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.

Ammunition,
Or Sarah Winchester, 23 Years Dead, and My Grandmother, Newly Widowed, Speak

The men were paid extra: danger money.
No metal buttons on their clothes, no cigarettes,

In his letters from the South Pacific, he always
called me Honey, made me promise not to forget

no matches. No hairpins for the women—
So many precautions: fire brigades waiting,

to smile for him in the beveled mirror
he’d bought that Christmas—home on leave—

deep wells, until there were hydrants.
Around the factories, even the horses wore

bells everywhere like the sound of ice cracking
when he drove the lake. I’d hold my door open—

brass instead of steel underfoot. Less chance
of sparks. The men worked overtime—

frightened. The months he was gone were
like that. The children in the back of the car,

gearing up for each new war, or maybe
war. Their shirts couldn’t have pockets.

holding the shells he’d sent them: speckled around
a tiny curve of breath. Until the telegram,

No stray bits of metal. And still—each year—
explosions, fires spreading until

I kept my promise: smiled as if he could see
my reflection in the bevel of the South Pacific.

they couldn’t count the bodies.

Before his ship was only splinters, smoke

As a child, I thought guncotton sounded

soft—like the cloth for a veil.

Sarah Winchester Remembers: Artizan Street, New Haven, 1850s

There was always something being built
in my father’s shop and sawdust tracked
onto our floors: a shimmer like the boards
were becoming mist, like on the Quinnipiac
where my parents met. You could walk into
rivers then and come out with new beliefs.

In the clock shops, time divided, shifting
us forward notch by tiny notch. People
crowded the Public Bathhouse—vapors
and lye and seawater. Small salvations.
From my French tutor: pere and bois.
What paid for my lessons: fine houses
ornamented by my father’s careful hands.

Carriage works, mills, the boarding houses
spilling into the streets. We lived comfortably
then. My sister, the only one buried. I carried
her name, like the rail tracks carrying Hartford
outside its skins: the elm-lined, sooty Green,
the custom house. Factories for shirts and guns.

In their rooms, new girls from Ireland
cut stacks of pieces—collar and breast, left
right, back—then stitch by stitch, created
a more perfect wholeness. The country
was coming apart. Rumors. Repeating
guns. But also beauty. New planed maple.

Everyone wanted spindles and tracery,
moldings copied from Queen Victoria
and The Crystal Palace. History turned against
its lathe, shaving us loose. On my father’s
floor: pedals for organs waiting for the music
to be built around them. No one told me
to want a more solid world.

Stereoscope: Annie Oakley and Sarah Winchester

It began with necessity:
hunting rabbits behind
that mortgaged house, then word spread out:     
snow on the fields, glinting off
sky, and everything
narrowed to hard wood and steel,
and me the small miracle
at the trigger men bet against:

How can I explain
windows designed from guns:
levers and latches aimed at
the gazing ball in the garden,
not for safety but because that’s how I
knew to build. Not a spider,
silking out her body’s web,
but a woman standing

cards riddled like windows
on a train that will take you
over oceans if you want it to;
the prince of Senegal sending
offers of tigers, and the German
kaiser sitting rigid as a portrait: ash
of his cigarette streaking the bullet
as it crumbled that one speck

where the wind’s eye watches
without sleeping—safe as houses
they say, but what is safe about
this world with holes shot through,
with empty safes and chairs—this
dust and light on the piano, the smoke
and no one else to warm at the hearth
now: only my own body

of fire. Such trust in common
stranger’s (woman’s) hands;
the legends made them safe
the way they do: the little sure
shot, dressed to kill, meaning
dressed to shoot at nothing
alive now. I became
something to be braved, boasted

glass—between me and the day:
not ghosts, but not the living either.
The legends grew like hedges
tangled and vined around me; words,
the spirits I started to believe in
because what else is a house but
something that holds time,
something to forgive us,

as any woman should—
holding her gun naturally as a baby
slung from her body. Love
has nothing to do with that
or it does, but also
wanting to trust something—
also our bodies bare as skinned
rabbits, and the floor cold

sleepless walks through rooms
held in some other world
we’ve built board by board; the window
open or closed and us still standing
waiting
wanting someone to see us
wanting—something soft as
silk, so maybe we are spiders

where the bed isn’t, and all
the pretty ways later we sell
to the world what began
with necessity

after all—this web around us,
plums in the orchards, morning
filling up the glass: something beautiful
in every corner. How can I explain it?

