Rachel B. Herrmann – författare

"Rachel B. Herrmann's No Useless Mouth is truly a breath of fresh air in the way it aligns food and hunger as the focal point of a new lens to reexamine the American Revolution. Her careful scrutiny, inclusive approach, and broad synthesisâ•all based on extensive archival researchâ•produced a monograph simultaneously rich, audacious, insightful, lively, and provocative."â•The Journal of American HistoryIn the era of the American Revolution, the rituals of diplomacy between the British, Patriots, and Native Americans featured gifts of food, ceremonial feasts, and a shared experience of hunger. When diplomacy failed, Native Americans could destroy food stores and cut off supply chains in order to assert authority. Black colonists also stole and destroyed food to ward off hunger and carve out tenuous spaces of freedom. Hunger was a means of power and a weapon of war.In No Useless Mouth, Rachel B. Herrmann argues that Native Americans and formerly enslaved black colonists ultimately lost the battle against hunger and the larger struggle for power because white British and United States officials curtailed the abilities of men and women to fight hunger on their own terms. By describing three interrelated behaviors-food diplomacy, victual imperialism, and victual warfare-the book shows that, during this tumultuous period, hunger prevention efforts offered strategies to claim power, maintain communities, and keep rival societies at bay.Herrmann shows how Native Americans, free blacks, and enslaved peoples were "useful mouths"-not mere supplicants for food, without rights or power-who used hunger for cooperation and violence, and took steps to circumvent starvation. Her wide-ranging research on black Loyalists, Iroquois, Cherokee, Creek, and Western Confederacy Indians demonstrates that hunger creation and prevention were tools of diplomacy and warfare available to all people involved in the American Revolution. Placing hunger at the center of these struggles foregrounds the contingency and plurality of power in the British Atlantic during the Revolutionary Era.Thanks to generous funding from Cardiff University, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

Explores how and why people manipulated borders in the early modern Atlantic worldClaiming Land, Claiming Water shares what historians and geographers wish readers knew about maps and borders before, during, and after the founding of the United States. The essays collected in this volume model how people can learn to interpret maps as arguments, rather than as historical facts, and to read maps for evidence of people and places that were elided, renamed, or destroyed.Contributors travel through the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries in the place known by many names: the Atlantic World; the North American continent; borderlands; and homelands. Onto this place where people exercised power over space by forging relationships, colonizers came and imagined borders onto maps. Featuring reproductions of twenty historical maps, the book takes readers through this era of immense disruption to teach them strategies for reading and interpreting these maps critically. Essays attend carefully to water alongside land and land alongside water in search of new interpretive avenues that reframe what we know about space, control, and sovereignty.By using historical examples of people—farmers, fishers, hunters, religious leaders, colonial projectors, traders, sailors, soldiers, diplomats, and cartographers, it becomes possible to resist the temptation to impose modern geographical constructs backwards onto the histories we read, teach, and write. Claiming Land, Claiming Water investigates why some of these people imagined and made claims to bounded space, and how and why other people confounded and challenged those claims.Contributors: Sarah Chute, Edward G. Gray, Kim M. Gruenwald, Rachel B. Herrmann, Christian J. Koot, Chad McCutchen, Jennifer Monroe McCutchen, John Morton, Paul Musselwhite, Charles Prior, Karen Rann, Jessica Choppin Roney, Samuel Truett, Harvey Amani Whitfield, Alex Zukas.