When Philip Claiborne Gooch traveled to Paris in the late 1840s to study medicine, he likely did not expect that he would ever sit on the throne of King Louis Philippe. Yet soon after his arrival, French citizens rose up against their government. Subsequent uprisings occurred in the German and Italian states and in Hungary, spurred partly by crop failures and poor economic conditions. The last was led by Louis Kossuth, who became 1848’s most famous revolutionary. In Paris, the king was deposed, and Gooch helped storm the Tuileries Palace. Although his fellow Americans did not share his experience, many shared his ardor. Back home, populations followed the revolutions’ developments and honored their leaders by rechristening locales such as Kossuth County, Iowa; Lamartine, Arkansas; and Garibaldi, Oregon. Men grew Kossuth-esque beards. Americans learned the polka, a dance said to reject European high culture. And when Francis Bowen wrote critically of the Hungarians in theNorth American Review, his stridency cost him a professorship at Harvard.

In Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism, Timothy Mason Roberts explores the reasons why Americans’ reactions to these “distant” conflicts were so fervent. A few observers like Bowen saw them with some objectivity. But like other foreign conflicts, Americans viewed the events of 1848 thorough the lens of their own concerns, imbuing them with great importance.

In 1848, for example, many Americans likened the uprisings to their own revolution. Most were unfamiliar with Eastern Europe, and the revolutions—several in number, and each with its own dynamics—made comprehension still more difficult to attain. But as Roberts explains, Americans sought “analogies in American history to help them understand overseas events” (7). Parallels were imperfect; one could not shoehorn 1848 into 1776 without distorting European developments. (Americans’ romanticized perception of their own revolution added yet another wrinkle.) But schoolchildren learned that Kossuth was akin to George Washington, and Italians imitated the Boston Tea Party when they boycotted Austrian tobacco. Suggestions that the revolutionaries were following America’s script magnified the conflicts’ importance in American eyes, because they became indicators of the United States’ global impact. It is difficult to overstate contemporary belief in this connection. When he visited the U.S., Kossuth was presented with a lock of Washington’s hair and bullets from the Battle of Bunker Hill.

The uprisings revived the debate as to what the U.S. role should be in such cases: Should America serve solely as a model republic for others to emulate, or should it involve itself directly in their struggles? The debate was as old as the French Revolution, and there were ardent partisans on both sides. James Monroe had pledged in 1823 that the U.S. would remain apart from European quarrels, and in 1849 Zachary Taylor invoked Washington’s warning against entangling alliances. Yet many, like James Buchanan, believed that Americans could not be “indifferent spectators to the progress of liberty” (23). Some U.S. officials recognized the new European governments before receiving permission to do so. This zeal led the Austrian minister to the U.S. to muse, Why do Americans concern themselves with Hungarian sovereignty, when their own nation has slavery?

The answer, of course, was that these inconsistent stances served their interests, and overwhelmingly, self-interest determined how Americans perceived and reacted to foreign events. For this reason, although Distant Revolutions addresses foreign-relations debates, its usefulness extends well beyond them. Some Americans, for example, saw the European struggles as advancing both republicanism and Protestant Christianity. TheMethodist Quarterly Review suggested that revolutions occurred in locations where the Protestant Reformation had stalled. At a time when Know-Nothings were suggesting that Catholics could not be good republicans, the Pope himself was forced out of Rome. Others saw an even greater significance. A writer for the Louisville Baptist Banner saw the revolutions as “but preparatory to the millennial reign of Christ” (110).

The uprisings influenced the intensity and character of American reform. Many reformers believed that their goals and accomplishments paled in comparison to the work of European revolutionaries and consequently changed their approaches. In the North Star, Frederick Douglass noted that France’s new justice minister had addressed a nonwhite delegation as “Citizens, friends, brothers!” (86). Roberts makes a convincing case that the European revolutions emboldened American reformers and moved them to cooperate with each other by seeing themselves as part of a community of reform. The dry lobby began to push for complete abstinence from alcohol—rather than mere temperance—and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott added women’s suffrage to their goals. Margaret Fuller, an ardent feminist, embraced abolition, and Douglass took time from his abolitionist activities to attend Stanton and Mott’s convention in Seneca Falls.

Because Americans’ reactions to the revolutions jibed with their self-interest, their support for the agitators’ goals and policies was not constant. Many who applauded the advent of universal male suffrage in parts of Europe opposed France’s establishment of “public works” for the unemployed of Paris. Although Horace Greeley cheered the latter effort, others decried the advance of socialism and warned that its spread to America would lead to interracial marriage. The notion that foreign trends could migrate to America—for good or ill—was prevalent. Slave owners tended to be more enthusiastic about Germany’s and Hungary’s rebellions than France’s, in part because the former groups had no enslaved populations that they might emancipate. Overall, Southern support for the revolutionaries was fleeting. The instability that resulted from the revolutions was bad for the international cotton market, and many recoiled from reminders that challenges to authority could succeed, at least for a time.

Europe’s revolutionaries failed to bring about peaceful political change. This result disappointed some Americans, but others saw it as underscoring just how remarkable their own revolution had been and, therefore, as proof of American exceptionalism. George Bancroft, who was penning his History of the United States,contrasted American serenity with European chaos. William Stiles, the U.S. chargé d’affaires in Austria at the time, concluded that Europeans were “unfit for the light of freedom” (36). Kossuth was the most celebrated foreign visitor to the U.S. since Lafayette, but as Roberts notes, his actual experience more closely paralleled that of Citizen Genêt. He drew large crowds, but Americans’ enthusiasm cooled as he pressed for tangible support for his cause. In 1852 the nation elected Franklin Pierce, who opposed U.S. involvement in European wars.

Problems with Roberts’ work are minor. The introduction is a bit overwhelming, as he outlines the numerous revolutions, but this is perhaps unavoidable. The title is somewhat misleading; to an extent, Americans did regard the Europeans’ actions as challenging American exceptionalism, but this is only part of the story. Distant Revolutions’ importance lies in its demonstration of how Americans absorbed—one could say “spun”—foreign events. If the revolutions went well, they demonstrated the U.S.’s growing influence. If they failed, the U.S. was exceptional. If France emancipated West Indian slaves, American emancipation became more likely. This looking-glass approach permeates the work.

Distant Revolutions is an important addition to the canon of antebellum-American history. For scholars of foreign relations, it demonstrates the depth and breadth of public interest in foreign events and the ways in which domestic concerns and culture shaped Americans’ perceptions of the world. It also provides an interesting juxtaposition to the era’s filibuster movements; as in those scenarios, many American officials found it difficult to remain neutral in thought, and sometimes in action. And the work reminds all historians of the era that American leaders often had foreign events in mind as they made decisions at home. For example, founders of the Republican Party saw the abolition of slavery as helping to make their nation a true “exemplar of liberal democracy” (185) and thus clearly distinguish it from European countries, in which aristocrats had prevented the founding of republics. Distant Revolutions is an intriguing work, well told and with an impressive use of sources. By demonstrating the degree to which domestic and foreign policies influenced each other, Roberts’ work enhances understanding of both.

This article originally appeared in issue 10.2 (January, 2010).

Elizabeth Kelly Gray is an associate professor of history at Towson University. She is currently writing a book-length study of the use and abuse of opiates in nineteenth-century America.

American cities in the early nineteenth century were burgeoning, noisy, odorous, and often chaotic places. Dell Upton’s Another City captures the texture of city life in the new republic by exploring Americans’ attitudes toward their changing cities during that time. Throughout his study, Upton maintains that it was their actual encounter with the city that permitted American urbanites to develop their sense of themselves as individuals and as republican citizens. In doing so, they also created new kinds of urban spaces that helped to foster these new roles (1).

This is a different kind of urban history. Occasionally challenging and often complicating prevailing interpretations, Upton aims to bridge existing studies of urban life that have tended to emphasize socioeconomic structure, political ideology, physical and demographic growth, changing urban and aesthetic ideologies, or changing economic practices. Instead, he attempts to capture something of the messiness and multidimensionality of historical change by focusing on how the actual experience of inhabiting and making cities shaped people’s sense of selfhood and their notions of republican citizenship. Another City builds upon previous studies by Billy G. Smith, Gary Nash, Shane White, Mary Ryan, Thomas Doerflinger, and Sam Bass Warner, but it also aims to offer what Upton calls an intellectual history of the urban environment that is neither a linear narrative nor a comprehensive survey of urban or architectural history. Instead, Upton employs a series of case studies to reveal the ways in which the antebellum city was lived by its inhabitants.

Antebellum Philadelphia and New Orleans constitute the book’s primary geographic foci, although Upton also turns to evidence from other cities such as New York to round out the story. His sources range widely, and include architectural drawings, maps, contemporary travel accounts, diaries, trade cards, advertisements, letters, local ordinances, legal proceedings, and contemporary prints and paintings. While Upton includes architecture in his analysis, he draws from the entirety of the city environment: the buildings, the streets and infrastructure, and even the urban atmosphere. Because appropriate self-presentation was especially important to many nineteenth-century urban Americans, and appearance and action were thought to constitute accurate indexes of character, Upton also explores the experiences and responses of antebellum city dwellers to one another. “We are part of the cultural landscape,” the author reminds us, and any history of the urban landscape must also consider the bodies as well as the habits of mind of its builders and inhabitants (14).

