Anglo-American artists began depicting Native Americans soon after their arrival in North America, creating a large body of visual documents that contain varying degrees of truth, fiction, and myth. In Painting Indians and Building Empires in North America, William H. Truettner, senior curator of painting and sculpture at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, examines two distinct groups of Native American portraits, which he suggests were each “conceived, directly or indirectly, to accompany attempts to expand white hegemony across North America” (3). The first includes eighteenth-century depictions of Mohawk leaders with whom the crown needed to negotiate in order to maintain access to important colonial holdings in what would become New York State. Truettner sees these images as counterparts to the Noble Savage ideal described by Enlightenment writers and philosophers. The second group of paintings dates to the first half of the nineteenth century and portrays members of the Upper Missouri River tribes, whose cooperation the new Republic depended upon to further fur trapping, exploration, and settlement. Truettner calls this group “Republican Indians,” a term more elastic and less clearly defined than the Noble Savage. He highlights these two groups in order to demonstrate how white observers, in this case, artists, pictured a shift in beliefs about Native Americans, “from one that encouraged the upward mobility of native tribes to one that tied them to the level of human development far below that of white Americans” (5).

Truettner begins his study with an often repeated anecdote about American artist Benjamin West’s first encounter with classical art during his visit to Rome in 1760. Viewing theApollo Belvedere,one of the most celebrated works of the ancient world in the Vatican collection, West reportedly exclaimed, “My God, how like it is to a young Mohawk warrior!” West followed his outburst with a description of the virtues of the Mohawk, suggesting that they might indeed resemble an archaic version of the enlightened Greeks who crafted the Apollo. West characterized the Mohawk as exceptional Indians, gifted with intelligence and superior physical abilities. While this elevation of the Mohawk fulfills an Anglo-American ideal of the Noble Savage, Truettner also suggests that the appeal of the Noble Savage may have been heightened by the British need for Indian allies to serve their imperial ambitions in North America. As Truettner observes, West made his remark at the conclusion of the French and Indian War, during which the British relied on Mohawk allies. In this way, he challenges the belief that the Noble Savage myth was solely a construct of “Rousseauian fables in which ‘savages,’… lived lives of redeeming virtue until they finally (and tragically) came in contact with ‘civilized’ society” (18). Instead, Truettner suggests that to some degree the Noble Savage myth originated in real life interaction between Anglo-American observers and North American Indians. Toward this end, he sees the Mohawk as a special case. The Mohawk both demonstrated idealized Rousseauian virtue and also served an important political purpose for their Anglo-American interpreters.

As an art historian, the heart of Truettner’s argument is rooted in the visual. While the first, second, and fourth chapters provide the bulk of his more-textually based historical discussion of Noble Savages and Republican Indians, the lengthier third and fifth chapters provide the visual evidence. For example, in the second chapter Truettner uses first-hand accounts of the Mohawks from Anglo-American observers who characterized the tribe in terms suggestive of the Noble Savage myth. Many of these figures—Cadwallader Colden, James Adair, William Johnson, and Benjamin Franklin—described virtuous Indians using language that evoked the classical past. Additionally, Truettner details how the British specifically cast the Mohawks as Noble Savages in order to serve their imperialist goals in North America. In the third chapter, Truettner discusses a series of portraits of Mohawk leaders, mostly by British artists, which make his case. He begins his study with the John Verelst’s portraits of “four Indian Kings,” who were summoned by Queen Anne to London in 1710. This marks the beginning of what Truettner sees as “portrait diplomacy” by the British. The portraits also initiate the process of turning Indian subjects into denizens of Arcadia through the use of costume, setting, and posture (a tactic that Benjamin West also pursued, most notably in his career-making The Death of General Wolfe.) Truettner includes a useful discussion of six portraits of Mohawk leader Joseph Brant painted by different artists over a span of three decades. Through the Brant portraits Truettner observes “a divide in Indian portraiture at the beginning of the nineteenth century. One trend moves on to picturing ‘civilized’ Indians in European dress … a second and dominant trend leads to a more ethnographic style of imaging, featuring Republican Indians … wearing reasonably authentic attire” (56). Truettner further illustrates the waning of the Noble Savage portrait with an 1828 depiction of Red Jacket by Robert Weir, a work that overlaps chronologically with the rise of the Republican Indian.

The book then shifts to a study of Republican Indians, who hail from tribal groups situated along the Upper Missouri River. Truettner admits that “to claim that Noble Savage portraiture was replaced at a certain time by the next generation of Indian painters, those who created what are here called Republican Indians, is making a neat package of what is essentially a messy, drawn-out transition” (61), and indeed the transition from one type of image to the other is not seamless. According to Truettner, Republican Indian portraiture was initiated in Washington and the east “to service an ambitious, if at first relatively restrained expansionist agenda, begun by Jefferson after the Louisiana Purchase and continued under the administrations of Madison, Monroe, and John Quincy Adams” (70). Republican Indians differ from Noble Savages in significant ways and reflect shifting American perceptions about native peoples. While the Noble Savage might have been an idyllic Arcadian on the verge of civilization, the Republican Indian was widely perceived as doomed to vanish, having no place in a white-populated West and little ability to assimilate. Truettner sees this born out in the tendency of portraitists to emphasize racial characteristics and ethnographical detail where once an effort had been made to classicize Indian subjects. Readers will likely be more familiar with the images in this section of the book, which includes paintings by Charles Bird King, Alfred Jacob Miller, Karl Bodmer, and George Catlin. To a large extent, these are the Indian pictures that have defined popular American notions of the Plains tribes.

