authors, however, work that might widen the scope of whose eyes were are looking through. Despite shortcomings, this is worth the read. 

The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of Enslaved, from Womb to Grace, in the Building of a Nation. By Daina Ramey Berry. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017. 212pp. Cloth, $27.95, Paper, $18.95.)

The most succinct expression of Berry’s argument comes in the Notes on Sources. Berry writes:

My work merges the economic patterns of enslaved appraisals and sales with the testimonies of the enslaved. It illustrates the ways in which black people were commodified from birth through death – and beyond (some enslaved bodies were harvested as cadavers for nineteenth-century medical education). I also argue that enslaved people held internal values, soul values that often escaped commodification.

This the point where I confess that I am not a scholar of slavery, just someone who has an abiding interest in the subject. If I was a scholar of slavery, I might be able to tell you how this books fits into the historiography of slavery and in economics and medicine. The most striking chapter in The Price for Their Pound of Flesh is chapter 6, “Postmortem: Death and Ghost Values.” Berry demonstrates that the bodies of the enslaved continued to retain value even after death, both monetarily and as scientific subjects through the abhorrent use of their bodies in medical schools. To me, this subject, mentioned in passing in other works, is laid bare in careful detail missing from previous studies. Berry provides an expanded explanation of how medical schools stole slaves from their graves to conduct medical experiments on them. She also demonstrates how even the bodies of the enslaved executed for rebellion or other “crimes” became commodifiable objects passed down through generates as a macabre keepsakes.

The Price for Their Pound of Flesh is an important supplement to books like Walter Johnson’s Soul by Soul. Berry’s book mixes economic and cultural history to present a well-rounded history of how enslavers and enslaved thought about the monetary valuations of their bodies. Importantly, by vesting their life with their own culture and values, slaves managed to appraise their bodies in non-monetary terms, as something that transcended economic value. That is an novel and important component of the how we should view how enslavers and enslaved struggled over how to value slave’s bodies.

North of America: Loyalists, Indigenous Nations, and the Borders of the Long American Revolution. By Jeffers Lennox. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022. 378 pp. Cloth, $30.00.)

Despite being our neighbor to the north, Jeffers Lennox believes that Canada’s presence and role in the American Revolution and the founding of the American nation has been overlooked. From before the Revolution to the end of the War of 1812, the desire to incorporate Canada into the emerging United States (prior to the Revolution, and through the grey area of the Articles of Confederation, which Lennox refers to as the “united States,” to the early Republic to western exploration to the War of 1812) remained an important goal for American policymakers.

In North of America, policymakers play the main role in demonstrating the pervasiveness of the desire to annex Canada. Because Lennox believes the story of Canadian incorporation is a novel one, he starts at the very top, so this is a history of great men. I think this approach is fine for now, but I would definitely be interested in a sequel that deals with the relationship between Canada and America on the ground, and in the role this relationship played in culture. How did Americans who lived across the often contested border from friends and relatives view to what Lennox portrays as an indefatigable desire to incorporate Canada into the United States. What kind of propaganda did they imbibe and react to? What newspapers did they read and write? How did they feel about their respective governments? How did they view the role of Indigenous peoples in the defense of Canada – and how did they respond to interracial violence? How did the “ordinary” Americans view Canada?

My other point of contention is the lack of discussion about the role of slavery. It is mentioned several times in passing but I do not think it gets the attention is deserves. Lennox does not, for example, explore the debate that would surely have occurred in Congress should the increasingly abolitionist provinces of Canada be incorporated into the Union. There are few dissenting American voices in this book, and nearly no southern ones (besides the views of presidents presented more as federal representatives than southerners). I would find it odd if no lengthy debates occurred in Congress about upsetting the balance of powers by admitting new Canadian territory into the United States. Sadly, Lennox’s omission of these debates lead us to believe they didn’t occur, which I find hard to believe. I will also point out here that this is a northern history – the voices of Southerners on anything, not just including race, are mostly silent. This seems like and oversight to me.

Lennox set out to prove that Canada played an important role in the founding and building of the new nation of the United States, and I think he does this. But it is far from a complete picture and begs other scholars to flesh out Lennox’s arguments, or contradict them. This is an important book, but its topic has the promise to be much more.

The Longbow, the Schooner, and the Violin: Wood and Human Achievement. By Marq De Villiers. (Toronto: Sutherland House. 307pp. Cloth, $34.95).

When I took a History of Technology course in graduate school, we always started out each class by naming the technology in the book we had read. They ranged from cigarettes to vaccines to nuclear power plants to cars to the SST. In The Longbow, the Schooner, and the Violin: Wood and Human Achievement, the technology at hand is wood. In his introduction, De Villiers states that he hopes the essays based on the subjects in his title will stand alone, and they do, so much so that they almost seem disjointed from the rest of the text (x). The book is at is most revealing and enjoyable when De Villiers writes about the history of wood and forests in the chapters that intersperse the eponymous essays.

