I'm pasting a description of No Useless Mouth below. I hope that this AMA will be part book club, part regular AMA; the book is Open Access (free for readers to download) here: https://cornellopen.org/9781501716126/no-useless-mouth/, so if you've had time to read it, I'd love to answer you questions about the book. If you haven't had time, that's totally okay, too. I look forward to answering your general questions about Native Americans' and enslaved peoples' experiences with food and hunger in the mainland British colonies, Nova Scotia, and Sierra Leone from the 1750s to the 1810s. Here are links to two podcasts I've appeared on recently if you want a quick intro to this material:
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In 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.
Thank you so much for joining us for this AMA today, especially as I know that faculty at Cardiff and a number of other UK institutions are currently striking. Although not related to the book per se, I was hoping that you might be able to talk a little bit about the issues which are driving this, and what reforms the Union is hoping to see come from it? Thanks!
Thanks for doing this! Was there any discourse in this period about the morality of using hunger as a tactic in war and diplomacy? Was it seen as a standard tool of states to use in these circumstances, or was there a sense that it was a less honourable/humane/civilised option?
Thanks for doing this AMA! I just put the book on hold at my library and look forward to reading it. Did you work uncover how parents thought about their children's hunger or what children thought about the lack or presence of food in their lives? That is, could you shed light on the impact of these decisions by adults on children? Thanks!
Hi! Thanks for doing this AMA. What sorts of staple foods were common in North America at this time, and how tied to seasonal cycles? Was most food obtained during harvest season, or was there ample fishing and hunting available as well?
Hi, and thanks.
I’m interested in the historiography of this. How did the first US historians discuss hunger in this period? Were they aware of the use of hunger as a tool of conflict and diplomacy? Deny it? Downplay it?
Basically- Was there any time before the subaltern turn in history that major historians would have acknowledged the hardships inflicted upon Native Americans and Blacks by the exploitation of food sources by settler communities?
Thank you greatly for this fascinating AMA. I've been reading through the book over the past week and really found it interesting.
What made you decide to put it out in Open Access? As a big fan of the method, have you noticed it working differently compared to other publishing methods?
More on the subject matter, was there much in the way of personal gardens like what we might recognize these days? Or was it all more like communal plots/farms?
Hi, thanks for doing this AMA! Was there any noticeable effect on food security for due to the revolutionary war on the British colonies, like Canada or the Caribbean, and even Great Britain itself?
Hi! Thank you for doing this. How important was rum during the American Revolution?
Hello Dr, and thank you for this AMA! I haven't been able to read your book yet but was able to look at the table of contents. I'm wondering if you might be able to explain more about how food was used during diplomacy? Was it like some kind of bribe, gift or 'grease' to smooth along proceeding? or something more fundamental?