Artists painted these Indian men and women for a variety of reasons, but they began with diplomatic intentions similar to those of earlier portraits commissioned by the British. U.S. War Department officials often brought visiting tribal delegations to Washington, D.C., portrait studios. During his tenure in charge of Indian Affairs for the War Department, Thomas McKenney acquired hundreds of such portraits, mostly painted by Charles Bird King, for the U.S. government. Yet this would be a short lived practice as McKenney was fired by Andrew Jackson (a figure who is curiously absent from Truettner’s book). Around this time, artists began traveling out West in search of “authentic” Indian subjects. Truettner sees Catlin, Bodmer, and Miller, all of whom painted Upper Missouri Indians on their home turf, as “effective in serving the government’s cause” (77). While this may be true, in that each of these artists shared a similar perception of the Indians as a vanishing race, it elides the sometimes overtly pecuniary motivations of the artists. Bodmer made his paintings for the German Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied’s exploration of the Missouri River. Catlin toured his “Indian Gallery” and certainly hoped to make money from it. Even the civil servant McKenney, though not himself an artist, tried to make a profit by borrowing the War Department’s portraits in order to make copies for the multi-volume portfolio History of the Indian Tribes of North America. This is not to say that these men couldn’t be motivated by both a financial interest and a desire to document the ways of a doomed culture, but Truettner gives much more weight to the latter. It may be that the very idea of picturing a vanishing race created a market for such images.

On the whole, the book offers keen insight into these powerful works. At roughly a hundred and fifty pages, the book is tight and lean. According to the author, the project began as a lecture, and expanded from there. A benefit of this method is that the book has a coherence and clarity that makes it ideal for classroom adoption. And I can think of no other source that brings together so many of these rich images. Although Truettner rightly notes that the book is the first to unite these two campaigns of Indian painting, I sometimes wished that he had expanded his argument further by connecting the dots between these groups. Readers might enjoy more of the “messy, drawn-out transition” between the two. As it stands, the category of Republican Indians encompasses a broad array of material, which Truettner could profitably explore further. Additionally, although the visual evidence pushes into the 1840s, Truettner almost entirely avoids the policy of Indian Removal. While this may be due to his focus on the Missouri River tribes, it might be worth considering how this policy shaped white Americans’ perceptions of the Indian.

Akela Reason is assistant professor of history at the University of Georgia. She is the author of Thomas Eakins and the Uses of History (2010).

The Arts of the Americas Wing opened with great fanfare on November 20, 2010, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. This grand wing, designed by Foster and Partners, boasts 53 galleries, more than 5,000 works of art, and over 133,000 square feet, with a dramatic glass courtyard and gallery space, along with a grand new name. The half a billion-dollar expansion of the museum intends to offer a hemispheric perspective, uniting the traditional United States with Native North America and Central and South America. The new space and the occasion aspire to a “new” way of viewing, seeing, and understanding works of art—and the museum and its curators have promoted this widely. Much comes across as innovative and opulent, in my opinion: the lavish architectural setting, the unified approach to the Americas, the bringing together of work in various media, and the extensive multimedia program. These aspirations can be measured by numbers, evidenced in the Facts and Figures on the museum’s website. More significantly, they can and should be measured in the new ways visitors learn to understand the art collections, the primary purpose of a museum. The unique chance to re-install a major museum’s collection from scratch and in an expanded space comes only every few generations.

Well, how successful are they in Boston? A mixed bag, I would say. Certainly the space is grand, although some of the architectural reviews have found the Foster design to be cold (fig. 1). The Shapiro Family Courtyard with its New American Café has been humanized by installations; during my recent visit in May there was a marvelous and enormous Dale Chihuly glass piece in the courtyard—very green and tall—that visitors repeatedly stood before, while peering up and gasping. The four floors of galleries allow for a comprehensive setting that moves over the centuries and the continents, making for interesting juxtapositions of galleries and objects. Visitors enter the series of central galleries from the courtyard. Additional galleries lie off passageways along with the two “Behind the Scenes” galleries. The chronological and the geographical organize the two central floors that move from the early eighteenth to early twentieth centuries (fig. 2). In these galleries, the museum’s curators have been able to unite many of its familiar objects with less familiar ones that had formerly been relegated to storage, more than doubling what had been on view before. Along with “the rebirth of masterpieces,” or those favorites that visitors expect to see, such as Thomas Sully’s Passage of the Delaware (fig. 3), comes the unexpected and the unknown. This setting and arrangement certainly seem to justify the hype surrounding the opening.

