I would have liked to open my “foodie” essay about pigeon with a description of cooking and sampling in my own kitchen one of the migratory birds that John James Audubon considered so tender. But I am more than a hundred years too late to do this for the generation of pigeons that I’m thinking about. Had I access to fresh pigeon in the market—say Boston’s Quincy Market in 1820 shortly after it had opened—along with my interest in testing preparations of this popular game bird, I would be sharing an account of the results with readers. That is what the cookbook authors Mrs. N. K. M Lee (calling herself a “Boston housekeeper”) and Lydia Maria Child were both able to do circa 1830 when pigeon was plentiful in the markets. We know that this was the case through commentators such as Audubon and Christopher C. Baldwin, whose descriptions of the flight patterns and hunting customs of birds such as the passenger pigeon take their place in the human food supply for granted.

My interest in Audubon and Baldwin has recently been piqued by a couple of books that I’m editing for publication to mark the bicentennial of the American Antiquarian Society: The diary of Christopher Columbus Baldwin (a 2010 collaboration with Jack Larkin published as A Place in My Chronicle) and the Society’s bicentennial history, authored by Philip F. Gura, to be published in 2012. By now, you might be wondering what in the world they have to do with pigeons.

Audubon, it turns out, visited Antiquarian Hall in 1840 during a tour of New England to line up subscribers to the octavo edition of Birds of America, which appeared in seven volumes during that decade. (He did not make a sale at AAS, although the Society subsequently acquired a set connected to that visit.) The packages of reproductions of his paintings were the bookends for a text, Ornithological Biography, in which he and his co-author, William MacGillivray, described the birds that he had illustrated. The commentary drew upon notes that the artist had made along the way. Thanks to the University of Pittsburgh’s digital edition, one can search for such words as “tender,” “tasty,” and “juicy” as well as “market” for a view of these volumes as a guide to edible wild birds (at least in Audubon’s opinion).

Baldwin, who became the Society’s first full-time librarian, serving from 1832 to 1835, kept an extensive diary in which he documented his activities. As effective as he was at the indoor pursuits of a librarian, he was also an outdoorsman who knew how to handle a gun and who numbered hunters among the friends of his youth. Asa Hosmer of Templeton, Massachusetts, was one of them. Baldwin described Hosmer as “a hunter by profession having done nothing else for several years.” Quoting, as was often his custom, from a conversation, Baldwin wrote: “He informs me that during the last fall he caught hundred and thirty dozens of pigeons, and the story is confirmed by his father.” In July 1830, Baldwin spent two days hunting pigeons and again in September. He was not particularly successful, writing in July, “The woods are thick with them, but they are in the tops of trees and so beyond the reach of shot.” The first day he went hunting in September he had similar luck. “Hunt pigeons, and fire at many and kill very few,” but two days later, when he returned to the hunt and was successful, he was “reprimanded” by a neighbor “for killing what he calls his pigeons.” Baldwin disagreed: “They are on my father’s land and far from his bed.” The next summer, when Baldwin returned home to Templeton, his relaxation included hunting, but with a different weapon “procured … for hunting pigeons and it answered a good purpose.” He wrote that he had “purchased me an old gun of that class called Queen Ann’s, carrying ten balls to the pound, and [had] it new stocked, with a good lock, for which I paid six dollars.” He was satisfied with the five pigeons he killed in September during a day in the out of doors.

Baldwin’s hunting was recreational, but the neighbor, George W. Bryant, who had scolded him earlier, was like Hosmer in the business of marketing pigeons, and Baldwin was evidently intrigued. He was so interested in this enterprise that he gathered some information about Hosmer and pigeons and then wrote one of his own extended reflections that appear from time to time in his chronicle.

Asa Hosmer, Jr., is a hunter by profession. He does nothing but hunt, and has made it his whole business for above ten years, and what is remarkable, he gets a good living by it. He told me that last year he caught over eight hundred dozens of pigeons in Templeton, and that this was not one-half the number taken in the town. Mr. Joseph Robbins and a person by the name of Parks, in Winchendon, caught thirteen hundred dozens; and a Mr. Harris of that town about seven hundred doz. more. They have taken nearly the same number for several years past. They find a market for them in Boston, Worcester, Providence & their vicinity. They [pigeons] sell from one dollar and fifty cents to two dollars per dozen, and the feathers sell for enough more to pay all expenses.

Pigeons—like some other breeds of birds—were easy to hunt, indeed, so easy that the hunt couldn’t be sustainable. “Innumerable thousands of pigeons have been seen during the fore part of this month of this year in various parts of New England,” Baldwin continued. This was the scary part: it was frightening to see the sky blackened by a mile-long flight of birds, “an appearance which, with our ancestors, would have created the most alarming apprehensions.”

It is said that their flight portends bloody war. I can well remember that in the spring of 1811 a flock passed over Templeton that was many hours in sight, and so large as to cover the whole horizon. They first appeared about half an hour before sunrise and continued until after ten o’clock. They were going to the north-east. All the old people said it was a sign of war; and, whether the pigeons had anything to do with the affairs of men or not, I cannot tell, but this is nevertheless true, that the United States did declare war against England within fourteen months from that time.

Baldwin’s reflections continued with descriptions of other sightings that were followed by transformative moments in American history, in 1774, and preceding Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia, in 1575 and 1576.

Audubon’s descriptions of the “astonishing numbers of pigeons in our woods” jibe with Baldwin’s but cover a more expansive geography—from New York State to Pennsylvania to Louisiana. “In 1805 I saw schooners loaded in bulk with pigeons caught up the Hudson River coming to the wharf at New York, where they sold for one cent apiece,” he wrote. Twenty-five years later, in March 1830, Audubon reported that pigeons were “so abundant in the markets of New York that piles of them met the eye in every direction.” Despite the “immense numbers” killed and the “cruelty in pursuing them,” he reported that “no apparent diminution ensues.” Some were caught in nets, others were killed when the flocks stopped to drink at a water source. Such complacency about the damage inflicted on the large, migrating flocks would eventually have dire results for the pigeon population, but for now, what mattered most was that the markets were supplied.

With the food markets so reliably and well stocked seasonably with pigeon, it is surprising that the record of how the birds were transported thence is so opaque. Details about relationships between farmers who remained in rural New England with peers who had established themselves as vendors at Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market have been teased out in relation to other country products, so it seems plausible that the shooters may have relied on a particular vendor in Boston. Or it is possible that they might have avoided a middleman. Winslow Homer’s drawing of a “View in South Market Street” (fig. 3) offers a visual suggestion. On the left is a farm wagon and in the foreground, a scene in which a straw-hatted farmer is selling produce from baskets. There are squashes and such in some of the baskets, but the basket at the lower left appears to contain birds.

If these are pigeons, the purchasers would have no shortage of directions for selecting a pigeon and a choice of methods for its preparation in cookbooks of the period. But as varied as were the methods of preparing pigeon offered by Child in The American Frugal Housewife (1829 and many later editions) or Lee in The Cook’s Own Book (1832), many of these receipts had first appeared in print as early as 1747 in Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, published in London. They can be traced through editions of Susannah Carter’s The Frugal Housewife (London, 1765, and later eds.). When Carter’s cookbook was reprinted in Boston in 1772, Paul Revere engraved two plates showing the preparation of some eleven meats, including the pigeon. Carter’s recipes were a source for authors of other cookbooks. One was Maria Rundell and her London publisher, John Murray, who produced A New System of Domestic Cookery, Formed Upon Principles of Economy, and Adapted to the Use of Private Families (1803, the first of many eds. in England and the United States). Another was Amelia Simmons, whose list of wild fowl and selection criteria in American Cookery (Hartford, 1796, and other eds.) includes such birds from the wild as duck, woodcock, snipes, partridge, plover, black birds, and lark, in addition to pigeon.

Pigeon appears in the first American edition of Carter’s The Frugal Housewife (1803) as part of the general information for the cook and again in the recipe section. Monthly bills of fare recommend pigeon in most months between March and November. A choice for an August supper might be roast chicken or pigeon with asparagus or artichokes; for a dinner in September leg of lamb or roast goose might be followed by pigeon pie. Pigeon returned to the dinner menu in November. Carter also provides suggestions “for the proper arrangement of two courses,” and some editions included an illustration of how to place the platters on the table. Many of Carter’s recipes, including those for pigeon, appear in American imprints of Rundell’s work offering an overview of their preparation on both sides of the Atlantic for both fancy and family dining. Rundell speaks to the versatility of pigeons. “Pigeons may be dressed in so many ways, that they are very useful. The good flavour of them depends very much on their being cropped and drawn as soon as killed. No other bird requires so much washing.” For a grand occasion, for instance, the pigeon in jelly “has a very handsome appearance in the middle range of a second course; or when served with the jelly roughed large, it makes a side or corner thing, its size being then less. The head should be kept up as if alive, by tying the neck with some thread, and the legs bent as if the pigeon sat upon them.” Pigeons left from dinner the day before may be warmed with gravy and served with stuffing on the side, or made into a pie; in either case, care must be taken not to overdo them, which will make them stringy. The cook was advised to reheat the meat in gravy and serve with forcemeat balls on the side, instead of as stuffing. Pigeon might be broiled, roasted, pickled, potted, or prepared in jelly. With so many cooking techniques possible, the pigeon was a very versatile bird.

Pigeon, as we have seen, was readily available, so these recipes remained useful even for American authors who were not suggesting extensive and elaborate meals. Child recommended roasted, potted, or stewed pigeon.

“Potting is the best, and the least trouble. After they are thoroughly picked and cleaned, put a small slice of salt pork, and a little ball of stuffing, into the body of every pigeon. The stuffing should be made of one egg to one cracker, an equal quantity of suet, or butter, seasoned with sweet-marjoram, or sage. Flour the pigeons well, lay them close together in the bottom of the pot, just cover them with water, throw in a bit of butter, and let them stew an hour and a quarter if young; an hour and three quarters if old. Some people turn off the liquor just before they are done, and brown the pigeons on the bottom of the pot; but this is very troublesome, as they are apt to break to pieces.”