Another City includes three main parts plus an introduction and conclusion. Part I examines the sensory encounter with early nineteenth-century cities. Part II explores the various large-scale projects for developing, embellishing, and reordering American cities. The final section analyzes the legal and political battles over the use of the public domain for private economic purposes, and the cultural conflicts over the political and social use of streets and urban open spaces. The book is well illustrated with wonderful images, some in color and most drawn from contemporary sources.

Antebellum American cities changed constantly, and were scenes of “perpetual ruin and repair” (20). As these cities mushroomed in size and population, they tended to grow in a bell or T-shape, with a more expansively developed section along the waterfront. These were “walking cities” that one could navigate easily on foot. Earlier American cities were not rigidly segregated by socioeconomic status or function, but by the end of the eighteenth century some neighborhoods in larger cities already demonstrated distinctive social characteristics. By the early 1800s, some occupational, social, and economic sorting had already begun to occur, and wealthier people started moving away from their workplaces. While developers erected hundreds of new houses, poorer people continued to endure crowded conditions in smaller dwellings, just as they always had. As cities like Philadelphia and New Orleans grew larger and more complex, urban leaders sought to regulate noise, address issues of waste, relocate cemeteries from more developed urban areas, and build new kinds of buildings set within street arrangements that would promote civilized and urbane forms of interaction. In doing so, they affected both the form of antebellum cities and the attitudes that Americans held toward them (3).

Upton highlights the ways that antebellum cities spawned complex sensory experiences. These odors, sights, and sounds constituted the often unintentional byproducts of human activity that were nonetheless part of everyday urban life: roaming animals and their excrement, rotting refuse, soot from industrial smoke, the stench from privies, and the general urban cacophony created by cries from street vendors, wooden and metal wheels rattling on stone-paved streets, and the noises from widespread small-scale shop manufacturing. The sensory intrusions that other people created were the ones that annoyed antebellum city dwellers the most. Intrusions that threatened individual comfort prompted many urban inhabitants to scrutinize their neighbors more closely; such intrusions were perceived as encroachments upon spatial order as well as disruptions of social relations (53).

This sensory overload fueled efforts by urban leaders to map, systematize, and regulate many aspects of city life. Periodic outbreaks of yellow fever and cholera, coupled with early ideas about disease such as miasma theory, which linked illness to atmospheric corruptions, prompted civic leaders to search for those environmental qualities that might foster such epidemic conditions. They eventually linked disease outbreaks with particular parts of the city where certain kinds of people were concentrated (61). Urban leaders also sought to regulate noise. Many more refined city dwellers found some urban noises to be “wicked and vulgar,” often associating them with crime, danger, and the “inept or misplaced speech” that characterized the lower rungs of society (75).

The clamor of changing American cities also made elite urban dwellers acutely conscious of the way they and others comported themselves. Social power in antebellum America depended on how one carried oneself in space as well as how well one spoke. A genteel bearing enabled elite urbanites to define their own identities while also setting themselves apart from the rest of the population. Although the fear of crime drove many to concern themselves with determining exactly who the individuals on crowded urban streets were, and categorizing where these strangers may have fit into the broader socioeconomic universe, elite urbanites were just as concerned about where they stood within the social hierarchy.

Along with the efforts to regulate noise and behavior, there also arose a powerful desire to create a regularized city, fueled by what Upton terms the republican spatial imagination—a way of thinking about the city that was undergirded by the drive toward scientific classification and systematic thinking—and that ultimately helped to reshape the American city by 1820. The republican spatial imagination was adopted most fervently by the mercantile elite, who seized on the notion of the grid as the basis for comprehending the spatial qualities of social, political, and economic order. Those who shared in this new urban vision “were impelled to reform and reorganize both cityscape and society into a single, centralized, rational order-a systematic landscape” that valued the maintenance of vistas, equal access, and open lines of sight (124, 134). Upton explores the way this republican spatial imagination played out in various realms: through the development of commercial arcades and changing business practices, in the emergence of new types of cemeteries that articulated selfhood and personhood, and with the development of new therapeutic reform institutions such as penitentiaries.

Legal battles and cultural conflicts over the use of public domain threw this republican spatial imagination into stark relief. Differing attitudes toward the use and development of the waterfront clashed in New Orleans, where a lengthy legal battle raised questions about who owned this area, what constituted public space, and who had the rights to it. Similar conflicts over the private appropriation of public space erupted in Philadelphia and elsewhere in the antebellum years. The control of public space was also contested in everyday life. While the street was the primary arena for public processions and celebrations, it was also a masculine realm. In the early 1800s, cities began to outfit some of their public squares as promenading grounds for the genteel. By the mid-nineteenth century, antebellum cities offered “a dual, gendered urban landscape. The masculinized world of the streets, the docks, and the financial district was opposed to the feminized world of the respectable home and the gentrified public space” (333).

By mid-century, a significant change had occurred, and most urban elites who had imagined a systematized republican city “had begun to abandon their project of optimistic repression. Occasionally they questioned their right even to conduct it” (336). In a brief conclusion, Upton notes that vestiges of the republican spatial imagination still resonate today, for we still debate who has the right to do what in public, and who should decide.

This is a marvelous book—imaginative, engaging, and deeply researched. Another City not only brings the antebellum American city to life with bold immediacy and thoughtful analysis, but its author’s original approach also forces us to reconsider the many ways in which individuals relate to their urban environments.

A Government Out of Sight is a very important book. Brian Balogh, a professor of history at the University of Virginia, argues that since revolutionary times Americans have had a paradoxical relationship with the national government. On the one hand, Americans developed a penchant for looking to their national government to build and maintain the social and economic pillars of society. On the other hand, Americans demanded that the structures of this national state remain as “inconspicuous” as possible (379). This “mystery of national authority in nineteenth-century America can be resolved,” he concludes, “once we recognize that although the United States did indeed govern differently than its industrialized counterparts, it did not govern less. Americans did, however, govern less visibly.” Thus, in A Government Out of SightBalogh sets three ambitious tasks for himself: to ascertain the origins of this unique configuration of national authority; to explain what this national government accomplished; and to explain the ideological and historiographical consequences of this ‘less visible’ government for American politics and society. On each of these fronts, readers will find Balogh’s arguments to be clear, deeply-researched, provocative, and ultimately successful. By elucidating the existence, contributions, and ideological ramifications of the national government in American history, Brian Balogh has written a remarkable and powerful book that will become required reading for students of American politics. That said, Balogh’s unwillingness to engage questions of agency, motives, and power will provoke much debate and reflection about the value of solving this “mystery of national authority.”

Balogh approaches the question of national authority in the nineteenth-century United States with an unabashed presentism, presumably in order to find an audience with politicians and political scientists. He views A Government Out of Sight as being in dialogue with the recent, rising tide of scholarship in the American Political Development school of thought, which seeks to understand politics by delving “into the intricacies of political conflict and governmental operations in particular historical settings,” according to leading expositors Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, in The Search for American Political Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004, cited passage at 3). Thus Balogh opens his book by declaring that, “The stories we absorb about the past help frame the way we see ourselves today and influence our vision of the future.” Indeed, he believes that “fundamental assumptions about the national government’s origins and history” have fostered an unproductive political debate about ‘big’ versus ‘small’ government in which both the left and right cling to a mythical history of a stateless past (1-2). By illustrating that the national government was, in fact, a central force in shaping the American past—that it “influenced the life chances of millions of Americans” (2)—Balogh seeks a pragmatic, historical third way, above the fray of partisan political ‘triangulation.’ Balogh’s history is intended to provide a narrative of a usable past: conservatives should appreciate that their own political heritage includes clarion calls for active government, while liberals should relinquish their tendency to deride non-bureaucratic, associational modes of governing.

Balogh’s book tells a rich, nuanced historical story about the growth and transformation of a common “vision” of government and government power in the early United States. The story begins during colonial times, when North American colonists, seized by revolutionary republicanism, came to understand politics and the polity as the foundational structural force in their society. Seen most visibly in the widespread tradition of local self-government, politics and political institutions anchored social life in eighteenth-century America. After the American Revolution, this faith in public power culminated in a “developmental vision” that was embodied in and echoed by the Constitution of 1788 (69). Drawing upon recent work by Max Edling and Robin Einhorn, Balogh contends that this vision “created the potential for a powerful central government” that could act independently of state and local governments, but one that much more often “would tread lightly in domestic policy” (57). Above all, this form of government was characterized by its hybrid nature: it was public in form but frequently private in substance, as seen through Alexander Hamilton’s financial system of government institutions conjoined with “the self-interest of wealthy individuals” (57); it was national in name but local in capacity, as national officers lived in the communities they regulated. Debates about how to construct this form of government during the 1780s (and the actual operation of the national government in the following decade) augured “the subtle evolution of national consciousness,” which cemented the bonds between the people and the young United States (91). The rise of a national consciousness reconstituted Americans’ developmental vision on a national scale, as people became accustomed to looking to government to solve social and economic problems.