But after two extensive visits, I’m not so sure. I will focus my discussion on the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century galleries and materials. I applaud the “en suite” installations where paintings stand before furniture, needlework beside silver: the fine and decorative arts are no longer consigned to different spaces. While the museum had done this mixing before in its American galleries, the results here are quite striking. Most dramatically as you enter on the first level from the courtyard, you see the museum’s perhaps most iconic object, the John Singleton Copley portrait of Paul Revere(fig. 4) but standing before, in a vitrine, is the Sons of Liberty Bowl (1768). The silver bowl can be seen as a political declaration on its own from its inscription and iconography (fig. 5). Further on in this gallery of Revolutionary Boston (fig. 6) is displayed the clothespress owned by Gilbert DeBlois, a wealthy merchant and prominent loyalist. The history of this object facilitates a discussion of the trade and consumption of textiles and the important story of loyalists in Revolutionary Boston. Such an arrangement begins to approximate a setup of the cultural context for the visitor, so he and she can explore the material culture of a particular time and place. Context is given greater emphasis in certain areas such as the neoclassicism gallery on the first floor, entitled “At Home in the New Nation,” next to the central “Art in the New Nation” (fig. 7) that is dominated by Sully’s monumental painting (fig. 3). Here various object groups, such as paintings and textiles or fashion and clocks, complement each other, toward the larger goal of portraying how men and women in the early Republic utilized neoclassical themes as they created a new government and a new culture. Indeed, I applaud the clever idea to lay out the gallery as a gendered space—after entering and seeing the initial display of the gallery on “Neoclassical Dining,” you must go either to the left of the display or the right. If you choose the left, you have a series of objects interpreted as “Men in the New Nation” with Duncan Phyfe furniture and portraits of elite men. If you go to the right, you encounter a display of domesticity and “Women in the New Nation” with a lady’s writing desk and a piano on view. This approach is subtle but effective as a way to lead the visitors to view the spaces as separate spheres. The labeling overall and in this gallery is concise and often contextual. Instead of working from the succession of styles, neoclassicism becomes embedded in the search for a national culture in the decades after the War for Independence and that culture also becomes depicted as gendered.

This possibility is not realized throughout. More to the point, while neoclassical galleries feature cosmopolitan cities and patrician classes, contemporaneous worlds are relegated to distant side galleries where far fewer visitors venture. The possibilities for breaking up categories, one of the lofty aspirations stressed in the museum’s promotions about mixing continents and media, doesn’t get taken far enough in the Arts of the Americas Wing. Putting the “Rural and Vernacular Arts of the Eighteenth Century” on the first floor and the “Folk Art” gallery on the second floor, and at some distance from the central galleries, a rather conventional grouping, misses an opportunity to think seriously about the relationship of the academic and the provincial, the commercial and the amateur, and the spectrum of art makers. It is much easier to leave the folk alone, putting commercial portraitists such as Erastus Salisbury Field or Rufus Porter across from weathervane makers. Why not put Winthrop Chandler’s 1770 portrait of the Connecticut minister Ebenezer Devotion next to a John Singleton Copley portrait of a Boston merchant, and try to explain how these two worlds—artistic and social—exist contemporaneously in Revolutionary-era New England? This kind of installation could lead the visitor to the question of why some sitters might patronize Chandler’s style as “cousins to high-style urban pieces,” as the wall label says, and teach us about these period ways of seeing.

What seems on first glance to be a breakthrough installation turns out to be much less adventurous on closer examination. We find the “Latin America before 1900” gallery situated between a “Regional Styles in the Eighteenth Century” space and the flanking “American Artists Abroad around 1800.” “Regional Styles” displays regional preferences in portraiture, furniture and silver. It features a striking wall of eighteenth-century chairs that shows visitors how to look at the structural forms of the chairs to discover the methods of the craftsmen or the taste of the patron. The case “Three Coffee Pots, Three Cities” about silver in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, emphasizes those northeastern British ports as style centers. Still, the gallery labeling and display, along with the central gallery on “Eighteenth-Century Boston,” push us to think about how these cosmopolitan port cities were embedded politically and culturally within the Atlantic world. Then the Latin American gallery features objects and text about the work of indigenous artisans, the role of the Catholic Church in commissions, and the movement of Asian goods and designs across the Pacific—a welcome corrective to our current Atlantic World predilection—along with discussions of racial categories in “Casta Painting” and the introduction of horses to the Americas in a display on “Silver for Horses.” The labeling in this gallery leans to the cultural and historical, compared to the adjacent ones. It recognizes the burden of providing an overview of Spanish Empire in the Americas in a few sentences, but the effort seems more token than consistent. These contiguous galleries inform us about the nature of art in the colonial Americas, but visitors could use more explicit connections between, for example, the Atlantic or Pacific orientation of mercantile life and the relative role of the church in artistic life.