To roast pigeon, Child directed the use of a spit. After preparation (stuffing), pigeon would cook in “fifteen minutes before a smart fire.” Carter and Rundell both describe preparing the pigeon for a lifelike presentation, either by surrounding them with a nest of spinach or artichokes or molding them in jelly to look as if they had paused during flight.

Pigeon was not only for family meals. It appeared on the Bill of Fare for the American Antiquarian Society’s semiannual meeting of April 25, 1866, held at Boston’s Parker House, where three wild birds comprised its game course: Brandt, Black Ducks, and Wild Squabs. (The gentlemen present followed this with a selection of salmon, mutton, capers, pork, lamb, beef, turkey and chicken.) By the 1890s, however, the squab were gone from the American Antiquarian Society’s menu and were replaced by snipe and plover.

As is well known by now, the passenger pigeon went from plentiful to extinction in the United States before the nineteenth century ended. Squab is still available to cooks and a lively tradition of preparing and eating this delicacy continues. In fact, as I reflected on this piece, I kept coming across contemporary mentions of pigeon—in the culinary sense. For Christmas I received a copy of Amanda Hesser’s Essential New York Times Cookbook. Hesser warned her readers not to use it for academic research and then I happened upon her words of praise for Craig Claiborne, the definer of “food chic,” who “expanded his areas of interest to include foreign cuisines with an unprecedented zeal.” The example Hesser chose to illustrate his international interest: “Pakistani pigeons and pilau.”

Hesser omitted the recipes, but they may be found in Claiborne’s New York Times Cookbook in a section titled Game Birds that opens with several recipes for squabs. His description is tantalizing: “A squab is a cultivated pigeon too young to fly and is one of the finest of esculents.” He recommends substituting Rock Cornish game hen in these recipes, “for squabs are expensive.” Formerly the meat of any pigeon or dove species would have been used, among them the wood pigeon, the mourning dove, and the now-extinct passenger pigeon. Now domestic pigeons are raised to one month of age and sold as squab, a business that has its own rich history extending for seventy-five years and more. The Palmetto Pigeon Plant of Sumter, S.C., is an example of a modern business that, in the absence of wild flocks to “harvest,” raises pigeon and their kin for research and the table. They are in the business of “supplying millions of squabs throughout the world.” Proudly, they reveal that “our squab has been served on plates of Kings and Queens, Presidents, Prime Ministers, dignitaries, and other lovers of great food because of the quality they demand.”

Palmetto Pigeon’s hand-processed and vacuum-sealed squabs are a far cry from the nineteenth-century market basket pigeon, and yet Claiborne’s cooking directions are still a bridge to the nineteenth-century kitchen. Of the four recipes for squab, three could easily, more easily perhaps, have been prepared in an early nineteenth-century kitchen—roast stuffed squabs, squabs with Madeira sauce, and potted squabs. The other, well, that’s Claiborne’s (and Hesser’s) spicy, international recipe.

The first step in the preparation of the roast squab is to truss the bird. I read Claiborne’s directions, following in my imagination: using a string, tie down the wings, then the legs, loop around the tail and cross over the bird’s back, make one more pass that secures the wings before making a second loop to “tie the neck skin.” And then I wondered, why do all this only to brown the bird in a skillet? Why not use the loop, as Mrs. Rundell would have recommended to the hearth cook, to attach the bird to a twisted string hung from a nail over the hearth? How much simpler that would have been than browning the bird in a skillet before roasting it in the oven. In the simple, old-fashioned way, the whole bird would have been roasted in a half hour or even half that time with a few twists of the string in front of a hot fire. In a similar vein, the recipe for Roast Squabs with Madeira Sauce is a variant of the recipe above, using a wine imported and readily available in town and country in the early national period. The drippings in a pan under the bird (whether in the oven or at the hearth) are the basis for the sauce made with equal amounts of Madeira and brown gravy.

Claiborne’s recipe for potted squabs calls for either a casserole dish or a Dutch oven. Again, one can imagine the nineteenth-century housekeeper directed by Mrs. Child browning the bird and arranging the vegetables, herbs, and broth around it. Using a Dutch oven for the ingredients, she would put the iron lid on the iron pot, set it on a bed of coals and place a shovelful of coals on top of the lid. Hearth or oven, the timing would be roughly the same—45 minutes to 60 minutes.

During his tour of eastern North America selling subscriptions to the octavo edition of Birds of America then in production, Audubon found himself with a leisurely mid-August Sunday in New Bedford, Massachusetts. He took a morning walk and went to worship at the old Unitarian Church (“No Organ and vile fiddlers!” he scoffed). After he had “Dined on Wild Pigeons now plentiful hereabouts,” he took a “Walk of about 7 miles with 4 Gentlemen, to several ponds, but saw very few birds … and eat as many huckleberries as I could wish.” It’s amazing how much better one can feel after a good dinner, even if we are left to wonder how that pigeon was prepared.

Further reading:

Jack Larkin and Caroline F. Sloat, A Place in My Chronicle: The Diary of Christopher Columbus Baldwin, 1829—1835 (Worcester, Mass., 2010). The entries cited are from January, July, and September 1830; July and September 1831; and April 1832, just as he was preparing to take up his appointment as AAS librarian. Birds of America is available (or scarce) in a variety of formats. The edition of Birds and the Ornithological Dictionary in the Darlington Library collection at the University of Pittsburg have been digitized and are searchable. The American Antiquarian Society holds a set of the octavo edition (1840-44). On the extinction of the passenger pigeon, see, for example, Christopher Cokinos, Hope is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds (New York, 2000) and Allan W. Eckert, The Silent Sky: The Incredible Extinction of the Passenger Pigeon (Lincoln, Neb., 2000). Andrew Blechman’s Pigeons: The Fascinating Saga of the World’s Most Revered and Reviled Bird (New York, 2006) is a sweeping historical account of these birds. Blechman’s quest to chronicle the transformation of this once prized and now reviled creature provided him with a series of fascinating experiences that reveal not only how much more there is to the pigeon than the scavenging street pigeon, but even includes an account of the Royal Pigeon Handler employed by England’s Queen Elizabeth II.

There are many editions of the popular Anglo-American and American cookbooks of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries cited above. Susannah Carter, The Frugal Housewife or Complete Woman Cook (Boston, 1772); Maria Rundell, some editions are titled American Domestic Cookery: Formed on Principles of Economy, others Experienced American Housekeeper: Domestic Cookery…Formed on Principles of Economy. There are many American editions of both titles and the illustrations include a pigeon ready for cooking. Cookbooks by Lydia Maria Child, The American Frugal Housewife (Boston, 1832), and Mrs. N.K.M Lee, The Cook’s Own Book (Boston, 1833), include recipes for pigeon, and both appear in many editions. The recipes by Craig Claiborne appear in The New York Times Cookbook (New York, 1990).

Sources for farmed squab include operations with a long history (http://www.palmettopigeonplant.com/) to more recently established businesses. Meat is available for shipment in many countries, and it is also possible to buy a farm: see, for example:http://www.schuhfarms.com/thefarm.html.

Hotel menus from Boston and New York and, to a lesser extent from restaurants in the south and west, form the basis for an article by Paul Freedman, “American Restaurants and Cuisine in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” New England Quarterly 84 (2011): 5-59. The appendix, derived from surviving menus from 1859 to 1865 for New York City’s Fifth Avenue Hotel, is an alphabetical list of entrees. Pigeon appears on fifty menus in twelve separate preparations. However, some of these vary only by sauce, such as wine (Madeira, port, or not identified) or tomato. Freedman indicates that some favored entrees, such as canvasback duck, became scarce and were served only on special occasions by the end of the century. Finally, for vegetarians and others who might be dubious about pigeon, he finds that macaroni, frequently and comfortingly with cheese, was a standard item on the menus scrutinized for his essay.

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

AT ATKA

In February at Atka
I stood on the black sands
below the trading post
and watched my husband
fade up the plank
stairway, a bag
in each hand.

Happy you be here,
Prekaska’s Wife.
Glad you was come,
Prekaska’s Wife.

The crowd hemmed
me in, smiled,
called me my new name.
Prekaska: shopkeeper.
Wife: me.

At the house
my luggage sat
on the bed,
waiting,
already settled.

THE FOOD, THE AMMUNITION

Late in May,
we sit at tea
at the neighbor’s.

My husband haggles,
trying again
to take a pelt
for nothing.

We hear a cry,
Prekaska, Prekaska
come! The store
is on fire!

Running back
toward the crowd,
I think of my scrapbook,
the photos, the platinum
blue pelt that was
my engagement
present.

Inside, acrid
smoke chokes me
as I pack and bundle
at the dresser and then
run, the fur swaddling
paper and frames.

Outside, the Aleuts,
armed with water
and blankets, flail
and shout, help
put it out.

Standing under
our ruined ceiling,
my husband notices
my full arms,
needless jumble.

Angry, he asks
why I left the food,
the ammunition.

ON CLOTHING

Walking
the muddy path
in wool pants,
a sweater,
and rubber boots,
I remember
the clothes I packed
for my first journey.

A chalk-white crepe
dress with a sequined cape.
A blue gown for dining.
A navy suit in which
to lean nonchalantly
against the rail.

When my husband
opened the suitcase
he groaned,
You won’t need this
on the Aleutian Maid.

Boxed in the storeroom,
they wait beside a stack
of blankets.

I haven’t sent them back.

PAPER PARASOL

When the Japanese
anchor in the harbor,
the Aleuts close
their doors, leave
the boat unmet
at the shore.