Sarah Winchester Visits The California Midwinter Exposition,
Golden Gate Park, 1894

Surely you did not see the woman dancing
nude at the new aquarium—a thin black veil over
her face, not so unlike your own. The cracking

of chairs as the police came to carry her off—
like a spider in a cup—to somewhere proper.
Were there even fish yet? Were there seals caught

beneath Cliff House—so thick, the papers wrote,
you could shoot them from the veranda if it weren’t illegal.
They wrote everything then: back at your farm

you named a hill Strawberry for here—invited
the neighborhood girls to its slope to eat
real French ice cream. That woman, surely,

nude by those glass walls, danced tarantella,
trying to survive the bite of her own skin:
just that veil between the gawkers and

grief. At the grand Egyptian revival pavilions,
a ferris wheel of oranges turned by electric
motor. You could stand underneath—watch

a hundred suns revolve at once: an eccentric
belief that the world stood still here, one room
could hold everywhere. The Court of Honor.

The Prune Knight with his armor: a bloom
of produce bristling from his chest. Sphinxes
with soft plaster noses. Germans—painted

and dressed like Japanese (who refused to be
servants)—running with rickshaws by Dante’s
Inferno, House of Horrors, where you could
pay—for a short forever—for your past.

“I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.”
—Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art”

Four decades ago, Bernard Bailyn suggested that histories of the American Revolution were entering their “tragic” phase: that is, the era in which both sides in the conflict—winners and losers, patriots and loyalists—could be depicted in a fair and even-handed way. From his biography of Thomas Hutchinson and Carol Berkin’s contemporaneous treatment of Jonathan Sewall to the recent appearance of books by Thomas B. Allen, Maya Jasanoff, and Ruma Chopra, it appears that the loyalists of eighteenth-century British North America have finally begun to get their due.

The same cannot be said of the men who led Britain’s effort to defeat the independence movement. Historians have expended little energy to validate the judgments of King George III or the ministers—Lord North, Lord Germain, the Earl of Sandwich—who crafted policy in those years. More attention has been given to the military commanders who led the war effort, but the Howe brothers, Burgoyne, Clinton, and Cornwallis have been criticized for their failures of judgment much more often than they have been dealt with sympathetically.

Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy’s marvelous new book, The Men Who Lost America, redresses this failing and, in the process, gives us the kind of three-dimensional treatment of Britain’s role in the American Revolution that we have long needed. At least since the era of the Vietnam War, most historians have treated the military outcome of the American Revolution as a foregone conclusion: if Vietnam taught Americans the lesson that an invading army cannot suppress a homegrown insurgency, no matter how disproportionate the combatants’ resources appear to be, U.S. historians have come to view the American Revolution as the first and greatest demonstration of that principle.

Paradoxically, O’Shaughnessy argues that Britain lost the war for America in a four-week period in 1776 (86-87), yet he nevertheless succeeds in restoring a profound sense of contingency to his narrative and analysis of events. His book takes the form of nine biographical chapters, each of which considers a key architect of British policy or strategy (one chapter treats both of the Howe brothers, so ten individuals are profiled). Beginning with chapters on George III and Lord North, and thereby offering a political overview of the war effort, he proceeds to depict five commanding officers and three more political figures whose choices did much to shape British action during the era of the American Revolution. While O’Shaughnessy is always willing to criticize the men he profiles and to highlight the ways in which their personalities shaped their choices for better and worse, his treatments are consistently generous. He succeeds brilliantly in humanizing his cast of characters and allowing the reader to see the constraints under which they worked. The biographical structure means that the book’s chapters overlap chronologically, but instead of redundancy we get an increasingly complex and layered perspective on a set of linked problems.

One kind of payoff this book offers is a reassessment of crucial political and strategic questions that many previous historians have puzzled over. Though Americans tend to think of George III as a tyrant, intransigent in his unwillingness to mediate the conflict between Parliament and the colonies, O’Shaughnessy restores the mood of optimism that attended his ascension to the throne and highlights the ways in which he sought to restrain the Parliamentary impulse to take a hard line with the colonies. Yet in the wake of the Boston Tea Party, George III “strongly endorsed” the Coercive Acts, and once committed to the use of force he was unwavering in his resolve (22). The instrument of his policy, Lord North, was as ineffectual a war leader as one could possibly imagine—yet since he never accepted the title of prime minister, and from 1777 onward tried to persuade the king that the war was unwinnable, this is perhaps unsurprising. George refused to listen to North, but wouldn’t replace him either, and North’s ambivalent leadership created a weak and divided cabinet. The British war effort was often confused and sometimes in disarray, and O’Shaughnessy makes clear that this was a problem that began at the top.

