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Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840. By Rana A. Hogarth. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017. 193 pp. Paper, $27.95.)

At the end of Rana Hogarth’s treatise on the intersection between black bodies and the origins of scientific racism as seen through the lens of the medical profession in Early Republic and antebellum America, Hogarth states, “Throughout this book, I have refrained from offering judgment on the efficacy of physicians’ treatments or the correctness of their theories in the past. In doing so, I have tried to draw attention to the process through which physicians produced medical knowledge about blackness” (193).

Though I understand the historian’s inclination to probe the meaning of historical phenomena over the search to discover correctness of the subjects we study, I believe in this case the omission of factual truths about how diseases affected blacks and whites to be the greatest weakness of this book. Omitting facts about how yellow fever, for example, affected blacks and whites as opposed to just examining how different thinkers conceptualized the root of black pathology weakens Hogarth’s narrative, as, in their absence, it is entirely impossible for the reader to truly understand the baselessness of white medical partitioners’ claims. The truth here is just as important in breaking down the constructedness of white perceptions of supposedly different responses to illness between blacks and whites.

Hogarth’s work is only half done in this book. It is possible to investigate the history and meaning a social construct without sacrificing an examination of what the historical record actually says about facts. If we don’t know or cannot ascertain reliable facts that is one thing, and should be highlighted as such. But if we do have reliable facts about the subject of our work, as in the case of Medicalizing Blackness, it makes our work all the stronger because we can contrast the meanings and outcomes of misconceptions with the truth those forces tried to hide.

All history, at the very end of the day, is guesswork. One thing Hogarth emphasizes over and over is how scarce sources were able for her study, making most of what she reads from the few existent sources read like guesswork. I also find it hard to believe. As Katherine Johnston’s The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World demonstrates, there are ample sources available to construct a compelling narrative about the medical construction of race while investigating instead obfuscating historical facts. Johnston pairs an investigation of a social construct by not only laying bare ideas about race, but also by comparing these ideas with the realities on the ground that refute or support them.

Medicalizing Blackness explores important historical actors in the supposedly scant sources Hogarth employees, but this book begs further exploration. If the source base is not there, it might be impossible to corroborate the claims Hogarth makes in the historical narrative. I applaud Hogarth for taking this subject on, but I am also glad that we have Johnston’s work to give us a better picture of what it meant to be black and enslaved and encounter disease in antebellum America.

Assembling the Dinosaur: Fossil Hunters, Tycoons, and the Making of a Spectacle by Lukas Rieppel is a delightful and stimulating read about the nature of collecting and displaying dinosaur bones during the Progressive Era. As is such, Andrew Carnegie and other monopoly capitalists dominate a narrative about dinosaur bones, a surprising revelation. But Rieppel’s goals is not to give a history exclusively about dinosaurs, but instead highlight how wealthy philanthropists like Carnegie used the collection and display of dinosaur bones in non-profit scientific institutions, most notably museums, to signal their wealth and status as well as to fulfill a narrative of uplifting the common man in contradiction to their brutal labor practices.

Dinosaur collecting and display became a trend, but it was always a capitalist venture, from the men who found the bones to the men who purchased and displayed them. Scientists also figured prominently as they tried to make a scientific narrative out of dinosaur bones that imparted far more questions than the answered. Scientists and capitalists worked together to use paleontological history to further their own needs and desires, and these often intersected.

Rieppel’s book is a great read. He balances science and capitalism well, and reveals a new side to capitalist philanthropy during the Progress Era, an area of interest readers might not know anything about. He also borrows from space historians who claim space programs as way to indicate scientific advance and prowess to other countries during the space race, something called “signaling,” a term Rieppel also makes use of. Here, capitalists and scientists made dinosaurs the subject of envy. Assembling the Dinosaur is not a history of the dinosaur, but a history of the collection and display of dinosaur bones. Rieppel lays bare mysteries that accompanied the dinosaurs and, in his closing chapter, argues that the dominance of the Chinese in finding dinosaur bones makes the issue political once again, though perhaps science crosses all borders. This is a well-written and researched book that would do well in both undergraduate and graduate classrooms.

I will note that this is a history of white, mostly elite, men. There are no minority characters and there is scanty coverage of how the general public received the displays of dinosaur bones. Elaboration on these issues would be welcome, but Assembling the Dinosaur is a good start.

As I read through Carl Zimring’s Clean and White, it took me several chapters to figure out what exactly his book is about. The story eventually reveals that Zimring is interested in how racial roles became associated and disassociated with environmental conditions in cities, specifically waste management. This made the chapter on Thomas Jefferson at the beginning quite confusing – was this Zimring’s attempt to trace the origins of dirtiness being conflated with race? If so the first half or even first 3/4 of the book offered nothing particularly enlightening that hasn’t been argued or explained by other authors before. Further, the information did not generate an in-depth discussion of the links between dirtiness and race. It felt as if Zimring was only scratching the surface. Only during the last chapters and the sanitation strike does the book seem to take a more refreshing turn, and Zimring’s work begs for another book written about race and what he labels the Environmental Justice movement of the 1970s-1980s. Too much of the argument here is implicit and too much of the history is summation of what has come before. While an interesting topic, Clean and White fails to deliver on its promise.