Unfortunately, De Villiers tries to include so much information in these chapters that they just read like long lists of tree types or wood types and or whatever the case may be. In the violin chapter he even states “The following far-from-complete list is comprised of violin makers whose work is widely recognized as outstanding” (229). There follows one of the dizzying lists that begs the question: is this list necessary?

But that is perhaps, nitpicking. The only chapter that really falls on its face is the one on schooners, which merely describes how schooners were built will placing them only in scanty context. He does much better in the chapters on longbows an violins. But again, the most enjoyable and important part of the book is his work on the history of wood and forests, ranging from perhaps lesser known topics like whether trees can communicate with each other and read human minds, to the more familiar controversy over how to maintain modern forests, for example, through the use of controlled burns or re-seeding. I think it would be better if the book had been marketed on those chapters.

This book might be passable in an introductory history course for undergraduate students in environmental history, but its lack of contextual historicizations means it pales next to competitors like Changes in the Land. Still, it is a good start for someone looking for a casual read with important educational overtones.

How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America. By Clint Smith. (New York: Little, Brown and Company. 297 pp. Cloth, $29.00, Paper $18.99.)

Teaching White Supremacy: America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity. By Donald Yacovone. (New York: Penguin Random House. 327 pp. Cloth $26.00, Paper $20.00.)

“The history we teach is the product of the culture we create, not necessarily of the actual history we made.” – Yacovone, p. 277. 

Reception. Every historian wants it, but history more often than not does not cooperate. The way people reacted to the events in their histortical moment, political, social, economic, culture, has too often been deemed not important enough to chronicle in the record. This has certainly changed over the last century, but even for historians who seek out reception, it remains elusive, forcing the scholar to expand their search to new source bases, some perhaps pushed aside by other scholars as not being important enough or objective enough; but luckily that opinion seems to go against current trends.

Both How the Word is Passed and Teaching White Supremacy aim to investigate how slavery has been taught in American schools, but each takes a different approach. Smith’s sets his book in contemporary America, traveling north and south to investigate how slavery is taught today, or was taught as of 2021. Yacovone examines text books from throughout American history to prove that the North and South worked together to present a historical narrative devoid of the horrors of slavery and driven by the narrative of the Lost Cause in order to perpetuate national reconciliation following the Civil War. 

Smith has an advantage over Yacovone. By setting his book in the present day and visiting sites related to slavery and how they present narratives of remembering and forgetting, he is able to get at the problem of reception. His experiences take the foreground: he is the one receiving the narratives of slavery. And less he be accused of bias, taking slavery-oriented tours of plantations, prisons, the New York City slave tour, and even a visit to a slave factory in Africa, he also attends a white supremacist rally. He interviews tour guides to better understand the resistance they come up against when they feature narratives of black experiences of the past, and he also interviews tour and event participants, including those at the aforementioned white supremacist rally. The people he polls are a small sample size, but the organic nature of his examination makes the experiences of tourists that more pressing when contrasted with the history of slavery they are enthusiastically or reluctantly imbibing.

What is the best way to teach slavery? Smith is an educator as well as an author of this historical work, and he says “I have come to realize that those conversations [about the history of slavery] with my students, now a decade ago, about how we might begin to understand our lives in relation to the would around us were some of the earliest sparks of this book. I tried to write that sort of book that I would have wanted to teach them. I hope I made them proud” (293). For Smith, reception is just as important as how slavery is taught. The two are inextricable.

One topic Smith does not discuss, which might seem a glaring omission but might also have been a deliberate choice, is how slavery was and is taught in American schools. Perhaps reception might have been to difficult to achieve there. It certainly would have made his book a lot longer. I can only speculate, but it might have something to do with the fact that he attempts always attempted to find sources outside himself, and those that are public facing, like plantation and prison tours, and history walks. Getting reception concerning school teaching and textbooks might have posed a problem he thought better left to other authors. 

This is where Yacovone comes in. He attempts to determine how Americans taught slavery by examining a wide array of textbooks from across decades of American history. What he finds is disconcerting but not surprising: most textbooks in the North and South, attempting to inculcate white supremacy, either elided the history of slavery or attempted to place it in an positive light. It stands alongside David Blight’s Race and Reunion in emphasizing how textbook authors avoided taking a critical or at least truthful look at slavery in an attempt to reconcile the North and the South following the Civil War. 