But the “polity-dominated conception of society was rudely challenged from the start” by ascendant liberalism (37). Although Balogh accepts this familiar narrative about the shift from republicanism to liberalism, he adds a new and important twist. Liberalism may have destroyed republicanism, he argues, but it did so without shattering the governing institutions created by republicanism. Even after the (alleged) liberal triumph, the flexible, hybrid government that arose from the experience of the late eighteenth century remained intact. And during the early republic, the American people continued to look to the national government to solve their problems, especially through the public land system and various internal improvement projects. But American appeals for government action were framed in terms of requests by liberal, self-interested individuals, rather than the older, public logic of republicanism. By the 1820s, as the “rationale” for public action became “the self-interested payoff that such public undertakings would deliver,” the national government itself receded from most Americans’ conception of government (149). The developmental vision had lost sight of the national government, and Americans would too.

It is in tracing this paradoxical and simultaneous emergence and disappearance of the national government in American political consciousness that Balogh makes his greatest contribution. Indeed, even as Balogh suggests the waning of national government in political culture, he draws upon the work of leading historians of nineteenth-century politics—Richard John on the postal system, Daniel Feller on the General Land Office, Andrew Cayton on territorial governments, William Novak on the common law—to illustrate how federal policy consolidated the republic from a loose alliance of states into a nation-state. The federal government engineered a communications revolution. The federal government killed, dispossessed, and displaced Indians. The federal government sliced and diced the western territories and parceled out lands to white settlers. The federal government, through the judiciary, guided the rise of a national system of law and national standards for commerce. But, Balogh writes, “in all of these venues, public action reinforced private activity that promoted the general welfare but limited central administration” (276). As a result of the obscurity of the federal government, “for most Americans living in the mid-nineteenth century it was not government, but rather civil society, that forged the nation” (277). The story of the American frontier best illustrates this interplay of statecraft and ideology. Even as the federal government fought wars against Indians, surveyed land, and conducted land sales throughout the West, the federal government disappeared from the popular understanding of the frontier. Thus the story of the West became one of rugged, self-interested individuals, rather than one of an active federal government.

The surge of nationalism that accompanied the Civil War only temporarily changed things. Balogh echoes Richard Bensel’s claim that public, wartime institutions disappeared as the emergence of a national marketplace and a national belief in the inviolability of the market generated harsh criticism of governmental ‘intrusion’ into private life (299). As with the story of the frontier, Balogh’s interpretation of constitutional law in the late nineteenth century points to the dynamic of an active government constructing institutions, while those institutions are obscured by anti-statist ideology. As the national judiciary erected the foundations of a national law of corporations and transactions, the way it did so obscured the constitutive role of government.

All of this brings us within sight of “the Twentieth-Century State.” The architects of the New Deal, Great Society, and even the Reagan Counterrevolution faced certain “patterns” of government that, Balogh concludes, emerged during the long nineteenth century. First, Americans have always looked to government to solve their problems, but the government they look to is simultaneously flexible, public, private, local, and national, rather than monolithic, “visible, [and] centralized.” Second, Americans will only tolerate “bureaucracy” during times of national crisis, and especially wartime. Third, national taxes are a dangerous “third rail” of national government. Finally, political development is almost always based in legal development and the action of courts. Taken together, these patterns mean that in America, national government functions “largely out of sight” (382).

Some will find Balogh’s conclusion too schematic in tone—a stark departure from the careful, almost thick description of policy and governance that precedes it. This shift in tone occurs periodically throughout the book, almost invariably when Balogh attempts to grab the attention of policymakers and political scientists. This is one of a few minor problems that deserve mention. Balogh relies quite self-consciously on secondary sources, which in itself is not problematic. Rather, one senses that he has occasional difficulty managing the sheer number of historiographical threads from legal, business, Western, and political history that appear throughout A Government Out of Sight. The result is that subsections of chapters appear superfluous or forced, such as the discussion of lighthouses as an “uncontested national program” during the early republic (217-18). Digressions of that nature make earlier chapters look far weightier than the brief treatments of the Civil War and Progressive Era, leaving the altogether ironic impression that Balogh—a historian of the twentieth-century U.S.—has slighted more recent history for the Revolutionary and early republican past.

Scholars of the Revolutionary era may also quibble with Balogh’s reading of Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist No. 27, which supplies this volume with its cryptic title. For Balogh, Hamilton desired a state that was leviathan-like and thus preeminently visible to the citizenry. The future Secretary of the Treasury denigrated what he called “a government continually at a distance and out of sight” (3). “What Hamilton failed to anticipate,” Balogh concludes, “was a national government that was often most powerful … when it was hidden in plain sight” (4).

I’m not so sure Hamilton failed to anticipate this at all. Hamilton uses Federalist No. 27 to discuss the problem of political coercion in a large republic. He believed that governments that rule solely by force ultimately fail. Thus the federal government must, upon its formation, insert itself into localities. In this way, Hamilton’s federal government would be ‘visible,’ or ‘in sight’—at least at first. But this government, once planted, would quietly take root. As Hamilton himself wrote, “the more the operations of the national authority are intermingled in the ordinary exercise of government, the more the citizens are accustomed to meet with it in the common occurrences of their political life, the more it is familiarized in their sight and to their feelings … the greater will be the probability that it will conciliate the respect and attachment of the community.” And the more the national government was “familiarized in their sight,” “the less it will require the aid of the violent and perilous expedients of compulsion” (Alexander Hamilton, “Number XXVII,” in The Federalist Papers, ed. Isaac Kramnick [New York: Penguin Classics, 1987], 203). In short, as the federal government became more naturalized, and blended or “intermingled” into people’s lives, the less it would be a source of popular discontent. Is this so different from Balogh’s federal state, “hidden in plain sight”?

Balogh’s reading of Hamilton’s Federalist essay does not change very much about his overall argument. Nor does it detract from his immense achievement in writing this book. A Government Out of Sight unequivocally establishes that there was a national state in the early United States, that the state achieved a great deal in its own right, and that it should loom much larger within the main currents of American historiography. But returning to Federalist No. 27 does raise the question of for whom this new state was to work, which “citizens” it sought to “conciliate,” and why. Balogh is not necessarily interested in this question because, in all fairness, it goes beyond his scope of inquiry. Thus among the most recurrent language in this book is discussion of what “Americans wanted,” what “Americans sought,” and what “Americans preferred.” But Balogh does not interrogate just who these “Americans” were. Balogh does not shy away from any of the federal government’s more dubious exertions of power, such as the Trail of Tears (210-11). And readers will quite correctly draw the conclusion that white settlers agitated for and benefited from this and all Indian displacement policies, and that the Indians suffered immeasurably from these same policies. But in Balogh’s project, which sets out to uncover the operations of power, there is little room for winners and losers, for the subjects and objects of power, and for the beneficiaries and victims of government action.

This would not be nearly so important if not for Balogh’s conclusion, which reads: “It is time to challenge the deeply held conviction that, historically, Americans have eschewed government intervention at the national level. That is why history matters. Americans must reclaim the national government’s critical role in enabling nineteenth-century American expansion, stimulating economic development, and managing international relations” (399). Balogh’s book proves that American citizens turned early and often to the national government. But “reclaiming” the national government’s role in settling the West, creating a national marketplace, and administering foreign policy seems a much more complicated endeavor—one that will require historians to figure out who these “Americans” were—and to sort out the historical ramifications of the national government’s achievements. It certainly is not an impossible historical project, as A Government Out of Sight teaches us precisely where and what to look for. But for those like Balogh, who seek an antidote to our own political ills, I’m not so sure they will like what they find.

Alison Games’ new book, The Web of Empire, consists of a loose-knit set of chapters about English overseas travel, long-distance trade, and colonial expansion in the early modern period. Most of the events recounted fall between the founding of the Jamestown colony in Virginia and the Restoration. Games selects a series of case studies, in the following order: “educational travelers” on the Continent, merchants in the Mediterranean, the embassy of Sir Thomas Roe at the Mughal court, the English trade mission in early seventeenth-century Japan, the early Virginia colony, the failed English colonies in Madagascar, and events in Ireland during the Interregnum. Whenever possible, Games stresses the connections between these various spheres of commercial and colonial activity, and she follows the movements of those English and Scottish subjects who traveled between English outposts, helping to weave a “web of empire.” She focuses on those literate elites who left written records of their plans and experiences. English governors, consuls, ambassadors, and clergy are discussed in particular detail because each of these groups moved along the strands of that web and had to negotiate the complex cross-cultural relations and strategies that came with their various territories. In her survey of these overseas activities, Games draws on a variety of interesting and important archival sources—commercial and diplomatic correspondence, East India Company court minutes, Virginia Company records, promotional tracts, travel narratives (both printed and manuscript), private diaries, travel conduct manuals, and other primary documents.

In the opening section of the book, Games poses this question: “How did this weak state [i.e., England] become an empire?” (7). Games gives much of the credit for this empire-building to the joint-stock trading companies, especially the East India Company and the Levant Company. And in giving credit where she believes it is due, Games describes these companies and the rise of English imperialism using a rhetoric that often glorifies and idealizes the acquisition of “global power and dominion” (8). In fact, this is a book that will be well received by students of economic history who wish to conceive of long-distance commerce and the early history of globalization as a heroic and beneficent “adventure.” At times, Games hearkens back to an earlier generation of historians who hailed the colonial and commercial enterprises of the Western European imperial powers as a boon to humankind, a glorious enterprise, and a high-minded sacrifice for the good of the nation. According to Games, through the pursuit of “adventure and opportunity” in global markets and in new colonial settlements, the English became “cosmopolitans” (9).