Or worse, the “Native North American Art” gallery sits along with those about “Mesoamerica, Marine Art, Embroidery, and Seventeenth-Century New England” in the lower ground level, where fewer visitors venture. Seemingly harder to integrate with the rise of an American art narrative, Native American art is organized according to the convention of regional traditions. The curators also decided to intersperse contemporary objects, such as the 1993 olla or water jar (fig. 8), amid historical ones. This is an interesting mode of display, one that the Museum of Fine Arts and other art museums have used to great effect. But in the new wing, where it is only done in this Native American gallery, it promotes, however unintentionally, the falsely ahistorical and timeless world of Native America.

Accompanying the broadening of the story of American art comes a deepening of that experience in a series of multimedia installations—”Behind the Scenes Galleries,” multimedia handhelds, and touch screens in the galleries. The Museum of Fine Arts conducted focus groups and in-depth interviews with visitors to learn that they desired knowledge about how the curators and conservators go about their work and how decisions were made about what to include in the collection and exhibit in the galleries. Along those lines, I found the “Behind the Scenes Galleries” to be most innovative in their compelling focus on questions of collecting and conservation, classification and curatorial choice. The ample space devoted to these areas is located literally behind the galleries, and that means that they receive a lot less visitation; however, those who do notice and venture over to the galleries are rewarded by some striking media walls with images from many aspects of museum work. For example, a large touch screen with an array of teapots awaits the visitors’ attempts to organize them, by style or in chronological order; or to make decisions about which early national portrait should receive gallery installation, according to particular thematic concerns. This interactive display provides ample additional information to facilitate the visitor’s interests and choices. These presentational materials on the two levels open up a proverbial black box about how the museum makes certain choices, but they transcend the “talking head” curator presentation to achieve a more robust interactive experience where visitors make decisions grounded in the additional information. Short of asking visitors to rearrange the galleries, these sorts of multimedia-facilitated experiences provide an alternative and compelling way to understand how and why certain objects enter a collection and receive space in an installation.

In the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War, white planters observed that recently freed men and women had an impulse for mobility, a long cherished expression of American liberalism. Edlie Wong’s study of the pre-war period helps us understand just how precious unimpeded travel could be to peoples of African descent who—regardless of their status—found it especially difficult and even dangerous. The institution and customs of Atlantic slavery cast a very wide net over what Wong refers to as the “legal culture of travel” and particularly over those suing for freedom or navigating laws targeting the movement of free blacks. Though perhaps a challenging read for those accustomed to more linear historical accounts, Neither Fugitive nor Free‘s interdisciplinary and transatlantic approach usefully draws from literary criticism, critical race theory, legal history, and gender studies to provide sophisticated and revealing insights into Anglo-American understandings of and narratives about freedom and slavery.

The book begins by deconstructing an iconic event in British antislavery action, the landmark case Somerset v. Stewart (1772). Historians have long known that Judge Mansfield’s decision in Somerset was purposefully limited and only indirectly challenged slavery by preventing the forcible deportation of slaves. What Wong nicely shows, however, is how abolitionist writers and lawyers successfully seized on this case to create an “invented tradition” that slaves who “breathed English air” became immediately free. This useful fiction positively affected white British liberal consciousness and increased opportunities for black freedom, but subsequent legal cases demonstrated a more restrictive reality. For example, in the 1827 Case of the Slave Grace, which is examined in detail, Lord Stowell of the High Court of Admiralty ruled that Grace Jones, a domestic slave from Antigua who had lived in England for several years, “forfeited” her freedom the moment that she returned, allegedly voluntarily, to Antigua.

Slave status, in short, could be reaffixed based on the assumption that a former slave’s “consent” to travel back home reflected an “implied contract” to re-enter slavery. These decisions created conditions whereby “choice” could become “another means to secure … subjection” (53). Colonial slaveholders exploited that irony, leaving black Britons like Mary Prince and Ashton Warren lamenting the fact that their English rights were not transportable to their native lands. With the verdict of individual freedom suits—and symbolically the British antislavery movement more broadly—resting on questions of consent (rather than inborn natural rights), proslavery and antislavery writers and jurists contested the nature of the slave will, and especially, it seems, those of female slaves. Proponents of slavery, Wong argues, asserted the caricature of the “utterly willful” enslaved woman, while antislavery groups, paradoxically, turned to the idea of a “will-less” and totally “unprotected” woman whose victimhood prevented choice and required humanitarian aid and protection (56).

Such themes anticipated and shaped the developments in the United States where personal freedom suits occurred even more frequently, especially after an 1836 Massachusetts court case, Commonwealth v. Aves,declared that slaves voluntarily brought into that state by their masters automatically gained freedom. On the surface, this case and similar ones, along with the repeal of northern states’ sojourner laws that had long protected slaveowners’ rights while traveling, seemed to preserve the idea that freedom and slavery had clear geopolitical boundaries. Yet Wong, in arguably her best chapter, reveals how kinship ties and social pressures blurred this “territorial logic” and meant that any freedom that slaves found was compromised and insecure at best, and in many instances quite costly. Indeed, for Med, the slave child at the center of the Aves case, freedom had depended on her presumed lack of will and resulted in her being permanently separated from her biological mother and placed in a chronically underfunded Boston Samaritan Asylum owned by the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS) which had instigated the lawsuit on Med’s behalf.