Mr. Kojima calls
me Madame,
brings gifts:
a paper parasol,
handkerchiefs,
a silk shawl.

But my husband,
wary and rude,
keeps his eyes
on his pipe
as he packs
and lights it.

Kojima explains:
If only we could
find a new harbor
on these islands.
If you would be willing
to point one out,
the Captain would
be forever indebted
to you.

My husband smiles,
leans over the map.
There is a harbor here.
His finger traces
the edge of an island,

a passage lined with rocks.

SKIN

I sort the blue fox pelts
for my husband.

I’ve learned to judge
the quality of skin—
long guard hairs,
even markings,
pointed tails
stretching wrist
to elbow.

Once a Captain
gave me the pick of his lot
if I could find the best.

When I held up
a supple, flawless skin
the Captain laughed,
The lady has it.

As he left,
I ran my fingers
against the fur’s grain

while my husband beamed
in the lamp’s round light,
his hands folded on the books,
figures leaking from
the pen’s tip.

Nicole Stellon O’Donnell

The poems in this sequence grew out of my reading of Prekaska’s Wife: A Year in the Aleutians, a memoir published by Helen Wheaton in 1945. Wheaton was the wife of a fox-farmer and storekeeper in the Aleutian Islands. As I read her work, I was struck by her voice. As a reader, the self she cultivated stunned me. My modern self, a woman cultivated in a different way by a changed society, questioned her silences. These poems grew out of my questions. I began by borrowing her words and phrases as I enjoyed her mode of description. I found when I was done that tone was the place where Wheaton and I parted ways. “The Helen Poems” reveal what I see as the subtext of Wheaton’s writing.

When I wrote Steam Laundry, a novel-in-poems published last year telling the story of Sarah Ellen Gibson, who came to Fairbanks, Alaska in 1903, I played with a different kind of appropriation. Instead of a public persona, constructed like Wheaton’s voice in her memoir, Sarah Ellen Gibson’s voice was private. Unlike Wheaton, who wrote with the goal of publishing, Gibson never intended her writing to be read by a wide audience. Her papers only survived in the archives because her son became a prominent Alaskan. He started the stage line from Fairbanks to Valdez and was the first person to drive a car between the two places. When he died, he passed on all his papers dealing with the motorcoach line to the archives. His mother’s letters happened to be tucked in the pile. The documents I dealt with were receipts, personal letters, obituaries, photos, and contracts. Sarah Ellen Gibson appeared to me in fragments. I built a character out of them. While I worked hard to be true to the Sarah Ellen I met in the letters, to make a narrative, I had to fill in gaps. My material for filling those gaps came from my own experience of being a transplant, a woman, and a mother in Interior Alaska.

In some ways, I see my appropriation of these lives as an act of defiance. I began writing from historical documents as a function of my own resistance to writing about the details of my own life. When I began writing poetry, I felt like that was what was expected of me as a poet. Initially, my attraction to persona was borne of my resistance to the confessional mode. More recently, I question that, recognizing that many of the historical poems I write contain embedded confessions. The last poem in Steam Laundry is the most intensely personal poem I’ve written. It’s my truth housed in the frame of someone else’s details. Because I had sunk myself into the details of Gibson’s life and her relationship with her sons, I was able to reveal difficult truths of my relationship with my daughters.

When I began working with archival materials years ago, I foolishly assumed writing from historical documents was a novel idea, but it’s not. It’s a return to the root. Poetry’s oldest form is a way of preserving the details of a story. In the case of the epic, poetry details a famous story, a culture-defining story. In the case of these poems, I’m preserving facts on a more personal scale, but I’m still keeping track of history in verse, and I’m mixing myself into that history.

Further Reading:

Helen Wheaton, Prekaska’s Wife: A Year in the Aleutians (New York, 1945).

Other poems from this sequence have appeared in The Women’s Review of Books and Ice Floe.

Nicole Stellon O’Donnell’s novel-in-poems, Steam Laundry, won the 2013 Willa Literary Award for Poetry. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Beloit Poetry Journal,Bellingham Review, The Women’s Review of Books, and other journals. The Rasmuson Foundation granted her an Individual Artist Award to support the writing of Steam Laundry. She lives, writes, and teaches in Fairbanks, Alaska

Bland Simpson’s nonfiction novel Two Captains from Carolina is a far more ambitious project than its slender 187 pages would suggest. At its best, it is a slim but sweeping history of the United States through the Civil War as seen through the lives and worlds of Moses Grandy and John Newland Maffitt, two “men of great skill on many waters” (168). Simpson weaves together a scrupulously researched and only lightly imagined twin narrative for his dual protagonists—one black and one white—as they lead lives that touch in profoundly different ways on the great issues of the United States’ first century. He uses material from each man’s contemporary narrative, making use primarily of Grandy’s 1842 Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy; Late a Slave in the United States of America and Maffitt’s autobiographical novel Nautilus: Or, Cruising under Canvas,published in 1871, to craft a pair of starkly juxtaposed biographical vignettes with much to tell the reader about race, identity, family, and the call of the sea for these very different men.

Indeed, Simpson does have an amazing pair of stories to tell as he charts the lives of these two Carolina-bred watermen, and some of Two Captains‘ most successful sections track his subjects’ adventures ashore and on the water. Born a slave in the 1780s, Moses Grandy twice raised the sum of $600 to purchase his freedom, only to be deceived and resold by treacherous masters. It took still more years of hard work on the ferries and small craft along the Pasquotank River before he finally succeeded in purchasing his freedom in the 1820s and began working the Atlantic packet ships. Later, he purchased the freedom of his son and wife, and became an important figure in New England’s growing abolitionist circles, before finally telling his life story in London to renowned abolitionist activist George Thompson for publication.

Maffitt’s career was incredible by any measure. Literally born at sea in 1819, he sailed on the storiedUSS Constitution as a young midshipman, served as second in a fatal duel between fellow midshipmen on a Menorca hillock, danced with Queen Amalie of Greece, charted much of the Atlantic coast for the U.S. Coast Survey, was vindicated after a political dismissal from the Navy, “chase[d] slavers and pirates” as commander of the USS Dolphin, defected to the Confederacy, and became one of the most successful blockade runners, raiders, and the “Prince of Privateers” at the helm of the CSS Florida during the rebellion.

In charting these two exceptional lives spent largely on the water, Simpson keeps a delicate balance between the larger themes and the deeply personal loves and losses of these two very humanly rendered men. His prose at its best is poetical and searching, and he breathes considerable life into even what on their face are unimportant details and anecdotes. At times, however, his penchant for grandness tumbles toward the purple, as when he introduces the reader to Maffitt’s pregnant mother as “Ann Carnic Maffitt, a gravid young woman whose time was nigh” (31).

The greatest blessing of Simpson’s project—weaving together men from the same place but starkly different worlds who both find a measure of success and freedom at sea—is also the novel’s greatest shortcoming. Although the two men would “circle each other for years afloat and afield, crossing each other’s tracks in ports both great and small,” the stories of Grandy and Maffitt do not always align in coherent or interesting ways (167). At times, these feel like too different lives for all the back-and-forth between them to make much sense, especially since Simpson moves chronologically rather than pairing phases or events in the lives of the two subjects. Maffitt is more than two decades younger than Grandy, so the reader knows Grandy as a man before Maffitt is packed off to boarding school at age nine. Moreover, while Grandy disappears maddeningly from known records around 1844, Maffitt survives until 1881 (although Simpson chooses to close the curtain on his subject in 1869). These differences, plus the stylistic variations of the underlying source documents, mean the two lives often feel as though they are not in sufficient conversation for Simpson’s grand synthesis to cohere. Simpson has opted for close fealty to his sources and, although he does imagine a few scenes in more detail than his sources provide, as far as nonfiction novels go, he is unusually careful not to wander too imaginatively from the known or likely into the wished or fanciful. Instead, he seeks to plug any narrative holes by widening the scope to examine the larger sweep of American history.

At times, the author works so hard to make these connections to the wider world and to contextualize his subjects’ lives for readers that the bonds feel stretched. When such links come organically, as with Maffitt’s childhood brush with Lafayette and prewar meetings with Jefferson Davis, or Grandy’s involvement with William Lloyd Garrison and his attendance of the Antislavery Convention in London in 1844, these narrative connections to larger events give context and gravitas to the project. For example, Simpson’s description of a brief meeting between Maffitt and his father, the famous itinerant preacher Rev. John Newland Maffitt Sr., the “Methodist Meteor,” weaves the aftermath of the Second Great Awakening nicely into the narrative.

In other places, however, superfluous background shading betrays an anxious need to link Grandy and Maffitt to bigger things. The most unsuccessful segments are the brief stand-alone chapters, each titled “The Wind that Blows” and each covering a different encapsulated moment in time. These disjointed mini-lessons see Simpson name-check everything from the Missouri Compromise to the Amistad case to Thoreau to minstrelsy, and leave the reader less, rather than more, engaged with the significance of the project.

In the final analysis, Simpson’s compact, potent volume succeeds more than it stumbles. If the book fosters new interest in these men and their memoirs, it is a worthy project. But Two Captainsaccomplishes far more than just to bring two nineteenth-century texts back into view. Simpson successfully captures the delicate balance of his witchy and unstable genre. The nonfiction novel, done well, both tells and evokes, and Two Captains powerfully melds intimate portraits and the human power of the particular with the context of a grand survey. By braiding together the strands of Grandy and Maffitt’s lives, Simpson offers the reader a strong rope in which is bound up not just his protagonists but also the larger histories of the nation.