Though there are moments when Games alludes to the brutality and greed that often accompanied colonial and commercial ambition (she discusses piracy, slavery, and genocidal attacks on indigenous peoples), these actions are placed within a narrative of heroic sacrifice and triumph, a teleological progress toward empire. Neo-liberals, neo-conservatives, and libertarians will like what Games has to say about the early joint-stock companies and their role in the genesis of globalization: “Global processes knit the early modern world together, enabling people to perceive in its entirety a world once experienced only in fragments” (6), and “English investment companies were free to create their own worlds overseas” (7-8). Apparently, greed is good for the nation: “Those who invested in trading ventures may have hoped to fill their purses, but they also attached themselves to national goals; their profit was inextricable from English prestige and power” (8). According to Games, English merchants and colonizers “understood the many opportunities and adventures that awaited them in different ports, to further their ambitions, to gain honor, to save souls, to seek profit” (14). Perhaps. But Games fails to balance this praise of enterprising merchants and colonists with an acknowledgement of how the profit motive and the aggressive drive to gain colonial territory inflicted suffering on countless others.

Games does put forward an overarching argument that is meant to link the various parts of her study, and this argument is one that exhibits (either consciously or unconsciously) a neo-liberal faith in the beneficial effects of a global “free” market. She blames the intervention of the state for ending the commercial freedom that got the English empire started. At the end of her introduction, she praises an imperial vision of “a world spanned by private enterprise and defined by cosmopolitanism before the sensibility waned and was replaced and eclipsed by the state’s commitment to centralized authority and to coercive strategies” (14). This seems like a dubious historical narrative, though. It relies on the assumption that the joint-stock companies and early colonial ventures were entirely “free” of state, court, or monarchical meddling. As Robert Brenner and others have shown, an increasingly powerful new merchant class did emerge during the period after 1570 in England. But this does not imply that these new capitalists operated entirely independent of the traditional laws and powers of the land. If, as Games claims, after the 1640s the British became less accommodating, adaptive, and tolerant while interacting with other cultures, that change was due not only to state formation, but also to the increased economic power of the British in the world, and the upsurge in their ability to deploy rapidly developing technologies and commercial organizations to exploit others both through “peaceful” trade and through “coercive strategies” such as the appropriation of land, intimidation of foreign communities, forced migration, and slavery.

Games should not place all of the blame for the dark side of expansionism on what she calls “the centralized authority of the state.” Rather, she should account for the new and more effective enactment of coercive strategies by contextualizing those violent activities within the global matrix of exploitation and appropriation that many scholars call “capitalism.” Capitalism and the state were not (and are not) separate and autonomous operations, and “free trade” was sometimes combined with military aggression. The Web of Empire asserts and assumes—without much discussion of the exact nature of the relationship between monarch and merchant—that the joint-stock companies were able to operate without much state interference, and that it was the assertion of state power over commerce under Cromwell that put an end to what was a brief golden age of free-market cosmopolitanism.

Games praises English commercial behavior in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and she celebrates the struggle to build colonies in the New World, but toward the end of the book she finds an object for moral condemnation in Cromwell’s brutal military campaign in Ireland and the Commonwealth government’s effort to uproot Irish Catholics and re-plant English and Scottish Protestant colonists in their place. The chapter on Ireland is not about cosmopolitanism; rather, it describes a grim case of intolerance and violent expropriation. The example of Ireland under Cromwell is used by Games to support her assertion that state power, directly enforced, is bad, and that the profit motive, unhindered by the state, is good. This is a reductive account of a very complex, give-and-take relationship between rising bourgeois power and the traditional authority of court and state to regulate trade and territorial expansion. Because it omits both a meaningful account of capitalism as well as a truly global sense of the dynamic world system of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Games’s argument fails to account for that complexity, and falls back, instead, on the old essentializing myth about the virtue of free enterprise in the service of Empire. “Enhancing a nation’s trade was a patriotic act” Games declares, with typical zeal (96).

Under the banner of “cosmopolitanism,” Games emphasizes throughout her book that “trade, travel and adventure” produced cultural openness and national benefit when the state left merchants and colonists to their own devices (127). Games glories in “new commodities [that] generated a festival for all the senses and brought distant lands into the domestic setting of English households” (82); she lauds “the impressive organizational activities” of the “enterprising merchants” who worked for the chartered companies (83); and she finds redeeming qualities in colonization, writing that, “Colonial undertakings offered creative men the opportunity to devise a new kind of society” (191). This last statement is not adequately balanced with a discussion of the deadly cost of that creativity for the displaced indigenous inhabitants of these new colonies. Finally, Games’ book exhibits a curious strain of old-fashioned Orientalism in descriptions of the Levantine Mediterranean—a place “replete with exotic, bewildering, and sometimes distasteful practices” (61)—and especially in a purple passage describing those colonists who had “traveledeast from England” before coming to Virginia: “They had traveled by caravan and caravel and camel; they had bowed before sultans and kissed the rings of sheiks…. They had seen elephants and monkeys and terrifying serpents…. Virginia was one of many adventures for them, and one for which they were well equipped” (126). While The Web of Empire is full of fascinating anecdotes and uncovers much useful information about colonial and commercial history, in many instances taken from neglected archival sources that deserve our attention, its larger historical conclusions are not convincing, and its laudatory treatment of commerce and colonization is problematic.

As a prototype for many subsequent American reactions to foreign liberation movements, Americans embraced the first, liberal phase of the French Revolution but recoiled in horror and condemnation when news of Jacobin bloodletting began to arrive in 1792. This story is familiar to historians of the early modern Atlantic world. Rachel Hope Cleves, however, takes the tale further, showing why notable Americans in the Northern states grew obsessed with French revolutionary violence, and how these obsessions surfaced in American society and politics from the 1790s through the Civil War.

Initially, Cleves observes, anti-Jacobinism circulated among Northern Federalists and Congregationalist and Presbyterian clerics who together doubted the orderly, Christian possibilities of popular sovereignty. Instead, they shared a Calvinist sense that strong rule—political authority as well as restraint of one’s own emotions and passions—was necessary to contain human depravity. We are familiar with John Adams’s fear of American Francophiles’ adoption of “the very stile and language of the French Jacobines” (67), and his administration’s adoption of the Alien and Sedition Acts as countermeasures to suppress potential red republican violence. Cleves links Adams’s opinion and policies with the preaching of such ministers as Elijah Parish, who warned against “parties and cabals” arising in America while in “the theatre of nations you see armies wallowing in their own blood” and predicted that “a shower of blood seems just ready to crimson our fields … [and] corpses will float [and] feed the wild beasts” (68, 69). Through graphic depiction of radical upheaval abroad Parish sought to shock his readers into opposing mob (that is, democratic) violence in America.

Cleves traces these sanguine sentiments across the Northern states, as inherited fear of revolutionary violence sparked literary works, social reform, and radical politics. She locates anti-Jacobinism in Gothic novels and pamphlets, which insisted that French revolutionary violence—cannibalism, infanticide, mass rape, beheadings of both the living and already dead—was “too disgusting to hear, too horrid to relate,” yet paradoxically called readers to “fix your eyes on this theatre of carnage!” (98, 97).

Reflecting how Americans’ discourse about controversial foreign events can often facilitate debate about important domestic issues, Cleves argues that this early Francophobic Gothic literature migrated towards condemnation of American slaveholding because “anti-Jacobinism and antislavery were connected by a common concern: unrestrained violence could destroy civil society” (107). The slave rebellion in the French colony of Saint Domingue, now Haiti, was essential to abolitionists’ adoption of “the violent language of anti-Jacobinism,” once white Haitian refugees spread accounts of “Dominguan bloodshed throughout the Atlantic” (146, 147). Such accounts, Cleves writes, “should have produced revulsion” among conservative anti-Jacobins. Instead, she argues, antislavery authors excused the Haitian slaves and blamed the uprising on slaveholder violence, focusing on “graphic descriptions of bloodshed, tortures, murders and rapes” that paradoxically served to compel antislavery readers to react (146). By the turn of the nineteenth century, macabre literary descriptions appeared of American slaveholders’ use of slave corpses for crop fertilizer and of slaves’ skin for shoe leather. In this way, revolutions in France and Haiti, or at least antislavery writers’ use of them, hastened calls for immediate emancipation, the association of the South with violence and depravity, and the rise of American sectionalism.

Meanwhile social reforms meant to secure nonviolent American republicanism emerged. During the War of 1812 peace societies flourished. A “Friends of Peace” political coalition emerged in New England, which was rationalized as an ethical and constitutional opposition to a war provoked by bloodthirsty Southern war hawks, and eventually culminated in the quixotic Hartford Convention. Cleves detects an undercurrent that “ran through the network of opposition” to the war, a “violent language of resistance,” which “contained tendencies toward bloodshed that nearly led to civil war” (193, 191). Given her emphasis that American anti-Jacobins were committed to nonviolence at the time, it is not clear how fear of French revolutionary violence could “nearly” pave the way to civil war. Cleves is on firmer ground, however, in showing the anti-Jacobin roots of campaigns for state-supported education. Contrary to most interpretations, which associate it with Northern reformers’ encouragement of liberal democracy, Cleves argues that support for public education was a reaction against transatlantic radicalism, or what Horace Mann described as the tendency of the young and poor to embrace “barbarism” (229).