Even as abolitionist groups like the BFASS wrapped themselves in the sentimental ideals of “republican motherhood” and celebrated their victory in the Aves case, they also “found themselves baffled by slave petitioners who stubbornly refused to relinquish kin for the ‘gift’ of northern freedom” (80). Indeed, slaveholders adapted to evolving rules by strategically exploiting kinship connections back home in order to minimize the risk of flight while in the North. In one instance, such kin networks led an adult slave, Catharine Linda, to not only chose to return South with her master, but (likely at her masters’ behest) to use her temporary rights as a free woman of Massachusetts to sue the anti-slave activist who had issued a writ of habeas corpus on her behalf for allegedly kidnapping her (97). Unable to fit such incongruous behavior into what Wong sees as antislavery’s “sentimentalized” paradigms of freedom, they went largely ignored or, in her sometimes semi-Freudian analysis, “repressed” into literary reflections of sexual violence such as E.R. Pickard’s The Kidnapped and the Ransomed (114). Wong’s special attention to the gender dynamics of these female petitioners “challenges the masculine trajectory of fugitive individualism found in the [more widely known fugitive] slave narrative genre and illustrates the complex ways in which enslaved women and children negotiated the unexpected predicaments that the law of freedom created in their lives” (80-81). This discussion alone, along with the book’s analysis of the turn towards the motive of “theft” in antislavery writings, makes this a valuable contribution to our historical understanding of how the forces of slavery and antislavery worked, one that joins other historical scholarship in highlighting the degree to which the interest and needs of abolitionists and those of individual slaves often diverged.

Less clear or convincing, however, is how this gendered analysis should transform our understanding of other legal battles, including the context and meaning of the infamous Dred Scott decision, a subject taken up in chapter 3. Wong suggests that previous cases such as Julia v. McKinney and Rachel v. Walker, wherein enslaved mothers successfully sued for their and (by the doctrine ofpartus sequitur ventrem) their children’s freedom, might have inspired Dred and Harriet Scott’s to do the same. Yet it is not entirely clear that success in these earlier cases had rested on the gender of the plaintiffs. Indeed, if that were the case, why did Scott’s lawyers decide to drop Harriet’s presumably stronger case and proceed forward with Dred’s? Nevertheless, by looking South and West, Wong nicely shows the diverse and often paradoxical ways that the laws of freedom and slavery intersected to provide confined—but sometimes tangible—avenues for black maneuverability within a slave state. For example, the mere existence of slaves filing freedom suits required at least a temporary suspension of that status, a fact which “held up an egalitarian ideal of the law” while also “strengthening the racial ideologies” by temporarily substituting racial terms like “negro” or “mulatto” for status (157).

The final chapter of the book takes up the interesting but understudied Negro Seamen Acts, whereby free black mariners of British and northern birth found themselves subjected to confinement when docked in southern ports. In these situations, southern states and supportive courts and politicians “denationalized” black citizens, proffering racial categorization over any rights and privileges gained by birth or political attachment—concepts Wong elsewhere describes as “modern fictions” (248). Close readings of F. C Adams’s Manuel Pereira—based on a Portuguese born, British sailor jailed under the act—and the story of John Glasgow—a free-born British subject sold into slavery under South Carolina’s law—highlight that the perceived needs and laws of slavery continued to reverberate throughout the broader Atlantic.

Despite Wong’s generally pessimistic story, she suggests that the perniciousness of these acts and the dissemination of information about them contained the seeds for their own destruction by creating the conditions for an “unexpected alliance” between various groups that helped to radicalize the political landscape against South Carolina. A much needed closer look at the history of these laws, however, might problematize the conclusion that these “peripatetic struggles” directly threatened slaveholders’ position. Even by Wong’s own account, British officials in southern ports deemed the issue largely closed on the eve of the Civil War, and despite considerable frustration from black groups, northern merchants and politicians seem largely willing to accommodate slaveholding sensibilities, a point that actually boosts Wong’s larger claim about slavery’s wide-reaching influence. An informative conclusion highlights the U.S. State Department’s move in the late 1840s to stop granting passports to free blacks (though interestingly not for slaves accompanying whites), for fear that doing so would indicate a sign of national citizenship. African-Americans like Frederick Douglass generally found ways around this, but the denial of official documentation “confirmed the statelessness of all free black Americans” (242).

Neither Free nor Slave is a highly ambitious book and in places the rapid movement from often narrowly determined legal decisions to broad literary motifs are not always as clear or as historically contextualized as they could be. In addition, one wonders if and how the presumably large, but here largely ignored, number of freedom suits brought by men comported to Wong’s gendered analysis. Still, this is a very impressive work that historians stand to gain a great deal from. It vividly reinforces that “the line between slavery and freedom was far less clearly demarcated,” both geographically and practically, than either nineteenth-century abolitionists or subsequent historians have tended to think (8). It highlights the need to continue to view the complicated struggles between slavery and freedom within a broader national and international lens. Finally, it shows, in compelling ways, how cross-disciplinary approaches can help peel away layers to the complicated and interrelated Anglo-American stories of liberalism and bondage.