In fact, Yacovone says the problem of white supremacy found its most fertile ground in the North, not the South, and Northern textbooks played a larger role in disseminating the narrative of the Lost Cause and white supremacy than did textbooks in the South. Yacovone acknowledges that Northern texts most likely proliferated because the North had more publishing houses than the South, but it doesn’t excuse the lack of history of slavery and Blacks in those textbooks, and their support for white supremacy as a way to unite the nation through a shared education on that subject.  He says, and it is worth quoting at length:

“Rather than Southern slavery, however, it was Northern white supremacy that powered the more enduring cultural binding force, planted along with slavery in the colonial era, intensely cultivated in the years before the Civil War, and fully blossoming after Reconstruction. Inculcated relentlessly throughout the culture and in school textbooks, it suffused Northern religion, high culture, literature, education, politics, music, law, and science. It powerfully resurfaced after the Civil War and Reconstruction to reassert control over the emancipated slaves to become the basis for national reconciliation, exploded in intensity with renewed immigration in the 1920s and ’30s, and endured with diminishing force to the present day. It succeeding as the superstructure of democratic society by allowing normal political conflict to proceed with the assurance that the assumed dangerous mudsill class (once controlled by enslavement) could pose no threat to the social order. Hence democratic equality rested on racial inequality and malleable definitions of whiteness. Moreover, it offered something more alluring than wealth, more effective than politics, and far more appealing than education. For even the poorest of its adherence, indeed especially for them, white supremacy imparts a sense of uncontested identity and, as the American philosopher and social critic Susan Neiman wrote, an otherwise unattainable level of ‘dignity, simply for belonging to a higher race.'” (6) 

Yacovone’s argument isn’t necessarily new, but he is good at reiterating what other historians have said before him. He also expands his investigation outside of textbooks to narrate the changing trends in race-based thinking in the United States as history moved from the antebellum period, to Reconstruction, to the Civil Rights Movement. But he has one key ingredient missing: reception.

Without question, it is easy to believe that there simply are no sources that detail reception of the textbooks Yacovone investigated. It is easy to imagine that no one thought reception important enough to write down. Yacovone relies mainly on tracking how many editions publishers published each textbook to track popularity and usage. He also tracks their longevity to demonstrate the popularity of the ideas they taught. He attempts to link these trends to historical events, and demonstrates changes in the popular narrative by tracking them against trends in the subject matter and narratives in textbooks. Teaching White Supremacy is a solid piece of scholarship, but it feels like it is missing a piece. Could Yacovone have gotten closer to reception by boarding his source base, trying to find sources documenting how teachers made choices about what to teach, or perhaps finding book reviews or sources from educators about what they taught in their schools? These sources simply may not exist, but they are worth investigating to build on Yacovone’s work.

So each work has its strengths and weaknesses. Smith is able to probe reception of the subjects he chronicles, while Yacovone writes solid history of changing or static conceptions of slavery in American culture and specifically in American textbooks. They need each other to tell a complete story. Read in tandem, they reveal an American narrative of slavery fraught with disunion, but perhaps in investigating these topics, they bring us one step closer to a consensus that refuses to let Americans off the hook for the shameful way we have taught slavery and race throughout so much of our history. 

The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts: The True Story of The Bondswoman’s Narrative. By Gregg Hecimovich. (New York: Ecco, 2023. 353 pp. Cloth, $40.00.)

As extolled in a recent New York Times review, the best part of Gregg Hecimovich’s The Life and Times of Hannah Craft is how how he lays bare the research process he used to discover the identify of the author of the The Bondwoman’s Narrative. Every historian is responsible for making their research process transparent, to detail their methodology so future scholars can trace the same historical trail to either affirm an historian’s conclusions, offer challenges, or add new and important information. The stakes were high for Hecimovich, but I think he does a good job of foregrounding the methods he used to explain how he discovered Crafts’ identity. This alone makes his book an invaluable source to help us understand how to pursue such difficult history.

My faults with Hecimovich therefore lie in more technical details, as I am nowhere near an expert in this topic and cannot offer a counternarrative or corroborating evidence to evaluate the veracity of his discoveries or his narrative. What I do take issue with is how the book was written from a technical standpoint. Hecimovich jumps between time periods with little indication of what time he is landing in, and the immense cast of characters can be extremely difficult to keep track of. I often times had to read a passage several times to figure out its subject. These may seem like minor quibbles, but I think, especially when keeping track of who is who in relation to one’s ability to verify the role of each historical actor, it is important to make this observation.

My other recommendation would be to read The Bondwoman’s Narrative before you read this book. Hecimovich also jumps between which parts of the novel he is describing, and without having the textual context that would come from reading the novel, I often found myself a bit lost.

Overall, however, I think this book is important because, as I stressed earlier, it lays bare the historical research process, especially important when facing such a difficult group of sources. Hecimovich writes that Crafts’ work “bears surprising similarities to that of the famous author Harriet Beecher Stowe – only, from the other side of the color line,” and Hecimovich spends an entire chapter on this comparison (153). He places Craft as a slave educated in reading and writing with an unusual access to reading material in the personal library of her enslaver. Focusing on the connection between these two novels allows Hecimovich to speculate on Craft’s literary heritage.

This comparison might raise more questions than it does answers, and Hecimovich is forthcoming in his extrapolations, though without losing his convictions about the origins of the novel and Crafts’ identity. By laying his historical process so bare to the reader, he invites future researchers to test his hypothesis, and to use similar transparency when writing about their own chosen topics.