“Henceforth there must be two peoples, Northerners and Southerners.” The doomed Orton Williams, writing in May 1861, was surprised by this new dichotomy. A young cousin of the Robert E. Lee family, Williams had grown up in a United States that did not oblige you to choose sides. Instead, most eagerly embraced an American nationality. But suddenly that secure world had come unhinged. The three essays in this brief but welcome volume revisit the startling six-month interval between November 1860 and April 1861, when the Union disintegrated and the Civil War erupted.

Certainly there had been Northerners and Southerners before 1861. Most Yankees in New England and the New England exodus states to the west embraced free labor, free schools, free soil, and the Republican Party. Some saw slavery as a moral problem; a larger number deplored its economic and social effects. But their North was no monolith. Swarms of immigrants, especially from Ireland and Germany, flooded into the Northeast and the Midwest during the 1840s and 1850s. Democratic Party loyalists, even if temporarily outnumbered, fiercely contested the upstart Republicans and looked forward to better times. One observer in January 1861 reported that Democrats in Maine were “decidedly against Coercion” and that many Republicans had “no stomach for civil war.” Democratic gains in state elections in Connecticut and Rhode Island in early April 1861 suggested that the North was increasingly disunited as the crisis deepened.

The seven Deep South states, from South Carolina west to Texas, likewise had a distinct identity. Here toiled more than three-fifths of American slaves. Their overall numbers almost matched the white population; two states and many cotton-growing counties across the Lower South had black majorities. The antislavery movement stirred visceral indignation in the Deep South. But the Lower South did not regard itself as separate from the American nation. Jefferson Davis, who masterminded construction of the splendid new U.S. Capitol building in the mid- and late 1850s, would have welcomed the 1860 presidential nomination of a united Democratic Party. His wife, Varina Davis, felt more at home in Washington, D.C., than in Mississippi. Many in the Deep South hoped before November that the nation would hold together. In mid-October former South Carolina congressman Waddy Thompson wrote to his old friend, Ohio’s Thomas Corwin, seeking assurances that Abraham Lincoln would be “conservative” and offering advice on how to “prevent seceding movements.”

The first essay in this volume addresses the extraordinary upheaval in the Deep South that directly followed Lincoln’s election. William L. Barney, its author, wrote one of the landmark studies of Deep South secession that appeared in the 1970s. His essay builds upon his earlier work, but also breaks new ground. As a young scholar, Barney thought the Deep South’s shocking course resulted primarily from anxiety that a Republican president would close off the territories and implement a slow strangulation of the slave system. Upwardly mobile supporters of John C. Breckinridge, the Southern Rights presidential candidate, led the drive for secession. Downplaying any danger of war, secession took place in Alabama and Mississippi amid a carnival atmosphere. Within just a few months, the Confederate States of America took shape.

Barney now introduces a fresh angle of vision. Secession was “the slaves’ revenge.” By “daily giving the lie to the professed white image of them as loyal, docile servants content in their bondage,” enslaved African Americans distorted Southern white perceptions of reality. Finding it “ever harder to convince themselves that slavery was right” and to justify their slave-based society, whites in the Deep South “ignored all the risks involved and rushed to embrace secession in the winter of 1860-61.” They thereby embarked on “a suicidal, self-defeating rush to destruction” (10, 33). Here Barney accomplishes several things at once. He moves irony to the center of historical inquiry. In effect he also tips his hat to the hardworking scholars associated with the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, who have demonstrated how much the slaves themselves did to bring about emancipation. Not least, Barney illuminates the pivotal juncture in the larger drama. The Lower South’s wild spasm—an astonishing moment of collective catharsis, when established political leaders either had to join the mob or step aside—created a deadly standoff that soon spiraled into war.

Let us turn to the eight slave states of the Upper South, which were less absolutely wed to the slave system and less inclined to go berserk because of Lincoln’s election. Our guide here is the author of the second essay, Elizabeth R. Varon, who focuses on the Upper South’s key state and her most famous son, Virginia’s Robert E. Lee. Varon has written two books on late antebellum and wartime Virginia, notably a biography of Elizabeth Van Lew, an elite native-born lady who headed a Union spy ring in wartime Richmond—striking evidence indeed that the Upper South was not quite so united in favor of the abortive Southern project as the Deep South. And this was most especially true during the months of uncertainty in early 1861, when the Upper South initially refused to follow the Deep South out of the Union.

Like the majority of white Virginians, Lee hoped to see the Union restored. For that to happen, the seceding states would have to rethink their course. He favored concession and compromise. Lee and like-minded Virginians ruled out any effort to compel their return; that would be counterproductive and inadmissible. Virginia would not tolerate “coercion.” In truth, Virginians had no idea what to do if the Deep South remained estranged, and they did not want to think about a possible shooting war.

Everything changed in mid-April 1861. The Confederates assaulted Fort Sumter. Three days later, on April 15, Lincoln called for 75,000 troops to put down the rebellion. Lincoln’s proclamation outraged most white Virginians (but not those in the trans-Allegheny northwest), much as his election had ignited the Deep South’s secessionist firestorm five months before. In the Shenandoah Valley town of Lexington, where Lee lived his last days after the war, assertive Unionists on April 13 erected a tall pole with an eagle on it to fly the American flag and overawe the pro-secession minority. But on April 16 the men who had raised the pole chopped it down. Lincoln had forced Virginians to pick a side.

We all know what Lee decided. Francis Preston Blair and Winfield Scott told him that he could expect to command the Union Army. Lee would not accept the possibility of fighting against Virginia, and so he resigned abruptly, ending a career that stretched for more than three decades. Several days later he was persuaded to take charge of Virginia’s forces. Varon rejects the well-worn canard that Lee’s answer was the one “he was born to make” (35). And so does Lee’s most discerning biographer, Elizabeth Brown Pryor, who notes that the majority of high-ranking Southern officers in the U.S. Army decided otherwise, that members of the Lee’s extended family included many with Union proclivities, and that the members of his immediate household were left speechless by the patriarch’s decision. Varon sees Lee’s decision-making process as “rational and calculated” (6), echoing her book, Disunion!; Pryor would amend that to say “the quick turnaround was probably entirely logical in Lee’s heart.”

Large parts of the South (though not all parts) fled the Union, but the previously divided North refused to allow it and rallied to reverse Southern secession. The North’s determination to restore the Union by force set in motion the astonishing events of the next four years. The third essay here, by Robert J. Cook, author of a fine recent biography of Maine’s William Pitt Fessenden, “probes the function of collective memory in the coming of the Civil War,” as “politicians on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line battled to persuade ordinary Americans that they and not their enemies were on the right side of history” (60). He focuses on “grievance narratives” (74, 76, 84). Secession leaders claimed to be following the footsteps of the Founding Fathers, by striking for independence rather than submitting to tyranny and oppression. Hard-line Republicans, by contrast, warned that a slave power conspiracy had long tried to undermine the antislavery aspirations of the Founding Fathers; Republicans promised to save the nation by refusing to compromise with wicked secessionists.

Cook then narrows his focus to the early months of 1861, especially the Fort Sumter crisis. William H. Seward held that “blind unreasoning popular excitement” in the Deep South would subside if not further inflamed. To bring that about, and to hold and strengthen the allegiance of the border slave states, he would relinquish Sumter. His counsel was, he claimed, “such as Chatham gave to his country under circumstances not widely different.” Seward thereby presented an intriguing alternative to the two grievance narratives. His own historical exemplar would be William Pitt, First Earl of Chatham, who in the 1770s “had tried to prevent war between Britain and its seditious colonies” (71).

Charles Francis Adams agreed. The South had been swept by “panic, pure panic,” but he would not “absolutely clos[e] the door to reconciliation,” as many of his fellow Republicans demanded. Instead, Adams thought it wiser to heed the examples of Chatham and Edmund Burke, who urged Britain to conciliate the American colonies. Had George III listened to Chatham’s “words of wisdom,” Adams observed, “he might have saved the brightest jewel of his crown.” Instead he took the opposite course. “He rejected the olive branch. He insisted upon coercion. And what was the result? History records its verdict in favor of Chatham and against the king.”

In the end, however, the decision was Lincoln’s to make. Dovetailing with Russell McClintock’s expert dissection of the decision-making process, Cook finds that the untested new president found inspiration in two sources—Andrew Jackson’s threat to use armed force against South Carolina’s nullification in 1832, and Henry Clay’s comparable line in the sand in 1850, when he vowed that any “open resistance to the Union” by South Carolina must be “put down at every hazard” (81-85).

When Lincoln made his decision, there was no way to know whether it was the right one. Would war ultimately reknit the national fabric? Or would war so alienate the divergent sections as to make reunion impossible? What did become apparent almost immediately was that Lincoln’s Proclamation for 75,000 troops bifurcated the former United States as never before. Blinking with amazement, North Carolina newspaper editor William W. Holden wrote that the proclamation, “as by a stroke of lightning, made the North wholly North and the South wholly South.” Seward’s ally, North Carolina Congressman John A. Gilmer, agreed. “As matters now stand,” he sadly concluded, “there is a United North against a United South, and both marching to the field of blood.”

Sex and Family in Puritan Massachusetts

Common-place asks Michelle Morris about her 2013 book, Under Household Government: Sex and Family in Puritan Massachusetts, and the role of family members in policing sexual conduct in early New England, which shows how ordinary colonists understood sexual, marital, and family relationships.

One of the central arguments of your book is that the policing of sexual behavior (sexual offenses in particular) took place primarily within the bounds of family, and often resulted in contests between families. What led you to this conclusion, rather than seeing the phenomenon as one chiefly of community surveillance?