Ultimately, the location and fervor of anti-Jacobinism, Cleves argues, helps us understand why so many radical reformers before the Civil War, including William Lloyd Garrison, Joshua Leavitt, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Richard Hildreth, William Cullen Bryant, William Cooper Nell, and Lydia Maria Child—who differed in gender, race, and political partisanship—all came from conservative backgrounds. And Cleves shows how and why they often interpreted violence in America as a foreign element, alien and therefore particularly dangerous to a putative American tendency towards nonviolence. Anti-abolitionist assaults on Garrison, the murder of abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy, the gag rule adopted by Congress against antislavery petitions, proslavery violence against free soilers in “bleeding Kansas” and against Senator Charles Sumner in Congress—each was interpreted as evidence of a Jacobin “reign of terror” descending on the American republic. Through comparison of proslavery violence to Jacobinism, abolitionists “learned how violent language could become an outlet for fantasies of violent retribution,” thus “seducing readers with violent imagery” and “paving the path toward their support for the Civil War” (237, 274, 266). Surely fear of Jacobin revolutionary violence was not the only way that abolitionists could “voice violent desires” and abandon their commitment to nonviolence (275). But Cleves shows how anti-Jacobinism helped to justify support for righteous violence of the 1860s, violence committed not only by the slaves against their masters but by Northern citizens against the South and even against a federal government apparently tolerant of or even controlled by fanatical proslavery interests. (In an interesting appendix, Cleves shows that the phrase “reign of terror,” among other keywords associated with French revolutionary violence, appeared some six thousand times in American newspapers, broadsides, and books through 1865 [283].)

Cleves occasionally acknowledges that anti-Jacobinism characterized the attitudes of groups other than the conservative, reforming Northerners on whom the book focuses. She notes, for example, how Southern whites began to embrace anti-Jacobinism, especially after the Haitian slave revolution, an enduring nightmare for Southern planters. And slaveholders and even anti-abolitionist Northerners could smear abolitionists as “Jacobins” (247). Newspapers reported John Brown’s murders of proslavery men in Kansas, not surprisingly, as “A Reign of Terror in Kansas” (273). Thus, although it is not her focus, proslavery anti-Jacobinism, North and South, may have been as pervasive as northeastern reformers’ anti-Jacobinism. Anti-Jacobinism, moreover, provided useful antirevolutionary language in American politics, with which national parties sought to tar opponents. Whigs labeled Democratic presidents as “Jacobin,” meaning that they abused executive power. Democrats called Whigs, and later Republicans, “Jacobin,” meaning that they opposed local majority rule—”popular sovereignty,” in the language of the day. After the Civil War, moreover, opponents of Reconstruction attacked land reform initiatives favoring the freedmen by characterizing such radical measures as “Jacobinism.” Cleves shows how opposition to the violence of the French Revolution galvanized antebellum Northern moral reform. But anti-Jacobinism loomed larger than that in American political culture: it influenced opposing sides of national conflicts through the Civil War era.

While the Civil War stripped hundreds of thousands of American families of both material and spiritual wealth, it did provide the nation with an abundance of human remains. Death darkened both the North and South during the Civil War, and Drew Gilpin Faust’s recent book This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War explores the multifaceted ways in which death transformed American culture in the middle of the nineteenth century. Death’s influence during the American Civil War was not limited to individual households; the living ascribed meanings to the dead that influenced science, fostered the growth of new businesses and technology, pushed the development of new bureaucracies, and shifted existing philosophical and religious beliefs. Simply stated, death permeated nearly every aspect of American life during the Civil War, and Faust asks her reader to reassess what we know about the Civil War, placing the voracious carnage of war at center stage. Faust argues that, “without agendas, without politics, the Dead became what their survivors chose to make them” (269).

Faust explains, “In the middle of the nineteenth century, the United States embarked on a new relationship with death, entering into a civil war that proved bloodier than any other conflict in American history … ” (xi). The Civil War, in fact, resulted in a greater number of deaths than the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War combined. As death reshaped the American populace, so too did it reshape American culture.

A statistical analysis of death fails to tell the whole story of human loss during the war. Death in the United States during the middle of the nineteenth century embodied numerous and varied meanings. Soldiers spent much of their time worrying that they would die a “Good Death”: an honorable death in battle, preferably at the hands of the enemy. The Good Death trope might include a dying soldier, clinging to a bible and a photograph of his wife or mother. This manner of dying was considered better than death by an accident or disease. Faust shows that soldiers spent a considerable amount of time reassuring the loved ones of recently deceased soldiers that their sons had indeed died within the parameters of Good Death. Though death worked to bind North and South together in certain ways, the two opposing sides of the conflict often engaged in different treatments of the dead. In the South, where supplies and materials were increasingly scarce as the war dragged on, cloth to create black mourning wear was hard to acquire, forcing Southern women to adjust their existing traditions in times of loss. Further, the practice of mourning a “Good Death” in a traditional manner was not always possible due to the realities of an increasingly modern battlefield. If a body had been destroyed so completely that it was rendered impossible to recognize, proper treatment and burial of the body became impossible. Faust writes, “Civilians found this outcome incomprehensible, but soldiers who had witnessed the destructiveness of battle understood all too well the reality of men instantly transformed into nothing. The implications of bodily disintegration for the immortality of both bodies and souls was troubling, and the disappearance of bodies rendered the search for names all the more important” (128-129).

Faust follows death’s impact on American civilization as it threatened long-held beliefs toward religion and philosophy. In 1864, the first national spiritualists convention took place in Chicago, and virtually all Americans believed that some form of communication with the dead was possible. Séances had been popular for some time, especially after they became popular in New York in the 1840s, but the increasing number of young men dying early as a result of war brought about an explosion of attempts to communicate with the dead. Material concerns emerged as well; the limbs lost and mutilated in battle led soldiers and their families to consider questions about how bodies would look and feel in heaven. The meaning of fighting, too, seemed less clear in light of the deaths gripping the nation. Many observers believed the meanings they attributed to the gruesome fighting came up short as the war came to a conclusion. Some—Faust offers Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. as an example—lost their belief in beliefs entirely. Though the wheels of intellectual and cultural change may well have been in motion at the outset of the war, the Civil War changed much of the nature of American discourse. Faust states, “Into this environment of cultural ferment, the Civil War introduced mass death” (174).

Death changed America’s relationship with religion and philosophy, but the Civil War fatalities also created a new commodity: the dead. Undertakers and coffin builders were in high demand following each major battle. Early in the war, families that could afford to do so brought bodies home in sealed, cold coffins. Families were concerned, with reason, that the wrong body might be sent home from battlefields, and they hoped to keep the remains intact long enough to check that their deceased was indeed a family member. Eventually, the new technology of embalming created a new market for professionals who set up shop near recent battlefields. In a macabre take on advertising, undertakers in Washington, D.C., attempted to reassure families who might be suspicious of the new technology by displaying embalmed bodies in the windows of their offices.

Faust succeeds admirably in her goal of presenting a new perspective on the legacy of death in post-Civil War America. What this book lacks, however, is a full examination of how death influenced both medical and anthropological science. The Army Medical Museum (AMM), founded during the Civil War with a focus on those who died in battle, would become a center for the study of what was then called “comparative anatomy,” though it might be better explained as racial science. From the close of the Civil War to the turn of the century, the AMM collections also became central to anthropological science. Collections of Civil War dead were supplemented with collections sent to the museum from battlefields in the American West, where thousands of Native American bodies had been collected for science. The collection grew to include bodies from around the globe. The large collection of human remains from around the world intended for “comparative anatomy” was eventually transferred to the Smithsonian and became the cornerstone for a new division of physical anthropology. The AMM, which became a component of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, had switched its focus from bones, important to battlefield pathology and comparative racial science, to the collecting of soft tissues, important to the modern study of disease some years following the war. Through a notable twist that would fit with Faust’s narrative, the AMM occupied, for a brief time, Ford’s Theater, the site of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. Before the close of the century, the site of Ford’s Theater became the home of the Compiled Military Service Records Office, which attempted to create an archive tracking the fate of every soldier who fought in the war. In 1893, a portion of the theater collapsed under the shear weight of the paperwork. Though Faust might have paid more attention to the manner in which the Civil War dead influenced the development of science in the United States, her existing approach to the topic can hardly be faulted.

This Republic of Suffering, the 2009 winner of the Bancroft Prize from Columbia University, is a captivating work of history. The author has a firm grip on the astonishing nature of her subject matter and delicately threads the reader through death’s various meanings during the Civil War. The work is both well documented and elegantly written, touching on subjects from the curious to the downright macabre. Those interested in Civil War history, the history of the body, and cultural attitudes toward death should find this book compelling.