The Howe brothers embodied the problem. General William Howe and Admiral Richard Howe were both members of Parliament who were sympathetic to the colonies and unsure about American policy before the war. Once the fighting began, they were sent to North America with dual roles, simultaneously holding military commands and appointments as peace commissioners. General Howe was an extremely capable commander-in-chief, yet his judgments were repeatedly clouded by miscalculations about both the strength of the colonies’ military forces, which he tended to underestimate, and the attitudes of its civilian population, which he assumed ran much more strongly toward loyalism than they did.

Nowhere was this fatal combination more evident than in Howe’s decision, in the summer of 1777, to march on Philadelphia rather than assisting Burgoyne’s attempt to capture the strategic corridor that ran from the St. Lawrence Valley up the Richelieu River and through Lakes Champlain and George into the Hudson Valley. No objective in the northern colonies was more vital than this corridor, control of which would have cut New England off from the colonies to the south and assured Britain of a secure line of communication between Canada and New York. Instead, Howe marched on Philadelphia and left Burgoyne to his own devices. He captured the city in late September, only a few weeks before Burgoyne was forced to surrender at Saratoga.

Burgoyne’s defeat made Howe’s decision appear tantamount to malfeasance and led to a Parliamentary inquiry into his conduct. But O’Shaughnessy contends that the lack of coordination between Howe and Burgoyne was the result of neither willful disregard of duty nor a breakdown in communication, so much as it derived from Howe’s unrealistic expectation that the two initiatives could succeed independent of each other.

Burgoyne has been one of the principal scapegoats for Britain’s military failure in North America for more than 200 years, but O’Shaughnessy rescues him from derision and allows us to see events unfold from the general’s perspective. Often caricatured as a vain aristocrat whose personal baggage nearly outweighed his regiment’s ordnance, Burgoyne, “the least aristocratic of the British commanders in America,” is shown by O’Shaughnessy to have been an enlightened and ambitious military reformer, progressive in his attitudes, insightful in his judgments, and successful in the field (124). Like Howe, his greatest mistake was to underestimate the popularity of the Revolutionary cause.

Another strength of the book is to illuminate forgotten or underappreciated dimensions of the Revolution. Thus, for example, O’Shaughnessy’s account of Germain’s attempt in 1779 to shift the theatre of the war to the Caribbean basin and to conquer Spain’s American colonies through a Central American campaign. Conceived and led by Major General John Dalling, the governor of Jamaica, the plan relied on the support of Miskito Indians and the deployment of irregular forces. Plagued by bad leadership and—literally—by tropical disease, the expedition collapsed and came to nothing, while diverting badly needed manpower and attention from the Gulf Coast, where Britain eventually surrendered West Florida to the Spanish (yellow fever and malaria crippled every European army that attempted to fight in the American tropics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as J. R. McNeill has brilliantly argued in Mosquito Empires).

In the end, O’Shaughnessy demonstrates that weak political leadership in London hamstrung British military leadership across the Atlantic, but also that the war effort failed “not as a result of incompetence and blundering, but because of insufficient resources, the unanticipated lack of loyalist support, and the popularity of the Revolution” (353). And he emphasizes that the war was far from a total loss: “The men who lost America were also the men who saved Canada, India, Gibraltar, and the British Caribbean” (361). Most of the men O’Shaughnessy profiles continued to play important roles in the army, in Parliament, and in imperial administration after the American war. None was more noteworthy than Cornwallis, who—after surrendering to Washington at Yorktown—succeeded Warren Hastings as governor general of Bengal, where he led an army of 20,000 to victory in the Third Mysore War. Then he served as lord lieutenant of Ireland and defeated an invading French army during the great rebellion of 1798.