I came to that conclusion in a rather roundabout way. Indeed, the case that was initially crucial to my thinking never appears in the book. I had initially intended to focus my project on motherhood in colonial America, and had also wanted to take advantage of New England’s rich cache of court records. I eventually realized that my topic and my source base did not work well together—motherhood, after all, is not a crime—but not before I came across the case of Mary Flood, a married woman who was accused of murdering her infant in 1686. When Goody Flood awoke at dawn to find that the child lying next to her was dead, her cries touched off a progression of visitors to her chamber until the final visitor notified the constable, who arrested Flood. I had been interested in the relationships between women giving birth and the women who attended them. Did women call personal friends, those who were known to be especially gifted in aiding birthing mothers, or simply their nearest neighbors? With this case, I started with a similar question: whom do you call when you wake up in the morning to find your child dead? I mapped out the homes of those who responded to the infanticide and was surprised to find that they lived all over town. So much for nearest neighbors. And then I was stuck. The file papers were rich in detail about the scene in the Floods’ home and Mary Flood’s treatment of her infant, but they had little to say about why particular individuals were summoned or felt the need to visit the scene. I needed to get to know these visitors better. I needed clues.

I turned to the New England Historical and Genealogical Society. Genealogies usually give brief summaries of whatever is known about their subjects, and New Englanders have been obsessed with their ancestors for centuries. I thought maybe I would find that one of the visitors was a midwife. Maybe the group was held together by some sort of craft organization. I piled mounds of genealogies on the long wooden tables, but it was not looking good. The people seemed to have nothing in common but their presence in Mary Flood’s chamber. But then I started to notice something: I was seeing the same last names over and over as I flipped through to find the individuals I was looking for, and so I started to see if I could bring family connections together in a coherent way. Sure enough, although the first visitors had been co-workers of the Floods or people who shared the Flood house, the later visitors were all members of the same extended family. Each new visitor was related to the last, and each was of a slightly higher status than the one before. Only the very last, a woman married to a wealthy stonemason and landowner, seemed to have the clout to take control of the situation and summon the constable.

As I transitioned to a project on illicit sexual activity, spurred by court records, I wondered if similar familial patterns might appear. I was quite surprised by what I found. I expected families to monitor, intervene, and testify about illicit sexual activities. It would have been odd if they had not done so. What I did not expect to find was that family relationships dominated and structured the trials. In nearly all of the cases I investigated, most (and sometimes all) of the deponents were either family members of those involved or had an identifiable personal stake in the outcome of the case. Given that our knowledge of family connections and personal quarrels is obviously incomplete, the consistency with which these connections appeared astounded me. What surprised me almost as much was the lack of non-familial intervention. Although neighbors sometimes testified in these cases, they usually testified about behavior they had observed; only very rarely did unrelated deponents claim to have tried to intervene in suspicious sexual behavior.

It did occur to me that what I was seeing might have as much to do with the density of family networks as it did with family members taking the lead in dealing with illicit sexual activity. After all, if almost everyone in a village was related to almost everyone else, then deponents and defendants could hardly help being related! Thank goodness for town genealogies. I tried several times to choose two people from the same town with different last names and make kinship connections. Although I could occasionally find a relationship that way, the vast majority of the pairs refused to connect. That really changed the way I thought about family and community in early New England. I had always envisioned a watchful society in which individuals considered their neighbors’ sins to be community business. It was only then that I thought back to Edmund Morgan’s work and his conclusion that “tribalism” (an intense and exclusive focus on the good of one’s family) had undermined the Puritans’ evangelical mission, and I realized that what I was seeing was another consequence of tribalism run amok.

As the introduction and conclusion make clear, Under Household Government is in conversation with Edmund Morgan’s now-canonical The Puritan Family. What does your book share with his book, and where does it build on or depart from it?

Edmund Morgan’s The Puritan Family mapped new ground when it was first published in the 1940s, and I do not think it is possible to write about the Puritan family today without building on Morgan’s work. The Puritan Family and Under Household Government share two essential conclusions: that New England’s Puritans believed families to be central to the way their society was organized, and that the Puritans’ intense devotion to their families ultimately undermined important social goals.

But Under Household Government is not merely an updated version of Morgan’s work. The books’ approaches differ in important ways. Morgan focused primarily on how New Englanders expected their families to work. Although The Puritan Family does include examples of family relationships gone wrong and familial duties unfulfilled, even these examples serve to explicate the ideal Puritan family. Morgan teaches us about the balance of order, hierarchy, and love the Puritans strove to achieve. My work, on the other hand, deals with families in crisis; it is more about how families actually worked than it is about how family members thought they should work. It might help to think about Under Household Government as the dark side of The Puritan Family. Morgan and I share a lot of the same type of sources, but the distribution of those sources is telling. Morgan’s archetypical source is a sermon; mine is a deposition.

You have much to say about the power of patriarchy generally, and of specific patriarchs in particular. How do you think your book fits with historian Toby Ditz’s rendering of the history of masculinity as one of power through access to women?

I think Ditz’s primary concern—that histories of masculinity have the potential to simply re-inscribe a dominant male narrative by neglecting the ways in which masculine power has been predicated on the subjection of women—is particularly insightful. In my book, I build on Thomas Foster’s work, which emphasizes the ways in which patriarchal status (the goal of fully developed adult manhood) depended directly and literally on access to women. As I explain in my book, the gateway to adulthood in seventeenth-century New England was built around marriage. Only by marrying and setting up independent households could men (and women) access the power that came with adulthood. Unmarried men, even those who were above what we consider the age of majority, were primarily sons or servants until they wed. Because most men in seventeenth-century New England married, the connection between marriage, adulthood, and patriarchy was not always obvious. We see it most clearly in cases in which men’s right to marry was called into question because of an inability to perform sexually.

The best example of this from my book is the tale of “Goodman Mousall’s Diabolical Erection” (chapter 3). In this 1663 case, John Foskett told John Mousall that “all that he [Mousall] had was the devil’s for he stood by his bedside and caused his members [penis] to rise” and that “the devil would have him and all that he had at the last.” The insult does not make much sense unless we understand the instinctive connection between masculine privilege and access to women. Foskett had reason to be insecure about his own masculine privilege. Although he was married, he lived with his wife’s parents. When Mousall’s wife, Elizabeth, challenged Foskett’s authority over dependents in both of their households, Foskett physically and verbally attacked both of the Mousalls. Because the Mousalls had a daughter, Foskett did not simply accuse John Mousall of being impotent. Instead, he challenged Mousall’s right to all of the trappings of patriarchal authority by claiming that his erections (a legal prerequisite for marriage) were not really his own.

Ditz, of course, also notes that the ways in which male power rests on access to women is not monolithic. It is complicated and historically specific. This is particularly true of marriage in early America. The ways in which men accrued power by marrying women are obvious. Patriarchal status depended on a man’s ability to marry and set up an independent household. The law of coverture gave a husband the right to all of the property and wages his wife had or might earn. A husband had a right to his wife’s labor and her sexual service. Yet women married willingly. They did so for a number of reasons: a lack of economic options, the desire for sexual satisfaction and companionship, social expectations, etc. Just as importantly, women, like men, derived a measure of authority and independence by marrying. It is significant that John Foskett’s attack on John Mousall was prompted by Elizabeth Mousall’s assertion of authority. Elizabeth might have been second in command to her husband, but in his absence she had the right to direct and control access to dependents in her household. In that sense, women like Elizabeth Mousall actually had a stake in preserving a patriarchal system that ultimately relied on their subjection.

You open with the phrase “This is a story …” and many rich stories appear within the larger narrative. As you immersed yourself in the lives of seventeenth-century residents of New England, getting to know them (as far as possible) in the process, did you experience a particular affinity for any of them?

Edmund Parker. I think I fell in love with the crotchety old man from Lancaster, Massachusetts. Parker is a relatively peripheral character in the first chapter of my book. His daughter Elizabeth was a servant who engaged in intercourse with an enslaved black man and bore a child. Edmund took both his daughter and her mixed-race son into his household and, despite his own poverty, refused to allow either local or county officials to separate them. He did not have a lot to work with. He had neither wealth nor position, and the law was not on his side. The document that hooked me was a petition from the selectmen who had tried to remove Elizabeth and her son from Edmund’s house. The selectmen complained that they “have had many froward peevish expressions from him, so that he hath wearied them out.” I cannot help but imagine the old man standing on his own doorstep, telling the selectmen who wanted to take away his daughter and grandson precisely what they could do with themselves, and then slamming the door in their faces. That’s my kind of grit.

I did become emotionally invested in a lot of the people in my book—in both positive and negative ways. I can hardly think about Jonathan Wade, who purchased Elizabeth Parker’s enslaved partner, without my lip curling in disgust. If you want to know why, he’s in chapter 1 as well. The procession of sexually abused children certainly got to me. Seventeenth-century court records tend to be emotionally unexpressive by modern standards, but once you become accustomed to the style of testimony, it’s sometimes all too easy to pick up on the emotion behind the dry recitations. I remember working one day on the Elizabeth Pierce chapter and setting up the section on the rape of minors. I worked my way through the descriptions of the injuries wrought by actual and attempted rape. Then I came to the case of Scisely, an Indian child under the age of ten. The woman who examined her testified that Thomas Keeney had been unable to rape her because her body was too small. The woman testifying wrote that Scisely was “as greatly wronged otherwise as is imaginable.” Seventeenth-century folk did not refer to imagination very often in court records. I put down my coffee, put my head in my hands, finally looked up and closed my laptop. It was before noon, but I found that I had had all the work I could take for that day.

If, however, by “affinity” you mean someone I could identify with, then the answer has to be Elizabeth Wells, who appears in the book’s final chapter. Elizabeth came to a bad end. She claimed rape but was prosecuted for fornication because she became pregnant. She landed in prison and then ended up on the streets. She had loudly proclaimed to all who would listen that if she ever became pregnant, she would name a rich man as the father of her child. She became pregnant, and she named her master’s son. But the reason I feel kinship with Elizabeth is that she was a teller of stories. Many of them were racy; several put her in a rather bad light; and I don’t think half of them were true, but I, too, love a good story.