Early one evening in 1810, while he was staying with a group of Chickasaw Indians in the lower Mississippi region, the artist-ornithologist Alexander Wilson paused to listen to a mockingbird “pouring out a torrent of melody.” A gunshot suddenly interrupted his reverie, however, and he “looked up and saw the poor mocking-bird fluttering to the ground” and then turned and realized that “one of the savages had … barbarously shot him.” Outraged at the silencing of the songster, Wilson immediately stalked over to the Indian and started berating him, telling him that “he was bad, very bad!” and that “the Great Spirit was offended with such cruelty, and that he would lose many a deer for doing so.” At that point, the Indian’s father-in-law intervened to defend his son-in-law from Wilson’s tongue-lashing; the elder Chickasaw explained to Wilson that “when these birds come singing and making a noise all day near the house,somebody will surely die.”

Wilson’s story about the death of the Mississippi mockingbird pits one sort of belief against another, with Wilson trying to frighten the Indian by appropriating the Indian’s own god, a supposedly vengeful Great Spirit, only to be countered by another Indian arguing another version of supernatural certainty. In writing the story, Wilson no doubt intended to portray what he took to be the brutish behavior and superstitious beliefs of people who had no regard for the beauty of a mockingbird’s song and, in doing so, to assert his own superior sensibility and rationality. In reading the story, though, we can certainly see different beliefs and sensibilities coexisting, even competing, in a common ground—and in the Natives’ home ground, at that.

Had he been on the scene with Wilson, Shepard Krech would have helped us develop a much more subtle and sympathetic view of the cultural significance of birds among Native American peoples in the early South. As the title of his book, Spirits of the Air, implies, Krech is concerned with the many spiritual meanings Indians assigned birds, whether as dark omens of sickness and death, symbols of personal power and physical prowess, sources of luck, expressions of love, or embodiments of beauty. From far too many old movies, of course, we know quite well that Indians used eagle feathers to denote strength and status among warriors (as did European and Euro-American military forces), but Krech points out the plumage of other birds used in battle dress, including red-headed woodpeckers, kestrels, vultures, and crows. When Creek warriors took the scalp of an enemy, they gave a war whoop that ended with an imitation of a turkey’s gobble, but when they meant peace, they carried the white tail feathers of eagles or the wings of swans. Birds also figured in less violent forms of physical difficulty. Cherokee people thought the yellow-breasted chat to be a cause of urinary tract infection, but they thought insect-eating birds, particularly woodpeckers and flycatchers, could provide a cure for toothache. And so it goes throughout the book, as birds and bird parts appear in a variety of symbolic and ceremonial forms, as decorations, ornaments, gifts, place names, clan names, even team mascots.

For all his attention the spiritual aspects of birds, Krech also takes note of their material importance to Native peoples. Archaeological analysis of bone and feather fragments in middens and other sites reveals quite clearly that Indians ate birds of all sorts—turkeys, ducks, and geese, of course, but also herons, hawks, cranes, eagles, crows, pigeons, and even small songbirds—all told, upwards of fifty to eighty species. On the other hand, crows and blackbirds also ate the Indians’ crops. To fight these predatory pests, some Native people erected observation platforms where human sentries could scare the birds away, while others set up hollow gourds on poles to attract purple martins, which would in turn attack the unwanted birds. In both ways, whether by contributing to the diversity or defense of people’s food, birds figured more significantly in Indian diet than we might have previously realized.

The killing of birds for either physical consumption or ornamental display takes us into territory Krech covered in an earlier work, The Ecological Indian (1999), in which he sought to set aside the seemingly sympathetic but ultimately dehumanizing notion of the Indian as being “one” with nature. He argued that Native Americans did indeed have an impact on the environment, sometimes engaging in practices that could not be sustainable, up to and including the extirpation of species. The Ecological Indian proved to be as controversial as it was influential, but Krech does not completely shy away from the same issues in Spirits of the Air. Here he notes, for instance, that Indian demand for eagle feathers contributed to the decline in the numbers of bald eagles and the near extirpation of golden eagles in the region—contributed to, that is, but did not cause. On the whole, in fact, he takes a reasonably benign view of Native people’s practices, concluding that Indians took a “sustainable harvest” of birds and, in a sense, understood overkill (177-179).

Krech has made quite a harvest of his own, and the variety of bird species he discusses in some detail is especially impressive. Finding birds in historical sources is a little like spotting them in nature: they seem to be everywhere if you only take the trouble to look for them, and you get even more from the experience if you can identify them properly. That’s where Krech’s own identity as a scholar and a birder makes a difference. The dust jacket text tells of his accomplishments as member of the anthropology faculty at Brown University, prolific author of books and articles, and prominent member of learned societies. The accompanying photograph, however, does not depict him at his desk, bookshelves in the background; rather, it shows him in front of some birch trees, binoculars around his neck. (Full disclosure: On a free afternoon at the 2008 meeting of the American Society for Environmental History in Boise, Idaho, I went birding with Krech in the nearby Snake River Birds of Prey Natural Area. He’s very good.) Krech has written a scholar’s book that birders can love, or perhaps vice versa.

As an anthropologist, Krech is careful to consider the possible errors and exaggerations inherent in his sources, particularly the verbal and visual representations left by early European observers. “Many southern Indians were represented visually wearing feathers, bird parts, and even entire birds,” he notes, but he immediately raises the possibility that Europeans saw those feathered Indians through the lens of their own ornate fashion sense, making Native people look like nabobs of the royal court. “Thus, the probability that the evidence is not straightforward or watertight dictates a cautious approach,” he concludes (63-64). As a birder, moreover, Krech is careful to turn a trained eye to the very feathers themselves. He questions, for instance, William Bartram’s observation that some of the Indian men he met in the eighteenth-century Southeast wore colorful cloaks of what he took to be “scarlet” flamingo feathers. Krech notes that flamingoes don’t normally get north of Yucatan these days, although he admits they might have in previous centuries; still, he suggests that the red feathers Bartram saw might just as well have been those of the scarlet ibis or, even more likely, the roseate spoonbill, which is much more common along coastal areas in the South.

Does that degree of identification really matter, one might ask, or is it just a pedantic attempt to bag another bird for one’s historical life list? It matters, I would argue, to the extent that we need to know the birds well enough to know the Indians better and thus perhaps to grasp what symbolic meanings Native people might have invested in which avian neighbors and why. Krech recounts, for instance, the startling discovery, in 1897, of the painted image of a crested bird that adorned a board pulled out of the muck of Florida’s Gulf Coast by ethnologist and archaeologist Frank Cushing. Cushing initially identified the blue-hued bird as a blue jay or kingfisher, but from a closer ornithological examination of the image (a copy of which appears on page 82 for the reader’s own investigation), Krech concludes that the painting depicts an ivory-billed woodpecker, a bird commonly deemed a culturally important “object of exchange, curiosity, and spiritual interest” among Indians in earlier times, a bird more worthy of human wonder and, no doubt, pictorial preservation (83-86).

Spirits of the Air is itself a work of pictorial preservation, and even though it may seem a bit out of place to do here in an on-line journal, I want to close with an appreciative word about the book itself as a book, as a physical object. In this emerging era of e-books, Krech offers a Kindle-defying handful, a heavy and handsome volume that sits solidly on the lap, a delight as much for the eye as for the mind. The pages are thick, slick, and beautifully illustrated, almost every one containing good-quality color reproductions of artwork by Native painters and sculptors and some of the usual Euro-American suspects, most notably Mark Catesby, Alexander Wilson, and John James Audubon. Yet while the book itself is hefty, the price is not: I’ve bought scholarly books that cost just as much but don’t look or feel anywhere near as good. And elegant and well-adorned though this book is, it would be a shame to shortchange Spirits of the Air by calling it a coffee-table book. It is, rather, a book for the academic office or home library, both a ready reference for scholarly inquiry and a relaxing source of visual pleasure. Shepard Krech can be proud to have written it, and the University of Georgia Press equally proud to have produced it.

Focusing on fascinating networks of personal ties and fictive kinship, formal alliances and imperial rivalries, Cynthia Van Zandt’s Brothers among Nations explores the complex relationships that linked European settlements and Indian villages in eastern North America. Closely examining case studies from Virginia, Maryland, New Sweden, New Netherland, Connecticut, and Plymouth, Van Zandt presents the early period as an ongoing search by Indians and Europeans for knowledge, advantage, and profit. These motivations often led to violent reprisals and preemptive strikes on both sides, familiar features of the early period. But equally often, Europeans and Native Americans were able to forge alliances of various kinds in which Native groups occasionally played the dominant role.

Many works on the early period, especially recent works that accord a major role to Native Americans, share Van Zandt’s emphasis on negotiation and mediating figures. But by doing so, the historical literature poses a distinction between the early period and the period after 1680, in which the former is marked by fluidity and possibilities and the eighteenth century by clear racial lines, clear imperial distinctions, stable governing structures, and what one can only call narrative coherence. Perhaps Van Zandt’s most significant accomplishment is to show that negotiation, alliances, and mediating figures suggest a new kind of coherence to the early period, that behind formal politics in the sense of wars, treaties, and the like, lay personal relationships and intercultural alliances that other historians of the early period would be well advised to look for.

From the beginning, Van Zandt makes it clear that although her focus is on alliances, she is not offering a rosy portrait of intercultural understanding and cooperation. Fear, hunger, and the desire for profit drove Europeans and Native peoples together even as ethnocentrism and violence pushed them apart. To achieve their goals, all parties needed information about the disposition of prospective allies and rivals, their territorial claims, and their relationships with the various European, Algonkian, and Iroquoian groups of eastern North America. Van Zandt uses the term “mapping” as the “metaphorical lens” (9) through which to examine these ongoing efforts to gain knowledge of other groups, and although the metaphor is a bit strained in places, Van Zandt makes a valuable point in asserting that mapping, in this sense, was as often effective as it was faulty.