Readers often have to choose between two unsatisfactory approaches to the military history of the American Revolution. Non-military historians tend to skate over the surface of events, providing too little detail to make the subject interesting or meaningful. Military historians are prone to err in the opposite direction while, with the aid of hindsight, criticizing every false step a war leader makes. The genius of this book lies in O’Shaughnessy’s sympathetic engagement with the experiences, aspirations, and shortcomings of his characters. He evinces no desire either to second-guess the decisions they made or to re-fight the battles of the Revolution to produce a different outcome. This is tragic history in the truest sense, an act of recovery and restoration that seeks to humanize an extraordinary cast of characters and do justice to the vast, complex, doomed effort to prevent American independence.

This article originally appeared in issue 15.1 (Fall, 2014).

Eric Hinderaker is professor of history at the University of Utah. He is currently working on a history of the Boston Massacre.

Taking up the scurrilous charge—”ours has been a notably sermon-ridden literature from the beginning”—as a judicious assessment, Meredith Marie Neuman’s book Jeremiah’s Scribes: Creating Sermon Literature in Puritan New England argues that all Puritan literature is a subset of the sermon. To understand Puritan literature requires a firm sense of sermon culture. This demands not so much a search for accurate content—what did ministers actually say given that we have no word for word transcriptions?—but a realignment of our scholarly questions to accord with the Puritan’s concern—how effectual were their words? Reorienting the study of the Puritan sermon around efficacy rather than accuracy shifts the axis of interpretation away from the print sermon as the gold standard and toward a nonlinear amalgam of manuscript, print, and oral practices that make up sermon culture. In so doing, ministerial control morphs into dispersed authorship, exegetical habits become genre conventions, and linguistic and spiritual fallibility break open into a promising debility.

Harry Stout first argued in his groundbreaking study The New England Soul (1986) that manuscript rather than print sermons provided a more accurate representation of the information ingested by the everyday Puritan (who clocked about 15,000 hours of sermon time in her lifetime). He reoriented a whole swath of scholarship that had relied on print sermons, which represented only a fraction of the sermons preached, by basing his arguments on the thematic content of an impressive assortment of manuscript sermons. Neuman returns to Stout’s insight to instigate another fundamental shift: hearing sermons helped create them. If we simply need to rely on more manuscript sermons after Stout, after Neuman we need to read them as part of an interactive sermon culture that includes an array of aural, textual, and material practices, in order to grasp, not the content, but the experience of the sermon as it circulated in New England and abroad. Neuman assembles a rich archive that she nimbly collates to approximate this sermon encounter at the moment of delivery and in its multiple afterlives. By situating herself firmly within the now-established approach to religion as lived experience, she naturally bridges book history and—what is the central contribution of her monograph—the study of Puritan aurality.

The book progresses through two main stages. The first reorients our sense of what sermons are and how we might read them, while the second investigates how the logic of the sermon undergirds all of Puritan literature. Chapter one destabilizes the sermon as a single-author genre that neither disappeared as it was spoken nor crystalized in print. Relying on what has been for some time a common understanding of authorship in studies of early modern England, Neuman establishes the eclectic and communal life of the American Puritan sermon as it moved through the nonlinear and permeable forms of oral, print, and manuscript. To read these texts that developed communally along circuitous routes one must recognize, Neuman argues, that the various forms are dialogically engaged.

But understanding, for instance, that the notes taken while listening to sermons are in conversation with the original delivery and with the eventual print version is one thing; figuring out how to read these documents is quite another. Anyone who has looked at these strange manuscripts knows (and there is a wonderful assortment of images within the book), auditor notes do not yield up their secrets easily. The primary strength of Neuman’s book lies in her perceptive and witty analysis of this common, yet largely unread, genre of manuscripts. She fleshes out a range of highly individualized notetaking practices and strategies and identifies three general paradigms for ease of classification: the structural auditor (the person who produces outlines according to sermon heads); the content auditor (the notetaker who focuses on units of meaning rather than relational logic); and the aural auditor (the listener who strives to transcribe the minister’s words verbatim). In doing so, she stresses both the subjective experience of hearing and the shared practices of aurality, which enables her to cull a wealth of information about the creation of the notes (for instance, most auditors wrote their notes in the meetinghouse and continued to work on them at home) and the sermon event (such as common changes in recording style at the end of sermons indicate that most sermons sped up at the end).