Apollo in the Age of Aquarius is about the way NASA influenced social movements and social movements influenced NASA in the 1960s and 70s. The author covers a wide range of social movements, which can give it the feel of an overview, and sometimes he loses his chronology, as his book is ordered topically. But I thought his argument was interesting and he clearly did his research. The Vietnam chapter was interesting but not altogether convincing, though kudos to Maher for digging up what he did on the Vietnamese and Russians in space. Maher has a really interesting argument to be made and a good framework for analysis, but there are so many moving parts that sometimes that analysis gets condensed down to just a sentence, and falls a bit flat. While he has really interesting and detailed examinations of each social movement he discusses, and did very impressive work with his primary sources, he does not link the social movements together very well, which I think is odd because they were concomitant and also in dialogue with each other. I learned a lot from the book, and I think it’s a valuable read and addition to the canon, but there were some weak spots that left me wanting more.

There is something to be said in the discipline of history for simply telling a story, and in that this book has much in common with Hurricane Camille: Monster Storm of the Gulf Coast, published only a year earlier and with the same goal of giving the storm’s survivors a voice in the historical record. Category 5 broadens its sites beyond the survivors to encompass the scientists who played such an important role in determining the path and power of the hurricane, and also in including the stories of local and state government officials whose job it was to respond to the storm. In this way Category 5 gives a more complete picture of the depth and meaning of the devastation. However, it is the narratives of the survivors themselves that take precedence over scanty but tantalizing analysis of survivor’s relationships with the government, and the way race and class define disasters for distinct groups of people. Category 5 would have been a much longer but more academically fulfilling book if it has given these issues the same amount of weight and page length as it did to the harrowing narratives of survival told in the oral histories the authors mined and conducted. This kind of analysis might have added further depth of our understanding of what happened in Hurricane Katrina, which happened the same year Category 5 was published. Also missing is a more piercing look at the role of the federal government in the disaster, another pressing topic when compared with FEMA’s current-day failure to abate the horror in New Orleans. Because of its human interest angle the book is readable and interesting, but as an academic text it fails to adequately scratch below the surface of what happens during disaster to what makes it one in the first place

From what I can glean, this is a very controversial book. I am not a historian of the Holocaust, of Germany, or even of World War II, so it’s hard for me to debate the book on the merit of its factual analysis and the representativeness of its case studies and sources. I can comment on methods though. I find Goldhagen’s thesis about the monocausal nature of antisemitism to be a major weakness in his argument, even though he claims that he is not making a monocausal argument. Though he argues often for the agency of the Germans (treated here as a monolithic block), he does not seem to realize that by making Germans slaves to their supposedly deep-seated antisemitism, he robs them of agency. Moreover, it is never entirely clear where this antisemitism comes from. But apparently it’s powerful enough that all Hitler has to do is flip a switch to not only turn it on but elevate it almost instantly to its most brutal and inhumane of forms. Goldhagen is also constantly making arguments from counterfactuals, which I think its a good example of a weak thesis. And his self-congratulatory Afterword makes the argument that his thesis is sound because the German people, at least the ones he interacted with, found it to be so, not because he has been a diligent scholar. It was certainly an interesting read, but I walked away from the book unsatisfied by the author’s intellectual rigor and remain unconvinced of his argument.

This neat little book is a handy primer on women’s role in the Industrial Revolution in England. Perhaps its most useful contribution is the historiographical essay in the opening chapter that introduces the reader to the evolution of scholarship on this topic. It provides an interesting examination of how gender shaped the conception of the workforce, often finding male and female workers as antagonists due to the prevailing gender norms at the time. While it doesn’t exactly offer anything novel, it does offer a good shorthand, and would be a useful text in an undergraduate class.

The essays in Tutino’s collection often stray from the “capitalism” of the title to explore pure political motives behind the revolutionary change that occurred in the Americas from 1750 to 1870, though trade and economics never lag that far behind. Most interesting is how dynamic the authors in this collection portray the revolutions of the Americas to be, with shifting alliances and motivations as different groups of people fought either for hegemony or individual roles in the emerging nations. While the authors of this volume do a good job including peoples of all races and classes in their analyses, they do not pay adequate attention to the definition of the “nations” called out in the title. A more explicit exploration of nationhood and nationalism would round out this otherwise fulfilling collection.

This is a book that wants to be more than just a chronology of the French Revolution, but struggles to paint a picture larger than the political machinations that went into the founding of the Republic and the turmoil that followed. For the most part it is easily readable, though at times it is hard to keep up with all the characters and plotting that want into this complicated event. That said, it is a solid text to be used as an introduction for upper level undergrads or graduate students. Not revolutionary in and of itself, it still does a respectable job of describing and analyzing the French Revolution.

September 6, 2017 – Started ReadingSeptember 6, 2017 – Started ReadingReview For the most part this book reads like a collection of descriptive lists – which flora and fauna went where, who explored or what or established relations where. There’s a lot of surface detail, which is good for an introduction, but chapters trying to move beyond such descriptions were disappointing; the chapter on the spread of ideas and mores had not much to say about its topic. There was no in depth investigations of the ways cultures encountered and interacted with each other beyond cataloging that exchanges happened and what they were. A good primer if you’re interested in the cataloging of Portuguese exchange with the rest of its global network, but if you’re looking for more in depth examinations of these relationships you’ll have to go elsewhere. I never felt the sense of motion the title implies.