Shifting European leaders and motivations away from center stage, Van Zandt argues that Indians often asserted a dominant role in their relationships with Europeans and further that “Indian actions were often determined more by relationships with other Native Americans than with Europeans, especially when inter-Indian alliances and conflicts stretched across territory claimed by European colonies” (11).

Van Zandt makes a clever argument that the frequency of preemptive strikes and fears of conspiracy show how real these connections were in the early period. European officials recognized that they were enmeshed in a web of alliances that they did not fully understand. In this light, the imagined conspiracies of the early period reflected “real fears, even if they were not necessarily accurate ones” (46).

Harsh tactics like preemptive strikes and violent reprisals were more likely before 1620, Van Zandt argues, because in the early years both Native Americans and Europeans were proud, suspicious, andill-informed. Dubious tactics like kidnapping, which in hindsight “seems to have been an extraordinarily ill-conceived strategy,” offered considerable short-term gains. Captives might serve as hostages, informants, and translators, and therefore kidnapping endured because “many colonial promoters and explorers nevertheless saw it as useful for a surprisingly long time” (57).

Not surprisingly, these methods largely failed to produce the desired results, and later efforts beginning in the 1630s “benefited from the earlier period of experimentation, even (or especially) when previous models were disastrous failures” (45). Jamestown, the subject of chapter 3, offers some of the early period’s most familiar examples of fictive kin alliances, cultural mediators, and preemptive strikes. Both English and Indians in the Chesapeake tried to assert a dominant role in their relationship: Wahunsonacock, or Powhatan, staged a famous adoption ritual involving Captain John Smith, and the English under Captain Christopher Newport staged an equally famous (and equally ineffective) coronation ceremony. Here as elsewhere, the Indian leader had the advantage in understanding: “if Captain John Smith failed to understand the full implications and obligations of Powhatan kinship, Wahunsonacock himself comprehended the essential symbolism and implications of vassalage” (79). This was a lesson that later Chesapeake figures like William Claiborne would take closely to heart.

Jamestown was the model for subsequent settlements, and the many published accounts of its experiences helped to drive the shift Van Zandt places in the 1630s. Then, virtuosic performers of the role of cultural mediator found ample opportunities for profit and forged more stable relationships. The second half of the book dwells in large part on two such figures. Chapter 4 introduces the fascinating Isaac Allerton, an official emissary of Plymouth Colony whose cultural and linguistic facility made him a welcome visitor and trading partner in England, New England, New Netherland, and among a wide range of Iroquoian and Algonkian villages. Allerton is an illuminating foil to the brittle ethnocentrism of William Bradford, whose “ideas of where the borders of Plymouth Colony lay and of how Plymouth should ally itself with others” (98) did not include any of his Dutch neighbors, let alone the Native ones. By foregrounding Allerton, Van Zandt offers a portrait of the early period that contemporaries would likely have seen as more accurate. “Bradford was the architect of a more restricted, culturally pure plan of colonization … In contrast, Allerton’s way was much more in the mainstream of early colonial realities” (114).

Virginia’s Colonel William Claiborne is another fascinating figure whose alliances crossed cultural and national boundaries. In Claiborne’s case, fur trading profits drew him into an alliance with the powerful Susquehannocks, Iroquoian speakers who came to dominate the northern reaches of Chesapeake Bay. His alliance effectively appended Virginia to a chain of diplomatic, economic, and military alliances extending into Huron territory north of the Great Lakes. Allies of the Hurons, the Susquehannocks were enemies of the Haudenosaunee, especially the Mohawks and Senecas. Their desire for an alliance with Claiborne was part of a long-term effort to establish trading ties with Europeans that began in the 1620s, when the Susquehannocks sought trading ties with the Dutch at New Amsterdam. After these efforts bore no fruit, Claiborne’s ventures north from the Chesapeake attracted the Susquehannocks’ attention and led to an alliance. Later, when Maryland officials successfully challenged Claiborne’s right to trade in their territory, they hoped to replace him as the Susquehannocks’ partner in the fur trade. But Maryland officials misunderstood the nature of the relationship Claiborne had initiated: the Susquehannocks were not interested solely in a trading relationship but an alliance, and when Claiborne was forced out, they shifted their attention again, this time to the fledgling settlement of New Sweden.

In a strong final chapter, Van Zandt shows how her focus on alliances like these can bring coherence to events usually described in terms of different national or regional narratives. Specifically, she argues that “the Dutch conquest of New Sweden and the Native American attack on Manhattan in 1655 were different aspects of the same event” (185). When the Dutch attacked the Susquehannocks’ client, New Sweden, they invited a reprisal for several reasons. The Susquehannocks hoped to draw Dutch forces away from their client but also hoped to strike at the Dutch, their Haudenosaunee allies, and none other than Isaac Allerton. Allerton’s trading ties with New Sweden and his residence in New Netherland made him a sort of traitor in Susquehannock eyes, and while in Manhattan, they ransacked Isaac Allerton’s house in a “public demonstration of mockery” (179).

The “peach war” and the Dutch attack on New Sweden admittedly play a minor role, when they play any role at all, in accounts of the early period. The same is true of Isaac Allerton, William Claiborne, and even the Susquehannocks. But by revealing the complex alliances that unify these actors and events, Van Zandt makes a broader point about the interwoven strands of the early period as a whole. Approaching this period from the standpoint of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in which Europeans were able in many cases to dictate terms to Native Americans and Africans alike, obscures the need for Native allies that marked all early settlement projects. As Van Zandt puts it, “interpretations that assume overwhelming European supremacy for the early colonial period can be too heavily influenced by the outcome of much later events” (185). Similarly, approaching the early history of Maryland, Virginia, New Amsterdam, and New Sweden from the perspective of later years, in which boundaries were more clearly drawn, obscures the alliances that bound the Indian and European settlements in eastern North America and the boundary-crossers who negotiated and profited from those alliances.

Once the domain of anthropologists, archeologists, and amateur and professional food writers, the study of food and its relationship to our past has become a fruitful field of inquiry for historians in recent years. A quick check of recently published books and articles reveals hundreds of titles related to food and foodways. Burgeoning interest in food in its historical contexts has opened doors to new and interesting primary sources, leading to a proliferation of specialized archives. Surprisingly, the Web has not kept pace with these new directions in research and expanded archival offerings. Searching the Internet for food-related history sites finds the cupboard quite bare.

While Google searches of food-related history yield impressive statistical results, the content of those searches is less than impressive. Using a variety of search terms, one seemingly finds a tremendous variety of food history Websites—anywhere from a few thousand sites to multiple millions of hits—yet clicking through to these sites reveals little of value for the serious researcher. Most of the relevant sites, and even the most highly ranked hits, are geared toward and/or written by K-8 students, such as “Social Studies for Kids” or “Food of Nineteenth-century United States” or are promotional sites for books written by food writers (e.g.,Infibeam.com). The student-generated sites offer a unique comment on the proliferation and importance of food studies, proving that the field is rich with teaching possibilities. However, the sites themselves offer no new insights into food culture or the foodways of the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, and researchers or higher-level students will find nothing of value there. Even sites produced by reputable living-history museums fall short.

Ranking high in the search results was Colonial Williamsburg’s Website, a place dedicated to living history and the faithful recreation of the past, but it unexpectedly offers little in the way of meaningful food history. The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation offers only two pages, albeit beautifully designed, dedicated to colonial foodways. The first page “Foodways,” gives visitors a brief essay on the role of food in colonial Virginia. The essay, however, is disappointing, offering very few specifics or contextualized details, thereby making it largely an advertisement for the living history museum and its restaurants rather than a well-researched look at food and its importance to colonial populations. The other page is equally disappointing; here the visitor finds a list of recipes from colonial sources adapted to modern measurements and ingredients. While cooking eighteenth-century food can be fun and interesting for the home cook, the researcher of America’s foodways will find little of value in recipes that are designed for today’s kitchen.

In recent years, blogs have become the main form of self-publishing on the Web and are without a doubt an increasingly important source of information for many people. Unfortunately, when it comes to food studies and food history, blogs leave much to be desired. Most food blogs eschew serious scholarship in favor of interesting trivia and historic ephemera, treating readers to mini-essays on the origins of American staple food items. The entries are often quite informative, but they do not follow any kind of academic standards, making them useless to students and researchers. In the many food blogs that exist, such as “American Food,” “Slow Food USA,” “Heart to Hearth Cookery,” or “Food—History,” one is hard pressed to find a single footnote, bibliography, or even a link to the sources used to craft each entry.

That is not to say that the Web offers no substantive food history sites. Hidden between the layers of fat on the Web are some juicy morsels that serious researchers will find worthwhile. One site in particular, “The Food Timeline,” offers both the scholar and student of food history a very nice collection of links to a wide variety of primary and secondary sources in food history across time. The site, launched in 1999 by New Jersey librarian Lynne Olver, is a continually updated and growing collection of links to a variety of food-related topics and historical recipes, organized on a timeline on the main page. While the design of the page is quite dated, lacking the graphic flair of modern Websites, and the organization is difficult to follow (a reflection of the dated design and the tremendous amount of information contained on the site), the material provides a useful starting point for anyone doing food history research. For example, a typical entry, “Summer Pudding 1875,” offers the reader a brief essay on the origins of this British/American dessert and, more importantly, an annotated bibliography of both secondary and primary sources.