This balance of the individual and communal forms extends into the material analysis of the notebooks themselves. Neuman finds both distinct personalities (even in unsigned notes) and shared writing practices that engage both the spoken sermon and print. For example, an anonymous auditor, whom Neuman dubs “Voracious Auditor,” is an aural notetaker who captures the cadence and emotion of the sermon. For the skilled Harvard student John Chickering, content seems most important, which he highlights not only through his notetaking style but also in his meticulous index. The less skilled content auditor, the layman Michael Metcalfe, records sermons in a handmade book carefully crafted to resemble the oblong notebooks popular for auditing sermons. Though he appears to have had no formal training, he nonetheless proudly announces “my 2 vollum that I made of this Sort of Works,” a moment Neuman marks as his declaration that he is “a record keeper of self and community” (90). Most importantly for her argument, the taxonomy of auditor types remains flexible enough to demonstrate a common sermon culture while also claiming that each notetaker “authors his or her own aural experience” in a material book envisioned as a “unique, personal creation” (30).

But auditors not only produced their own books, they also crafted the notes that became the basis for the print version of the sermon. And, because the primary hope of the Puritan sermon was efficacy rather than accuracy, the aural experience they recorded transferred easily to the print form. Neuman’s third chapter traces the ways that aurality and its accompanying subjectivity became part of the formal structure of print sermons. The printed Puritan sermon is notoriously difficult for modern readers because of its unbalanced structure in which some points seem to branch out endlessly (typical of the Ramist style that the Puritans followed). Rather than a flaw, Neuman reads this as “a tacit grammar of strategic imperfection” produced by the energy of the structure—which she characterizes as a centrifugal force that sweeps up the minister, auditors, and readers in a dialogic form (114). It is this messy interplay between the words of the minister and the experience of the hearer that produces the lived truth or application of the sermon.

This productive in-between space becomes central for understanding Puritan literature and its most distinctive feature: bringing experience in line with revelation. Neuman explains in chapter four that, contrary to what we might expect, the belief in the fallibility of humans and their language enabled a flood of textual production. The excesses of plain style exegesis that everyday Puritans habituated, like scriptural collation, figurative reading, and, my favorite, text crumbling (a technique that broke the scriptural text into tiny parts—a word, a comma—for minute analysis), point not toward an unwavering literal reading of Scripture, but toward the creative work of the minister and lay person as they sought the divine word not just at the moment of delivery, but “in linguistic acts of enabled debility” that permeated all of sermon culture (172).

Neuman’s book concludes by moving outward from the specific practices of sermon culture to the multiple literary genres that it enabled. She finds poetry, for instance, the genre most conducive for the Puritan writer to explore linguistic failure and spiritual ability. Her last chapter, though, focuses on the conversion narrative, which she argues should not be understood as a burgeoning form of early autobiography, but as a subgenre of the sermon. Laity applied the habits of exegetical thought learned through listening to sermons to the narration of the soul. In Neuman’s hands, the secret experience of conversion (implicated in all the problems of scriptural exegesis and verging on antinomianism) lies at the center of the conversion narrative that “adapts the methodology of the sermon in order to narrate the unnarratable” (32). But, rather than celebrate Puritan individualism at the expense of community, Neuman’s methodology casts us right back into the interpenetrating forms of sermon literature and culture. It is not that the individual triumphs in salvation morphology (as a late evangelicalism might be described to do), but that the very instability of the language of the soul enables the believer to continue on an expanding exegetical project that cannot exist apart from this shared sermon culture.

Neuman’s book does not overstate its scope or its centrality to a matrix of intersecting disciplines. If anything, it undersells its importance to the history of the sermon, the book, the senses, studies of sentimentality, affect, aesthetics, and religious and American culture more broadly. This is in part because the book, though it fundamentally alters how we understand the genre of the sermon in relation to all other Puritan literature, does not take time to specifically engage these other conversations. Its tightly focused purpose keeps the textured archival materials at the center. Yet, at every turn, the materials Neuman elucidates unfold in multiple directions that will surely inspire conversation from a host of disciplinary perspectives. Like the metaphors Neuman uses for the sermon—a jazz riff, a centrifugal experience regulated by form—her book cannot help but continually push the reader beyond it. If the sermon as permeable, communal, and experiential text is the logic of Puritan literature, for which she makes a compelling case, Neuman’s book is necessary reading not only for every student of Puritanism but, given the longue durée of Puritan forms, every student of American literatures and religious cultures.

This article originally appeared in issue 15.1 (Fall, 2014).