To build on the issue of subjectivity and your relationship to your research: as you painstakingly reconstructed court cases, you must have formulated your own judgments about them. Sometimes you reveal those to the reader (as in the case of one free black servant woman’s infant, likely murdered by her mistress), and other times not (as in the case of the rape of Elizabeth Pierce). How did you decide when to disclose, even gingerly, your own “verdict” and when to remain more “neutral”?

My impulse is always to “solve the mystery.” The most important factor in sharing or withholding my own judgments was the evidence I had to work with. In most cases, if I thought I had enough evidence to figure out what happened, I shared my “verdict” with the reader and laid out my evidence so that readers could decide whether they agreed. In many cases, the evidence allowed for a pretty clear verdict. In others (particularly the premarital fornication cases, which turned on the physical descriptions of newly delivered infants) the evidence was so sparse or contradictory as to make any conclusions little more than guesswork. What drove me crazy were the cases in the middle. For example, did Edmund Pinson, the hopelessly obtuse suitor from chapter 3, marry his bride without her parents’ consent? In my mind, the question came down to the absence or presence of a nail the bride’s mother might have given Edmund so that he could post notice of his intention to marry on the meeting house door. I can imagine the case going either way, but I will never know if the nail was there. The answer is not important to the point of the story, but its absence bothers me nonetheless.

The stories about the rape of Elizabeth Pierce (chapter 4), and Zipporah, the free black servant accused of infanticide (chapter 6), are both special cases. Elizabeth Pierce accused Benjamin Simonds of rape, and in so doing set off a dramatic conflict between their two families that resulted in three legal trials. Here, the ambiguity in the story is part of the point. I want readers to understand that Elizabeth’s and Benjamin’s families engaged in extreme behaviors (including jury tampering) without actually knowing what happened between Elizabeth and Benjamin. In their ignorance of the truth, at least, the Pierce and Simonds families were in a position not dissimilar from that of the reader. In this case I do suspect more than I am telling, although my evidence is thin. I do think Benjamin raped Elizabeth, but I don’t think either party was telling the whole truth. Even here, however, I could not resist burying a clue for my readers. If, in my mind, the Pinson case came down to a nail, details of the Pierce case come down to a horse (see footnote 110 for the details).

In the case of Zipporah, my “verdict” is crucial to making sense of the story. I struggled with this case for years. Even a cursory reading of the court documents on which the case is based suggests a dramatic story. A group of people walking along the shore in Boston encounter the corpse of a headless baby. Upon investigation, it turns out that a black servant’s mistress had forced her to deliver her baby in secret and then bury the body of her stillborn child in the middle of the night. A colleague was kind enough to share with me supplementary documents she had located relating to the case, but I still could not put the pieces together. Yes, the outlines supported my larger argument about how families abandoned free servants who became pregnant out of wedlock. Zipporah’s mistress planned to sell her as a slave in the Caribbean. The case bothered me because it was too pat. A secret delivery, a convenient stillbirth due to prematurity, a mistress, her mother, and a midwife willing to testify that no murder had been committed. No reason for the court to pay it any further mind. As I went over and over the evidence, I started to realize that what was really bothering me was that the case did not make sense. All of the legal evidence was there to acquit Zipporah of infanticide, but that was all that was there. None of the witnesses provided the reasoning on which they based their conclusions, which was extremely unusual. No one appears to have asked who the father of the child was. The more I looked at the evidence, the more it fell apart. I had approached the documents the same way I approached all my cases—assume everyone is telling the truth until there is reason to believe otherwise. Usually, the clue that someone lied comes from disparities among the depositions. In this case, the testimony was all consistent. When I turned my first assumption on its head, however, and assumed that all of the women in the birthing room were lying about the stillbirth, the pieces started to fall into place. No one asked who the father of the baby was because he was a member of the family, and that baby was neither premature nor stillborn. In this case, a cursory reading of the documents did illustrate the point I was making. Masters and mistresses did usually abandon free servants if they became embroiled in sexual scandal by, for example, getting pregnant. Enslaving a servant and shipping her off to Barbados was a rather extreme version of that pattern, but “solving the mystery” and sharing that with my readers allowed me to demonstrate just how dark the impulse to get rid of inconvenient servants and protect family members could be.

It is that inward-looking devotion to family that is really at the heart of my book. On the surface, it is hard to imagine how strong, caring families could be problematic. In many cases, they were not. Parents and other family members watched over their sons and daughters, attempting to steer their children away from sexual sin and into strong, stable marriages. Those who lived under the watchful gaze of dense family networks may sometimes have resented prying eyes, but families were usually successful at steering younger members away from sexual crimes which could bring harsh legal consequences and damage marital prospects. Problems arose when families interacted with members of the community with whom they did not share ties of kinship. Sometimes, as was the case with Zipporah, these were servants within their own homes. Other times, such as in the Elizabeth Pierce case, those community members were part of other families. The early leaders of the Massachusetts Bay colony had gone to great lengths to set up a system of justice which would protect the rights of the accused and ensure both poor and wealthy access to impartial courts. Secular justice in the abstract was an important ideal in colonial Massachusetts. However, seventeenth-century communities lacked anything resembling a modern police force which might have played an investigative or mediating role, and the community at large was generally unwilling to fill the breach (at least in cases relating to sexual activity). The result was that court trials often played out as battles between competing families, and those families tended to put the needs of their own members before more abstract ideals of justice.

In Remembering the Civil War, Purdue University historian Caroline Janney challenges the prevailing narrative of Civil War memory, which contends that turn-of-the-century whites in the North and South achieved a sincerely desired reconciliation by setting aside past antagonisms and embracing a racist memory of the war that omitted slavery and emancipation and extolled the white masculine virtues of battlefield courage and devotion to one’s cause. In her skillful presentation that successfully synthesizes most of the recent literature on Civil War memory and delves deeply into personal papers, organizational records, government documents, and periodicals, Janney presents a Civil War generation unable to reconcile and unwilling to forget the causes for which they fought such a brutal and punishing war. Regarding the era as a pivotal moment in the history of the nation, the war generation feared that Americans born after the conflict would forget their sacrifice and worked tirelessly to shape the nation’s memory of the Civil War through commemoration. Unwilling to sacrifice their cause to achieve reconciliation, the veterans and the women of the respective sections vigorously challenged any interpretation of the past seen as injurious to their cause. These efforts, she argues, inhibited any attempt at true reconciliation, a concept she finds troublingly elusive anyway, and too amorphous for the historian to accurately identify, define, and track.

The four primary legacies that Janney identifies as emerging after the Civil War are familiar. Among white southerners, the Lost Cause held sway, which banished slavery from the scene, defined the conflict as a constitutional crisis, and honored southern soldiers for their bravery and fidelity to the southern nation in the face of overwhelming Yankee manpower and materiel advantages. For white northerners, the war had been fought to preserve the Union, with emancipation thrown in as a positive byproduct designed to crush the rebellion and eliminate the root cause of sectional strife. For most Unionists, slavery and race remained distinct issues, and celebrations of slavery’s demise did not imply a belief in racial equality or support for black civil rights. For African Americans and some northern whites, however, emancipation took center stage as the means by which the Union had been saved and the nation reborn in a true spirit of freedom. Lastly, the reconciliationist legacy—predicated on celebrating the American qualities of courage and loyal devotion to one’s cause—emerged periodically and sporadically and gained the greatest traction with the generation of Americans born after the Civil War. Poignantly, Janney reminds us that these legacies, while useful generalizations, were never clear-cut or static. In fact, individual and collective memories of the war’s meaning “were continually being created, negotiated, and renegotiated” (10). Furthermore, remembrances frequently incorporated aspects of two, three, or all four of the legacies simultaneously. Ultimately, there proved to be no compelling reason for either side to surrender its cause. Reunion—the North’s principal war aim—had been accomplished when the Confederacy capitulated, and southerners never contested this outcome. But the war left deep feelings of bitterness and resentment on both sides, and a true desire for reconciliation never emerged during the war generation’s lifetime, and certainly not by 1900. For them, reunion was enough.

Janney argues that true reconciliation required a shared memory of the war that both sides agreed on—and that this shared understanding simply never existed. She regards the outpourings of reconciliationist sentiment common at “Blue-Gray lovefests” (a term somewhat caustically applied to Union-Confederate gatherings) as having been overblown by a popular press looking for a good story, and hollow gestures at any rate. In probing the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century façade of reconciliation, she finds northerners and southerners feeling extremely wary of the other’s intentions and steadfastly willing to rise and challenge any memorial, oration, or textbook that tarnished their memory of the Civil War and the cause for which they had fought. Whatever appearance of reconciliation emerged around the turn of the century was constructed on the unspoken agreement to omit unresolved issues, such as the cause of the war, how the war was waged, or the treatment of prisoners of war. “True, heartfelt reconciliation,” she writes, “was rare indeed” (162).

If reconciliation proved difficult for the war veterans, Janney asserts that it proved impossible for women who lacked the shared experience of military service and the political or commercial incentives to at least appear to reconcile. She shows that northern and southern women—especially the latter, who remained the principal purveyors of the Lost Cause and Confederate history—proved especially hostile to the demonstrations of the brotherhood of war put on at the veterans’ gatherings and actively sought to hinder them. Women of both sections adamantly and vociferously rejected any reconciliationist gesture as a cardinal violation of the memory of their sacrifice. Even when northern and southern women worked together on common causes, such as temperance, their alliances never demanded that they abandon their view of the Civil War. In fact, some southern reformers used their sectional identity to encourage other women from the South to join in social movements, arguing that they were in fact respectable outlets for women’s energies. Interestingly, Janney’s research reveals that northern and southern men often praised these women when they assumed aggressive stances against reconciliation, providing further indication that the Blue-Gray lovefests amounted to little more than show.