Beyond the timeline and its links, the site features separate sections that explore historic food prices, lesson plans (for grades K-12), and regional and state foods. One can also find links to a historic menu collection, notes on adapting old recipes to modern cooking techniques, and a very good tutorial on doing culinary research. Researchers can even submit culinary reference questions to the site’s librarian, who promises to answer the submission within forty-eight hours.

Clearly, with some exceptions, the Web has a long way to go to catch up with the substantial body of research being done in food studies. While the general reader may find something of interest on the Web, most serious scholars will find better results with more traditional archives and library research.

Among many new syntheses of the decades preceding the Civil War, Elizabeth Varon’s Disunion!: The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789-1859 is one of the most insightful, innovative, and readable. Interweaving recent scholarship on race, gender, and popular culture with traditional political history, Disunion! provides both a valuable synthesis and a compelling argument about the political significance of language. At a glance, her conclusion that “disunion” rhetoric proliferated and evolved over the decades preceding the Civil War seems obvious. But Varon has much to add about the power and breadth of this word. The tendency to conflate “disunion” with “secession,” Varon suggests, is the primary culprit for our lack of attention to disunion discourse. “Secession” was the formal policy act of withdrawal from the Union. “Disunion” was far more capacious.

Varon clarifies these two terms and provides a useful taxonomy of disunion rhetoric. From 1789 through 1859 the word appeared primarily in five “distinct but overlapping” registers that together made the idea of disunion central to political conflict over slavery’s fate in (or outside of) the American republic. Disunion as a “prophecy” warned of “national ruin” if slavery was allowed to become divisive. Politicians, especially Southerners, frequently used disunion as a “threat” to extract concessions. Moderates employed disunion as an “accusation of treasonous plotting” to besmirch political adversaries, especially abolitionists and Southern fire-eaters. Over time, disunion rhetoric came to describe a “process of sectional alienation” whereby the free North and slave South became increasingly incompatible. Finally, some extremists in both sections, and by the late 1850s many Southern political leaders, advocated disunion as an actual policy “program for regional independence” (5).

Varon shows how slavery magnified popular forebodings over internal and external threats to a republic’s survival. For prophets of disunion, fears about sectional division over slavery came to encapsulate the many perils of disunion, including foreign invasion, popular uprising, economic collapse, race war, and disruption of traditional social, especially gender, hierarchies. Already in the Constitutional Convention, disunion threats surfaced as a Southern tactic for securing protections for slavery, but the compromises of the Constitution seemed to obviate further conflict and establish a strong, durable union. Disunion rhetoric as both an accusation and a threat, however, flourished as a partisan device for Federalists and Jeffersonians arguing over Alexander Hamilton’s economic program, Federalist foreign policy, Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase and 1807 embargo, the War of 1812, and, on an early occasion, over slavery in a spirited 1790 House debate incited by Philadelphia Quakers’ petitions against the African slave trade.

Northern congressional attempts to eliminate slavery in Missouri raised the stakes of disunion rhetoric and made its sectional undertones explicit. Yet, even in the Missouri crisis (1819-1821), disunion rhetoric remained “a kind of political gamesmanship or parliamentary maneuvering.” Neither slavery extensionists nor restrictionists in the early republic intended disunion “as a process or program.” By invoking disunion so often, though, participants on both sides of the Missouri debate further ensconced the term in the national political lexicon. Additionally, “the Missouri controversy racialized the discourse of disunion by adding lurid word pictures of ‘servile war’ to the ‘language of terrifying prophecy,'” especially in light of the black revolution in Haiti and Gabriel’s abortive rebellion in Virginia in 1800 (44-45). Meanwhile, burgeoning free-black communities in the North propagated a new theory that only emancipation and racial equality could ensure perpetuity of the Union.

By organizing political history around a rhetorical concept, Varon makes new space for the politically marginalized. By showing that slavery’s politicization hinged on popular discourse as much as on votes cast and decisions rendered, Varon enables us to see how those excluded from conventional policymaking still profoundly influenced national politics. Famous black radicals like Nat Turner, David Walker, and Frederick Douglass powerfully shaped the debate over disunion. More to the point though, Varon shows that countless enslaved and free blacks heightened sectional tensions by challenging proslavery authority, not least by fleeing slavery and protecting fugitive slaves in their communities. Varon also elucidates how women antislavery activists’ disregard for antebellum gender conventions intensified sectional alienation by convincing Southerners (and conservative Northerners) that abolitionists aimed to revolutionize the American social order.

The emergence of immediatist abolitionism in the 1830s transformed the discourse of disunion. Familiar disunion language suffused the rabid, widespread anti-abolitionist responses to the growing radical movement. The new abolitionist challenge, embodied in the postal propaganda campaign of 1835 and subsequent congressional petition drives, inspired new arguments about slavery as a “positive good.” Furthermore, already in the initial 1836 debates over a prospective House gag on antislavery petitions, proslavery extremists like South Carolina’s James Henry Hammond invoked disunion as a process well underway. Abolitionists retorted that slavery was the “root danger” to the Union and dismissed Southern disunionism as “empty bluster” (122).

Over the next few years, abolitionists developed two comprehensive responses to proslavery disunionism, both of which reinforced Southern anxieties about protecting slavery in a half-free republic. One was William Lloyd Garrison’s espousal of an antislavery disunion philosophy, which argued that the Union was fundamentally corrupted by slavery and that conscientious Northerners could no longer bear the moral burden of participation (152-154). The much larger group of (male) abolitionists who joined the Liberty Party and later the more moderate Free Soil Party devised the Slave Power Conspiracy argument. Political abolitionists established their commitment to the Union by smearing the Slave Power—the proslavery politicians that controlled the federal government and infringed on Northern liberties—as the real menace to national unity. Varon seems to argue that Garrisonians did more to contribute to polarization over the fate of the Union than the political abolitionists who decried the Slave Power. Perhaps, but political abolitionists played an indispensable role in inciting the aggressive Southern political responses that so escalated sectional conflict, precisely because Southerners deeply feared their efforts to channel abolitionism into concrete antislavery policy. Through those battles the Slave Power argument gained currency across the Northern electorate, making compromise on slavery, and especially its westward extension, an ever thornier project.

The midcentury sectional crisis over slavery in California and New Mexico and the Compromise of 1850 constitute a crucial pivot in Varon’s history of disunion discourse. Never before this crisis had support for disunion as a program been so pervasive. The compromise’s apparent success at mollifying friction between Northern and Southern moderates only further inflamed radicals on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act corroborated abolitionist charges of Northern complicity in the slave system and soon generated unprecedented “northern outrage” (235). Black resistance in the urban North to the odious law especially disturbed slavery’s champions. These Northern responses in turn “legitimized a long-standing argument of the South’s proslavery vanguard—that Northerners could not be trusted to keep their promise” (235). Southern politicians demanded renewed assurances that the federal government would protect slavery, but their new affronts—the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott decision, insistence on the fraudulent proslavery Lecompton Constitution for Kansas, and calls for reopening the African slave trade—gave further credence to antislavery charges that a Slave Power Conspiracy was propelling the nation toward disunion.

The Republican Party that coalesced across the North in response to these aggressions strove to prove its unionism at the moment when Southern secessionists were growing boldest. As “disunion threats materialized into a regional program, and as images of revolution and invasion swirled in the political atmosphere,” Republicans grew increasingly antagonistic towards Southern ultimatums, as famously demonstrated in William Seward’s “irrepressible conflict” speech (320). These tensions crystallized in the aftermath of John Brown’s insurrectionary raid on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. Brown’s invasion and the sympathetic Northern reaction elicited by his antislavery martyrdom terrified Southerners across the political spectrum and, for many, made disunion seem unavoidable.

Brown’s 1859 raid rather than the outbreak of the Civil War seems a curious choice of denouement (notwithstanding a brief epilogue on secession and the war years). It was likely dictated by the editors of the Littlefield History of the Civil War Era series, which will include a separate book on the secession crisis from 1859 through 1861. A more complete discussion of the actual mechanics by which disunion became secession (through different trajectories in various Southern regions) would have better completed Varon’s narrative and further strengthened her important point about the complicated relationship between “disunion” and “secession.”

Varon impressively brings together social, cultural, and of course political strands in a very manageable volume. (By contrast, recent prize-winning syntheses of this period by Sean Wilentz and Daniel Walker Howe are twice the length of Disunion!.) In trying to incorporate all the key highlights from conventional political histories of the period as well as new insights about the antislavery movement, Varon’s chronological narrative occasionally strays from its focus on the power of “disunion” rhetoric but never for too long. By delivering her arguments through an accessible narrative framework, though, Varon has crafted a synthesis that speaks to specialists and remains approachable for undergraduates, scholars in other fields, and general readers. In the process, Varon offers fresh and enlightening conclusions about the power of “disunion” in the seven decades before the war of words over slavery became a war of arms over union.