Wendy Raphael Roberts is an assistant professor of English at the State University of New York at Albany. She is working on a post-secular account of early American evangelical poetry.

Early Americanists have long acknowledged the contingent and mediated nature of our archives, and yet we cannot avoid producing truth claims based upon “proof” of past events. In early American Indian or Native Studies in particular, both our longing for authentic Native voices and our frequent reliance upon interpretations, translations, and transcriptions of oral or written speech amplify questions about access to the past. Perhaps this is why early Native Studies scholarship has recently turned toward the concrete object of the Native-authored book, the material evidence of the Native-authored manuscript, the traceable processes of print production and reproduction, the quantifiable indicators of Native literacy. Such scholarship has helped revise long-held assumptions that American Indians did not write, did not have histories, or did not contribute to the creation, distribution, and consumption of print materials. But in On Records: Delaware Indians, Colonists, and the Media of History and Memory, Andrew Newman reminds us that written records are only one piece of the evidentiary puzzle, and that historical consciousness does not require writing. Of course, Newman cannot abandon documentary evidence. But he explores the limits and possibilities of annals, archives, and histories by thinking through what such media as oral histories, anachronistic paintings, and dubious documents tell us about past communities. In the process, he offers a timely reminder about the desires tied up in scholarly approaches to records and representations.

Newman’s subject is memory practices among Delaware Indian and colonial European communities. He seeks to initiate dialogue between memory studies, a field usually focused on twentieth-century Europe, and Native Studies. He analyzes the recording, reception, and reproduction of four stories about the Lenni Lenape (Delaware Indians) told by various communities: colonial Delawares and their descendants, colonists, early historians, and contemporary scholars. At times, he calls his claims “farfetched.” But therein lies the power of the book: by focusing on memory rather than writing, Newman refreshingly embraces the uncertainty of all evidence and indulges in a sustained meditation on what that uncertainty means.

Newman begins with stories that raise questions about origins and time, citing two Lenape origin stories recorded by European settlers. The first story claims that the original man and woman sprouted from a tree on a turtle’s back. It takes place in what we might call “deep time,” the term literary scholar Wai Chee Dimock employs to describe a “cumulative history” of the world’s existence that exceeds the confines of nations, periods, and modern taxonomies. The second story, in contrast, indicates that the Lenape migrated to their current location in historical time. In chapter 1, “Lenape Annals,” Newman focuses on this contested second story that Moravian missionary John Heckewelder recorded and published in 1819 and that James Fenimore Cooper incorporated into The Last of the Mohicans (1826). During Cooper’s era some white Americans used the story to justify the displacement of Native communities: they claimed that Native Americans were in fact not native, but rather were recent arrivals to North America and, like Europeans, conquerors of an indigenous race.

This migration story also appears intriguingly in the Walam Olum, a manuscript that antiquarian and naturalist Constantine Samuel Rafinesque claimed in 1833 to have “translated word for word” from etched Lenape cedar sticks. Newman is interested in “the fantasy of the Walam Olum,” the desires wrapped up in the reception of this controversial text from the early nineteenth century to the present (54). Although in 1994 David M. Oestreicher convincingly demonstrated the Walam Olum‘s inauthenticity as a Lenape document, Newman analyzes why it “has been repeatedly brought back from the brink of obscurity, retranslated, and republished” (27). The rejection of the Walam Olum, according to one of Newman’s Delaware sources, corresponds to a widespread “skepticism about native literacy,” while claims for the text’s credibility reveal a longing for authentic Native voices in writing (50).

Chapter 2, “An Account of a Tradition,” treats a Delaware oral tradition concerning the first Dutch colonists’ land acquisition in the New York area. According to the narrative, the colonists asked the Delawares for only as much land as a bull or an ox hide could cover. They then cut the hide into strips and claimed as much land as the strips could encircle, where they built a fort. This story, which corresponds to the classical tradition of Queen Dido’s acquisition of land for her citadel at Carthage, does not appear in primary source documents authored by Dutch colonists. Because of this lack of written evidence, scholars have omitted the story from “the history of New Netherland and early modern imperialism” (56). Yet the story appears in a number of sources from imperial contexts across the globe. Newman studies the story’s pattern of distribution and, by treating the oral tradition as history rather than folklore, argues that the hide trick became a “ceremony of possession” the Dutch employed to create imperial outposts. Newman repeatedly cautions that he has hardly “cinched” his case, and yet this chapter makes one of the book’s most compelling claims: that Native oral traditions tell us not only about Native histories but also about global imperial conquest and can be interpreted as literal accounts of colonial interaction. Newman’s hesitancy to solidify his claim ironically bespeaks a scholarly distrust of oral traditions, even as his book refutes this assumption and joins a host of Native Studies scholars who have demonstrated the crucial place of oral history in recovering the past.