This book is a worthy addition to the growing body of literature concerning the formation and expression of Civil War memory. It also provides a useful synthesis of the current literature. Historians of the period will find important counterpoints offered on several major points of historiographical consensus. Among the most notable are her contentions that the fifteen years following Appomattox were not a period of hibernation, but a pivotal moment when memories of the war formed and took root in both sections; that white southerners did not view President Abraham Lincoln as a friend of the South and did not lament his assassination; that President Andrew Johnson did not squander an opportunity to remake the South through his lenient reconstruction policies; that Confederate nationalism was a potent force that survived the war and served as the basis for the creation of a distinct regional identity; that white supremacy did not foster reconciliation, and that the Spanish-American War failed to accomplish a true reconciliation between the North and South. Her arguments are well supported in most cases, but she does tend to overstep her evidence when she asserts that Lincoln’s murder “shaped the course of Reconstruction, paving the way for Radical Republicans and nurturing the rising momentum of Confederate memory” (42). There is no compelling evidence offered to draw this broad conclusion. Also, after repeatedly warning historians against conflating terms, she conflates “Liberal Republicanism” and “reconciliation” when she claims the former’s failure to win the presidency in 1872 demonstrated a lack of feeling for the latter. While Liberal Republicanism certainly contained reconciliationist strains, this was not its primary message, and its electoral defeat should not be solely ascribed to a lack of feeling between the sections. Janney is correct in arguing that reconciliation is a difficult concept for historians to measure. For that matter, so also is its absence. This is a persuasively argued and well-written book that effectively challenges the traditional narrative of Civil War memory. However, without quantitative measurements, which are problematic in their own right, there is simply no way to know if the voices Janney brings to our attention represent the majority opinion, or simply express the intensely held views of a very vocal minority.

If a single vision of what the Civil War meant is the standard by which we should gauge reconciliation, then it appears that true reconciliation remains elusive even today. Janney argues that the Union cause became a victim of its own success; she is probably correct. The United States endured the challenge of civil war and emerged from this conflict a reunited country that stood on the doorstep of world power by the end of the nineteenth century. For the South, the former Confederate states were restored to the Union and white southerners embraced their American-ness at the same time that they used the memory of the Confederacy, divested of slavery, to carve out their own distinct regional identity. Unlike the Union, the Confederacy remains suspended in time, forever affixed to the Civil War. For many, both North and South, the “Confederacy was the Civil War” and remains so today (10). But no matter how hard the “heritage not hate” crowd may try, slavery cannot be erased from the Confederate past, just as the Confederacy cannot be separated from the war. For some the Confederate battle flag is an enduring symbol of southern distinctiveness and independence. But for others, the flag conjures memories of rebellion, racism, and injustice. The flag, like the war itself, is many things to many people, and will likely remain so for some time to come. In fact, Americans may never agree on what the war meant or how it should be properly remembered or even celebrated. If so, it seems that reconciliation, by Janney’s standard, remains a long way off. Of course, even if Americans still cannot agree on what the war meant, those who lived through the war would probably be pleased to know that we care enough to remember and to continue to disagree about what the Civil War was all about.

Michael Millner’s Fever Reading begins with the appealing idea that it “seeks to understand the meanings of reading badly” (xiii). This is a wonderful hook for an academic audience. Most of us have had to squelch feelings of being bad readers—we don’t finish books, we prefer the sexy or the scandalous to the important, we struggle to stay awake for work we know to be theoretically interesting (in both senses). At the same time, we know what good reading is: critical, objective, knowing, questioning. Millner’s examination of nineteenth-century American reading practices looks at texts that solicit emotional rather than rational responses, those devoured with feverish absorption. Such, alas, is not generally the problem with our academic practices, but the central question still appeals: can bad reading, in fact, be good political practice?

About readerly practices and their relationship to politics there is, as Millner demonstrates in this deeply researched study, much to tell and much to learn. Those of us who have engaged with histories of readership are well aware that our available scholarly models are insufficient. Theories of reading have often been a bit like theories of economics, in which rational actors respond in predictable ways to literary stimuli. More recently they have tended instead toward a model of resistance, as if every reader were always subverting hegemony even while consuming its products. The former category emphasizes reading’s role in what Jürgen Habermas called rational-critical discourse, while the latter privileges unruly, embodied emotions. Millner attempts a new structure of analysis that bridges these poles. To Habermasian public-sphere theory (in a nutshell, the idea that print culture enabled political progress via reasoned debate), Millner adds theories of affect. In particular, he engages William Reddy’s theory of “emotives:” verbalized emotions that we use to navigate the varied stimuli of our lives. Millner argues that we need to understand readerly emotion as a critical reading practice in order to grasp what it meant and means to participate in the American public sphere.

Fever Reading is divided into two parts, with the first laying out the book’s theoretical foundation and the second offering up archives for analysis. The first section gives an overview of classic public-sphere theory and some of its revisions, and deploys period texts to show that eighteenth-century authors agreed with Habermas that good reading is characterized by “critical distance (rather than the immersion and attachment characteristic of, say, popular forms of religious reading or pornographic reading)” (9). Less familiar to scholars of early America may be the review of scholarship on emotion—or “cogmotion,” as some cognitive scientists apparently call the nexus of thinking and feeling. Where literary criticism tends to interpret emotion as always either “symptomatic” or “strategic,” Millner says, the “experimental sciences” suggest that emotions “are a form of perception, even a form of critical thinking” (15-16). This is the theme to which Millner returns throughout the book: reading that looks thoughtless, indulgent, or prurient should be understood instead as potentially critical practice and as meaningful (if not necessarily effective) participation in the public sphere.

The second part of the book addresses three categories of text that have typically, Millner claims, been excluded from public-sphere theory: the obscene, the scandalous, and the religious.”What could be more antithetical to distanced, discussion-oriented, autonomy-creating, and reflective public-sphere reading than absorptive, addictive, and secretive pornographic reading?” he asks, ventriloquizing an imagined tribunal of public-sphere theorists (72). Millner’s answer, based on readers’ “double experience” of privacy and publicity, is not groundbreaking (72). Instead, as he freely acknowledges, his work joins an ongoing scholarly effort to revise the public sphere away from its rational-critical basis. Without such revision, Millner explains, “Habermasian public-sphere theory is not particularly helpful in understanding the public sensorium of modernity” (73). With it—if the “rational-critical public sphere” is understood instead as the “affective-critical public sphere”—we may develop a model that describes not only American history but also the global present, transcending Habermas’s extremely narrow (Western, middle class, implicitly white and male) formulation (144). “If there is an existing public sphere that extends beyond pockets and enclaves to reach something like a majority, it is characterized by sensation and emotion, not critical reason,” he concludes (146).

Millner’s substantive contribution toward this lofty goal is in assembling his three archives of marginalized literature. In his chapter on obscene literature, he carefully reconstructs what this category meant in nineteenth-century America by scrutinizing arrests for obscene publication. The titles mentioned in arrest reports lead him to two bodies of literature. The first, the “sporting press,” consisted of newspapers like the National Police Gazette, which ran from the 1840s through the 1870s, and shorter-lived but more expressively titled papers like the Whip, the Flash, and theBroadway Belle. These papers presented a veneer of public-mindedness while they reveled in “prostitution, celebrity, deformity, the criminal underworld, murder, and beautiful and battered bodies” (76).The other category, “obscene novelettes,” rose to prominence in the late 1840s and 1850s, as the newspapers cleaned up under official crackdowns. Millner offers examples from this genre that place public figures in compromising positions, as in the anonymous The Amorous Intrigues and Adventures of Aaron Burr (Millner labels it a “porno-bio” [88]) and a scene from George Thompson’s The Countess in which the heroine seduces Harry Rush, rakish son of Benjamin. By putting public life and obscenity into conversation (criminal or otherwise), this literature generated its own structure of reading. It focused on current events and political figures, emphasizing “a simultaneity of information and readership”; it also positioned readers as participants in an anonymous community (81). So far, the structure of reading matches that credited with creating publics in classic public-sphere theory. On the other hand, the politicians who appeared in these works were not debating policy but vomiting drunkenly or visiting brothels. The news “isn’t offered for analysis, interpretation, or critical reflection as much as it’s presented to elicit reactions we usually associate with the body: disgust, loathing, exhilaration, thrill, arousal” (81). The readers become observers and critics of society through their visceral reaction to texts.

Millner shows that his second archive, scandal texts, gained new importance in the mid-nineteenth century. While print has perhaps always been used to tell secrets and lies about people, it was in this period that scandal became “mediated.” It moved, as a concept, from society whispers into printed pages, and print became a creator (rather than a spreader) of intrigue. Scandal looks like “the public sphere gone bad”: “Instead of truth and agency, the scandal sphere seems to offer little more than highly manipulated spectacle meant for easy consumption; it is often perceived as a product of the culture industry masquerading as news and information” (95). This perception is more or less what Millner demonstrates in the course of the chapter. The highly popular Awful Disclosures, by Maria Monk of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal, for example, claimed to draw aside the pious veil of a religious institution to reveal an abusive brothel. It inspired a bevy of “refutations, refutations of refutations, sequels, and copycat books” (110) that, taken together, relegate the concept of reliable narrative to the realm of naïve illusion. Scandal literature suggested secrets everywhere; it also represented the power of print media to create intrigue where there might have been none to discover. Participants in such a culture could hardly expect to weigh evidence objectively and come to rational conclusions. Instead, they had to feel their way between trust and mistrust. Here Millner notes that affective reading is not always a liberating alternative to the detached kind, and it might not yield political effectiveness. “This situation isn’t necessarily one to celebrate. It is simply a reality. In a society of complex decision-making processes, democracy is grounded, not on communicative reason, but on some of the most fundamental feelings of trust and mistrust that may be circulated through the media” (118-119). The conclusion is commonsensical, especially when we think about our own media culture, but it is nevertheless refreshing in a field that is often tempted to view non-normative public engagement as progress.