For reasons that no one seems completely to understand, the middle third of the nineteenth century, particularly in America, was a hothouse of utopian experiments. Some of these enterprises—the Shakers, for instance—first took root in the eighteenth century and sustained themselves through succeeding generations, long after their charismatic founders had died. Benjamin Franklin’s memoir offers intriguing portraits of the Moravians in mid-eighteenth-century Pennsylvania and of Michael Wohlfahrt (or Welfare) with his fellow Dunkers. Amish and Mennonite communities dating from this period continue to exist in many parts of the Northeast and Midwest, where a sectarian family in its horse and buggy are familiar sights on country roads. Pietist or Socialist communes of various sorts—like the Rappites of New Harmony, Indiana, and their Owenite successors—tried to envision and to enact workable alternatives to the brutal economic realities of industrialization. Nathaniel Hawthorne employs the utopian aspirations that took him, briefly, to Brook Farm in 1841 as the background for his third novel, The Blithedale Romance (1852), though he had the instinctive good sense to replace the “Blithedale” with the “Romance” very quickly indeed as his story unfolded. Utopian idealists (Hawthorne’s narrator concludes) tend to be obsessive bores. Richard Francis struggles with precisely this narrative problem in his discussion of Bronson Alcott, his family, and his idealist colleagues and rivals in the short-lived communal experiment called Fruitlands.

Very early in his introduction, Francis calls Fruitlands “one of history’s most unsuccessful utopias ever—but also one of the most dramatic and significant” (1). Part of this claim is certainly true. Fruitlands was a going concern for roughly six months only, if one counts just the weeks that Alcott and his companions spent at the little farmhouse on Prospect Hill in Harvard, Massachusetts, to which the name applies. The community members (never more than thirteen and most of them Alcotts) moved to the farm in June 1843 and by January 1844 the enterprise collapsed in a morass of disillusionment and ill-feeling largely triggered by personal conflicts between Abigail Alcott (the accidental heroine of this story) and Charles Lane, the English financial backer of the Fruitlands effort. Francis charts the failure in excruciating detail, almost literally day by day, weaving in commentary by outsiders like Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose caustic analysis of Bronson Alcott’s agenda proves to be one of the delights of Francis’s book. But it is never really clear why this utopian failure is exceptional for its drama or its significance. It is certainly not remarkable for its numbers.

The vegan few at Fruitlands are a negligible remnant indeed. By contrast the Shaker settlement in Harvard had nearly two hundred members when the two Fruitlands founders, Lane and Alcott, visited them in 1843 on one of the pedestrian tours that Alcott often took apparently as a means of evading the hard work of farming. Brook Farm—which Alcott and Lane also visited that year—had eighty or ninety resident socialists, enthusiastically raising swine and cattle, manuring their fields, making love, and generally horrifying their abstemious visitors with the comparative fleshly gusto of their existence. “Vegetable diet and sweet repose. Animal food and nightmare,” one Fruitlands aphorism declared. “Pluck your body from the orchard; do not snatch it from the shamble” (126), ran another. These exhortations and others like them appeared on the motivational sealing wafers that the Alcott family and their utopian colleagues used on the letters they wrote to one another and deposited in a household mailbox for internal, domestic delivery—a kind of self-imposed surveillance system that, like Alcott’s celebrated “Conversations,” was ultimately geared to keeping the faithful in line with the hodge-podge of dietary and philosophical doctrines that governed the enterprise.

These doctrines occupy Richard Francis’s attention throughout his study, beginning with his account of the charismatic Englishman, James Pierrepont Greaves, a devotee of vegetarianism, celibacy, and the educational theories of Johann Pestalozzi, who attracted a small circle of followers in the late 1830s drawn to Greaves’s strange dietary metaphysics. Greaves and his circle adopted a regimen aimed at the reformation of mankind quite literally through the reformation of eating, a link that shapes yet another of the Fruitlands motivational wafers that Francis cites: “Without flesh diet there could be no blood-shedding war.” Greaves in turn was attracted to the accounts that he read of Alcott’s short-lived Temple School in Boston and made an overture to this American reformer in a letter that captures the odd spiritual eroticism that Greaves and Alcott shared: “Believing the Spirit has so far established its nature in you, as to make you willing to cooperate with itself in Love-Operations,” Greaves wrote to this complete stranger, “I am induced, without apology, to address you as a friend and companion in the hidden path of Love’s most powerful revelations” (29). Walt Whitman would absorb such language from his contemporaries with unique avidity and convert it into remarkable verse, but his sexualized sensibility was far from unique.