Chapter 3, “The Most Valuable Record,” continues to think through the significance of oral tradition as it deals with Pennsylvania’s “civic myth”: the memory of William Penn’s treaty with the Delawares that supposedly took place underneath a “Great Elm” tree at the Indian village Shackamaxon in 1682 (20). Written records indicate that a treaty meeting occurred around that time, and no evidence contradicts the story. Yet because no treaty document exists, historians since the colonial era have doubted the popular tradition. Less conventional evidence of the treaty meeting includes paintings, wampum belts (Native communicative belts made of purple and white shell beads), and Delaware hunting practices. Newman’s approach to such evidence is invigorating. For instance, Benjamin West’s painting William Penn’s Treaty with the Indians When He Founded the Province of Pennsylvania in North America (1771-72) elevated the treaty story to mythical status with numerous embellishments and anachronisms. But Newman wants to consider the painting not as an inaccurate representation of a past event but as a “visual expression of an oral tradition” that flattens time, “making the past simultaneous with the present” (104). Indeed, both a Pennsylvanian and a Delaware oral tradition come under scrutiny in Newman’s analysis and contribute to the history of memory surrounding the Great Elm treaty. This methodological focus on the communicative traditions of various discourse communities offers a valuable alternative to simplistic Indian/white and oral/written dichotomies.

Chapter 4, “Writings and Deeds,” moves from the famous Elm treaty to the “infamous” Walking Purchase of 1737 (133). Pennsylvania Proprietors and Delawares agreed that the Delawares would grant William Penn a tract of land measured by a day and a half’s walk. The Proprietors liberally interpreted the terms of the treaty: they hired athletic walkers who, pushed to their limits, gained approximately 500,000 acres for Pennsylvania. Newman explores conflicts over memory between the Proprietors, Quakers, and Delawares that resulted from the Walking Purchase. For instance, during the French and Indian War, Delaware spokesman Teedyuscung used the volatile relationship between Quakers and Proprietors to contest the Walking Purchase in a series of treaty meetings. Teedyuscung chose Quakers for allies and suggested two “innovations in treaty protocol”: that his messages be composed in writing and read aloud, and that he have a clerk of his own “as a check against the official minutes and a proxy in the examination of documents” (168). Colonial leaders and Teedyuscung remained skeptical about one another’s sources throughout the meetings, not least because Teedyuscung’s insistence on literacy defied stereotypes of Indian oral communication. Today, documents surrounding the treaty meetings continue to present a puzzling combination of records.

As the previous paragraphs indicate, On Records amasses a startling number of exciting, under-studied records. Discussing stories of Lenapehoking, the traditional homeland of the Delaware, in his “Afterword,” Newman observes, “When memory, as opposed to the past, is the object of study, one cannot simply peel off layers to arrive at a primeval green” (187). Newman accumulates, rather than peels back, layers of memory; at times, however, one seeks a bit more “green” in the form of robust claims about the stakes of Newman’s analysis. For instance, in Chapter 1, why does Newman leave behind the Lenape origin story to focus on the Lenape migration story? These stories’ competing (or intriguingly cumulative) temporal registers raise important questions about periodization, a thorough discussion of which would surely contribute much to early American studies and to Native Studies. Moreover, although Newman deftly interweaves theoretical concepts from memory studies with the particularity of colonial history, I am not sure that memory studies offers Native Studies something new. Concepts like “language ideology,” the “insight that linguistic practices … are attended by value judgments and implications for the social order,” are certainly relevant to Native Studies but have long been taken for granted by Native Studies scholars, for whom language has always been a colonizing or liberating force (8). That said, the memory studies approach productively unsettles commonplace scholarly assumptions about colonial documents. If sifting through On Records‘ layers of memory for a glimpse of “green” can become dizzying, the value of doing so lies in Newman’s fresh approach to records that embraces both the missing past and the process of remembering as history.