No Useless Mouth

Reviews / Votes

Herrmann's work points researchers in constructive directions. There is reason to believe that No Useless Mouth will become a standard introduction to food history. Herrmann deserves high praise for attempting this expansive study and, what's more, with limited conceptual guidance. She deserves yet more for completing this significant contribution to our understanding of power relations in a turbulent period in Atlantic-world history.

(H-War) Sweeping in scope yet tightly focused on a meticulously driven methodology, Rachel B. Herrmann's No Useless Mouth points the way toward new historiographical directions. Herrmann takes a new and innovative turn, diving into the archives to parse out the ways that this power intersected with attempts to declare, maintain, and control food sovereignty. What results is a fascinating journey into a history that many if not most readers of these pages today have left behind generations ago-the battle over hunger.

(Early American Literature) No Useless Mouth is an important study that reveals how entwined hunger and power were in the long American Revolution. Further, Hermann does commendable work in elucidating how American Indians and, to a lesser extent, the formerly enslaved retained agency throughout the period through expression of the hunger behaviors of food diplomacy, victual warfare, and victual imperialism. The monograph would be an excellent companion to any survey related to the experience of American Indians in the mid-eighteenth through early nineteenth century.

(American Indian Quarterly) No Useless Mouth is an ambitious book about hunger, war, power, and conflict in the British colonial world. Herrmann persuasively shows that the study of hunger allows us to reread the writings of British negotiators, American military officers, and colonial governors and to see how food diplomacy and victual warfare were not just strategies of the powerful but could also be employed against these same officials as deliberate survival strategies. Struggles over food and hunger were tools of empowerment and resistance for Native American and enslaved communities.

(William & Mary Quarterly) 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 synthesis-all based on extensive archival research-produced a monograph simultaneously rich, audacious, insightful, lively, and provocative.

(The Journal of American History) [E]nvironmental historians, especially ones in dialogue with Indigenous studies, will be interested in how No Useless Mouth relates hunger to larger changes in land use and ownership. No Useless Mouth demonstrates how studies of hunger are always studies of power.

(Environmental History) Herrmann analyzes a vast range of archival sources-predominantly military in origin-for evidence of [Indigenous nations and peoples of African descent] experience of hunger changed over time. Brisling with provocative insights regarding the roles played by food in cross-cultural relations, settler colonialism, declension narratives, and the time and geography of the revolution itself, her wide-ranging study adds much to our understanding of how the American Revolution transformed the Atlantic World until circa 1810. [S]he has made a persuasive case for how an informed appreciation of how [hunger-prevention initiatives] can illuminate the ways in which power relations between white and nonwhite populations changed over time.

(American Historical Review) Rachel B. Herrmann brings new nuance to the American Revolutionary period. Her book is a worthy addition to the bookshelves of serious scholars of the American Revolution, especially those interested in Indigenous and Black history.

(Hudson River Valley Review) One of the strengths of Herrmann's book is the broad topical and chronological vista on the Revolutionary era that she presents. Along with her portrait of the Haudenosaunee, she illustrates how Cherokee and Creek Indians in southeastern America fought against the Americans in a vicious cycle of victual warfare.

(Journal of British Studies)