Ultimately the Greavesians (including Charles Lane, a successful London commodities analyst) established their own communal school and living quarters near Richmond, a dwelling that they christened Alcott House. With the help of a gift from Emerson, Alcott was able to visit his English fans in the spring and fall of 1842, and though Greaves himself had just died, Charles Lane and another Greavesian named Henry Gardiner Wright ultimately returned to Massachusetts with Alcott to settle together, first in Concord and later at Fruitlands to build their new sexual and dietary economy, contribute long-winded articles to the Dial or other transcendentalist organs, and form “harmonic” couplings with one another. It didn’t last, and Francis’s book charts its collapse with the zeal for detail characteristic of a reality television show. Overexposure to Alcott’s vapid prose and feckless ways ultimately breeds contempt in Francis himself, who cannot resist the occasional mocking reference to the Fruitlands “business plan” (50), to Alcott’s “loser’s philosophy” (65), or to his invariably grandiose and murky prose. Abigail Alcott is by far the superior writer, Francis concedes, with a flair for “energy and attack”(238) that may have been responsible for the ruthless purging of her letter books later in life in an effort to blunt their keen and vivid criticism. Male egotism is pervasive and absurd in this story; female intelligence and courage partly (but only partly) redeem it.

But aside from the brainy melodrama on display at Fruitlands, why bother to reconstruct its domestic history at such length and in such an insular fashion? One scarcely gets out of the figurative house in Francis’s pages, despite the occasional jaunt some Fruitlander or another will make to Brook Farm, to the Harvard Shaker Community, to New York or to Boston in search of recruits or money or both. Why does this outbreak of utopian fever take place in these years and take these forms? What lies behind the intense sexual issues addressed by the extremes of Shaker celibacy and Fourierist promiscuity in these utopian worlds? Despite the memorable beginning made by Alice Felt Tyler inFreedom’s Ferment (1944) and one or two much more recent successors (Carl Guarneri, Christopher Clark, Sterling Delano), no one has systematically linked nineteenth-century utopian movements as a whole to the world from which they spring. Francis offers an occasional defense of Fruitlands for its premonitions of a modern ecological consciousness, but the case is not very detailed or very persuasive. And in any event, human flesh was the chief segment of the biosphere in which the Fruitlands experimenters took an interest, not the Nashua River wetlands, the urban pollution of nineteenth-century cities or the nineteenth-century diet to which it hoped to offer an alternative. A micro-study such as this one still requires a contextual and intellectual scaffolding that will account for its claim on our attention today. Readers ofFruitlands: The Alcott Family and their Search for Utopia will have to construct that scaffolding on their own.

Some years ago during a hot “dry season” in West Africa, where I was living and conducting research, I received a series of letters from family members asking where they could send black-eyed peas for my New Years meal. I was born in Virginia, and Virginians must eat black-eyed peas on January 1 to have good fortune in the months to come. My family was both surprised and delighted when I wrote back that black-eyed peas were readily available in much of West Africa, the crop having been domesticated there.

That my family knew little about the origins of one of our prized dishes is understandable. Few people know the details of the numerous and important crop transfers from Africa to the Americas. And until Carney and Rosomoff’s delightful and Frederick Douglass Prize-winning book, no one had written a comprehensive overview of the degree to which Africans, as slaves, shaped American diets. Africans in the New World did so by selecting particular seeds and roots from their homelands, planting them, processing what they harvested, and preparing their bounty as food in a manner informed by knowledge handed down from generations past. What is to be gained from Carney and Rosomoff’s book is an appreciation of Africans as more than laborers who shaped our hemisphere’s history. In the stinking hulls of ships and under brutal conditions on plantations, Africans preserved particular sorts of knowledge that they drew on, applied, and bestowed upon their descendants. Americans, white, black, and brown, are heirs to that knowledge. Our culture is informed by Africa, whether we all know it or not.

With evidence drawn from a fabulous array of sources and in readable prose, In the Shadow of Slavery takes readers on tours of African gardens throughout the Atlantic—from Guinea to Angola, and Virginia to Bahia. The book begins with a look at Africa’s food history, follows African plants across the ocean, and then explores the ways that Africans and their descendants fostered them in American settings. It also considers American crops that were introduced to Africa (maize and cassava particularly). Food crops of African origin that made their way to the New World included yams, okra, hibiscus, tamarind, Guinea millet, watermelon, sorghum, and the oil palm. Other plants, like bananas, are of Asian origin but reached the Americas via Africa. In the era of Atlantic slavery, none of these crops was consumed often in Europe. These were not the commodities—sugar, cotton, and tobacco—over which most slaves labored many hours every day. But food crops were crucial to empire, since colonists, slave and free, had to eat.

The authors theorize that African food crops reached the Americas aboard slaving vessels. Ship captains bought a range of foodstuffs to feed their human cargo during long crossings of the Atlantic. What was not consumed often went with slaves, who, Carney and Rosomoff write, then had access to seeds and roots from their homelands that served as planting stock. Craving a taste of home—something to break the monotony of bland diets masters sometimes planned for them—African slaves applied knowledge that they possessed to grow some of their own food. In some cases, they planted crops from their homeland to stave off starvation. In places, African foods became staples of white colonial diets and essential parts of broad, regional cuisines.

Carney and Rosomoff focus primarily on two American settings—maroon (or runaway-slave) communities, and plantations. Drawing on a range of sources, they show how maroons adopted African farming techniques and crops in a great variety of places and integrated African foods into their diets and religious traditions. Cuban maroon communities, for example, presented offerings of black-eyed peas, okra, and jute mallow to deities of African origin. Likewise, rice, grown in parts of West Africa, was used by Surinam’s maroons to honor ancestors.