The final category is evangelical texts, designed to move the heart rather than engage rationality. The Second Great Awakening promoted images of embodied reaction, as converts wept, babbled, and collapsed under the influence of spiritual fervor. This doesn’t at first look like a rational-critical public sphere, but readers of these texts debated and questioned what they read according to public-sphere norms. Millner presents a fascinating archive of these practices: the notes of colporteurs who distributed Bibles and tracts in the New Jersey Pine Barrens in the 1840s. They recorded useful numbers—how many people had Bibles, how many read them, how many accepted tracts—as well as pithy anecdotes about cantankerous villagers (one “‘can scarce buy rum much less a bible'”) and, of course, much weeping (124). Tears produced by religious reading are, as Miller notes, a cliché of the genre, but he offers a compelling interpretation. Readers approach the texts as part of the public sphere, subjecting them to analysis and debate. At the same time, the religious works point to an absence: rituals and meaning lacking in secular life. The crying—the distillation of affective response—is a critical response to the public sphere itself.

The (good) reader who finishes Millner’s book is left convinced that emotional response is an element of public-sphere participation, and a necessary topic for further study. His evidence makes clear that when literary historians postulate either ideal or subversive readers, we miss the many more varied and complex responses solicited by texts, and so fail to understand the ways those texts operated in the world. The frustration with this kind of work is acknowledged by Millner: we can deduce structures of reading from texts, but the experience of the individual reader—the heart of the matter—will always elude us. (A few readers made records of their reading experiences, but these are vanishingly rare and by nature atypical.) Still, Millner’s careful analyses represent a significant step toward understanding reading cultures generally, that of nineteenth-century America in particular, and our own media moment. Perhaps the “experimental sciences” will one day offer tools that let scholars peer into the minds and brains of readers past. Millner shows what they have to offer literary history in the present: a set of concepts that enables a scholar to revisit an outmoded construct, take up the trusty tools of archival research and close reading, and begin to rebuild it.

Sarah Nehama’s catalogue In Death Lamented was published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name that she curated at the Massachusetts Historical Society. The topic is mourning jewelry—ornaments produced in honor of a deceased person—a genre that scholars have often overlooked for its macabre and maudlin associations. Nehama traces the changing forms and cultural uses of mourning jewelry in America from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. She draws her examples primarily from the holdings of the MHS, but supplements them with pieces from her own private collection.

Nehama brings the precise eye of a jeweler to the project. The strength of the catalogue lies in her exacting and detailed analyses of individual objects. These textual descriptions are well matched by the spectacular and copious photographs that allow readers to see Nehama’s points clearly for themselves. From the twisting black enameled band of the rococo mourning ring, to the hair-infused ivory landscape of the neoclassical locket, to the paste and jet enhanced curls of the Gothic Revival brooch, mourning jewelry has never looked so good. Nehama’s work as a jeweler may also have shaped her exploration of the changing materials used to create mourning jewelry and her detailed explanations of modes of manufacture. A fascinating sidebar in the catalogue, for example, shows the stages in the creation of a Georgian-style enameled mourning ring, as completed by contemporary jeweler Will Francis. Thanks to this step-by-step explanation, these seemingly simple gold bands—embellished with enameled decoration that included the name and age of the deceased—prove to be surprisingly complex. The catalogue gives the viewer a sense of these bands’ three-dimensionality and their luxury, elements that are difficult to convey without direct contact. This emphasis upon craftsmanship was complemented in the exhibition by the display of a hair braiding tool: a stool made into a loom upon which hair could be braided or twined. Such an apparatus makes clear exactly how intricate those patterns of hair commonly featured in nineteenth-century mourning jewelry, such as the lover’s knot, actually were to produce.

Nehama organizes the catalogue chronologically. Each chapter begins with a brief historical essay and then breaks out to individual catalogue entries, a format that allows the author to fully elucidate stylistic trends in mourning jewelry. She is also attentive to developments in craft as a result of new manufacturing processes, as well as changing mourning traditions. Moving from the seventeenth century through the postbellum period, the author deftly draws connections between jewelry and the larger iconography of funerals, tombstones, and the etiquette of mourning. Mourning jewelry also clearly exhibits stylistic influences from other forms of jewelry and underwent significant alterations as new media penetrated the form. In particular, Nehama’s arguments for the relationship between representation (portraiture and mourning scenes) and jewelry show the complex constellation of practices and influences that shaped mourning jewelry. Nehama explains how the portrait and mourning miniature’s rise in popularity over the eighteenth century resulted in the growing size of mourning brooches and lockets, detailing that “In order to accommodate the size of these miniatures, jewelry settings—both the bezel and the band—had to change substantially” (44). Similarly, the rise of photography in the nineteenth century and the desire to incorporate the daguerreotype also shaped the appearance of mourning jewelry as “jewelry forms evolved to house photographs, making it possible for mourners to wear them” (74).

Throughout the catalogue, Nehama shows how densely enmeshed mourning jewelry was in larger patterns of life. Not aberrant objects produced only for funerals or created for grieving widows, mourning rings, lockets, brooches, and a plethora of other forms were items of everyday life for elites and increasingly, by the nineteenth century, those in the middle classes. They exhibit the patina of age and the effects of being handled and worn. In fact, the catalogue so convincingly places these artifacts within the texture of everyday life that the designation of mourning jewelry becomes problematic. To what extent is the category of mourning jewelry a function of the current collecting market that does not ultimately help to explain period practice? How separate were these items from regular jewelry and tokens of sentiment? Locks of hair snipped from a child’s head as tokens of affection might all too soon be added to a mourning brooch so that parents could remember a lost toddler. Similarly, daguerreotypes exchanged by young lovers or husbands and wives and made into a locket could take on a memorial function after an untimely death. Is mourning jewelry not defined by the intended function at the time of manufacture, but rather by the use to which the owner put a piece of jewelry? Such slippages encourage us to wonder how separate these items were from “regular” jewelry. That mourning jewelry’s styles paralleled shifts in other kinds of jewelry only complicates its position as a distinct form.

Although the author’s painstaking genealogical research anchors individual artifacts in time and space, it would have made the catalogue stronger to have a firmer grounding in actual behaviors and the specific uses of mourning jewelry. Nehama seems to take for granted that these artifacts were always primarily intended to forge a personal and emotional connection between the wearer and the deceased. Certainly mourning jewelry fulfilled this memorial role, yet how exactly did it do so? Recent works on hair jewelry have started to explore hair’s physical qualities and the symbolic associations that allowed hair to play a special role in sparking sentiment. These kinds of more metaphorical associations are missing in Nehama’s analysis. Also overlooked are the potential multiple functions of mourning jewelry. As Nehama notes, but does not fully explore, these items indicated a wearer’s status (as suggested by the fact that desire expanded over time to include those of the middle classes). They could also be used as tools of nation building—for example, those many mourning pieces that were created upon the deaths of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. The catalogue even traces the ways that mourning jewelry could function as a tool of international diplomacy, as in the ring for Tsar Alexander I and Empress Elizabeth of Russia that was presented to Louisa Catherine Adams, who had befriended the couple while her husband, John Quincy Adams, served as the U.S. Minister to Russia. What impact might these other uses have had upon the development of the form?

The catalogue also raises interesting questions about gender, demographics, and transatlantic connections. Nehama notes that by the nineteenth century, women were “regarded as the primary ‘observers’ of a family’s grief,” and the catalogue suggests, though it does not explicitly state, that women were the primary wearers and consumers of these objects (72). This gendered association is highlighted by the inclusion of a few pieces of jewelry specifically for men including a stickpin (tie pin) and cufflinks. Nehama mentions other forms of mourning jewelry that are “distinctly masculine,” such as “watch fobs, and watch chains,” yet these are the only examples she gives. Are these forms less common because men were less likely to wear mourning jewelry? Did mourning jewelry become associated with women because of women’s growing role in the nineteenth century as keepers of the home and the family? The number of mourning rings made to commemorate young children and unmarried adults is a similar theme that emerges, but that is also never fully elucidated. (Interestingly, these were composed of white rather than traditional black enamel in order to connote the deceased’s innocence.) Do these examples point to a larger trend? Were mourning rings more commonly made to memorialize children than other deceased people? If so, does this suggest that mourning jewelry was intended in part to help those left behind to grieve during particularly emotionally devastating deaths?

Finally, the geographic parameters of the catalogue suggest possible questions of cross-cultural influence and the relatively limited audience for mourning jewelry. The designation “Anglo-American” is a loose one, and the catalogue interweaves rings produced in England with those of American manufacture without always distinguishing whether these items were made in England and used in North America, or if they are solely English examples. More careful attention to geographic location might have illuminated transatlantic connections as well as potential divergences between mourning jewelry made in England versus America. Considering the specific audience for these pieces might also have shed light on their function. What was it about this jewelry that appealed to Anglo-American elites and not Native Americans or African Americans? Was it solely expense that kept these groups from purchasing mourning jewelry (suggesting its importance in status definition), or was it related to divergences in burial practice and mourning traditions?

In Death Lamented raises many questions that I hope other scholars of early America will pursue. With its careful descriptions and seductive photographs, this catalogue should be a call to arms for museum professionals to put more mourning jewelry out on display and for scholars to give these artifacts greater attention. There is good reason to think that this will happen. The catalogue participates in two growing trends: works of American history that study how past peoples viewed and treated death, funeral rituals, and interments, and studies in art history and the decorative arts that take seriously jewelry, and more specifically hair jewelry. As scholars continue to pull apart the connections between mourning jewelry and the complex cultural practices that shaped it, the seeming conundrum of beautifully embellished rings becoming repositories of painful sentiment is one that promises to yield great historical insights.