If maroons maintained African foodways, so too did slaves held in bondage. In the early years of American colonization, Carney and Rosomoff point out, white colonists knew little about tropical agriculture and, therefore, often struggled to feed themselves, ultimately depending on their slaves, who were expert cultivators of tropical lands.

Of course in many places Indians served as the first slaves of whites, and everywhere in the Americas, colonists learned a great deal from Indian neighbors. These are important topics that Carney and Rosomoff largely ignore and their inclusion could have added a great deal to the book. But all historians make choices about how to limit the subject matter, and Carney and Rosomoff (wisely, I think) keep the focus squarely on the actions of Africans and their descendants. Nonetheless, it should be remembered that in the Western Hemisphere, colonial regimes appropriated knowledge from two groups they subjugated—Africans and Indians.

Once plantations were established throughout the Americas, African traditions continued to shape slave diets. It was common in many plantation societies for slaves to receive from their masters a plot of land and a small amount of time on weekends to work it. On these plots, slaves often planted items that were distinctly African. Hence, when a French observer saw Bambara groundnuts, sesame, and guinea squash among other things growing on a slave provision ground in the Caribbean, he called it what it was—”une petite Guinée.” And when it came time for preparing food from the harvest, African slaves created dishes that bore similarities to those from their homelands. Thus, plantains were often picked green and boiled before consumption, and meat and vegetables were often cooked together and served as sauces over rice or another starch. Carney and Rosomoff show that Africa’s botanical legacy in the Americas is manifold and can even be found in the African-derived words used today for a great variety of foods. “Gumbo,” for example, is from a Bantu-language word for okra.

While most of the crops slaves brought with them from Africa never became commodities exported from the Americas, rice did. To long-standing debates about whether or not African knowledge was important for the development of rice production in the Carolina colony, Carney and Rosomoff bring some fascinating new data. They argue that Africans already familiar with rice “were able to adapt its cultivation to the diverse and favorable growing conditions of the Carolina lowcountry” (151). Though I think Carney and Rosomoff are right, here they fail to make one important point. In the period rice was introduced to the lowcountry, most Africans in the region were from non-rice producing parts of their continent. Comparatively few were Upper Guineans, who possessed detailed knowledge of rice agriculture. Most were Angolans, who knew nothing about rice before they stepped foot on Carolina’s shores. Evidence that Upper Guineans were a minority among slaves in Carolina when rice was first cultivated there in the late seventeenth century does not undermine the argument that Upper Guineans first planted the grain. Nor has anyone convincingly refuted the argument that Upper Guineans, who arrived in large numbers after the mid-eighteenth century, applied paddy-rice technologies to plantation agriculture in Carolina.

However, by failing to examine closely the Old World regional origins of Carolina’s slave population—or the Old World origins of slave populations in other parts the Americas—Carney and Rosomoff miss the opportunity to detail how the cultural knowledge of particular African groups became generalized in the New World, ultimately emerging as “African” or “Negro.” Thus, on Carolina plantations, slaves with a wide range of ancestral backgrounds internalized an Upper Guinean view of rice as the food of choice. At the same time, they learned and adapted Upper Guinean rice farming techniques, making them their own. In Carolina, rice knowledge quickly became “Africanized,” as blacks, regardless of their origins, made rice a food that was part of a broadly defined African culture rather than a more narrowly defined Upper Guinean one.

Food is, of course, a “cultural marker.” It serves as an indication of self, a sign of who people think they are. Like dress, language, and many other things, food choices can distinguish one group of people from another. For me, what is fascinating about “African plants,” “African farming practices,” and “African cuisines” is that few plants, farming practices, and cuisines were known by all blacks shipped to the Western Hemisphere. Yet through their daily interactions with one another on plantations, Yoruba, Mandinka, Balanta, Wolof, Igbo, Akan, Kongo and people from many other widely scattered ethnic groups began to see plants, farming practices, and foods that had been known in only a few of their homelands as broadly African or black. When they defined their food as “African,” they were declaring themselves part of one, unified culture rooted across the ocean. Black slaves “invented” this culture when brought together in a vast array of New World settings. And to be sure, it was a culture that was constructed over shared food bowls after long, hard days of labor. When looked at this way, Africa was as much created in the Americas as it was recreated.

Though I have criticisms of In the Shadow of Slavery, they are small indeed. This is a wonderful book, one I will recommend to colleagues, friends, and family alike. To be sure, when I sit down to enjoy okra, which I bought at the farmers’ market, I will, thanks to Carney and Rosomoff, entertain my children with the story of how Africans domesticated the crop in their continent’s forest-savanna ecotone and later as slaves in the Americas selected it for provision grounds. I will explain the derivation of the word and will make sure they know that the choices Africans made hundreds of years ago about what constitutes good food have shaped our meals in the present. Maybe next time I’m in Africa, they’ll rest easy knowing that I’m able to eat foods that are in many ways quite familiar here at home.

This article originally appeared in issue 11.3 (April, 2011).