Rachel B. Herrmann is Lecturer in Modern American History at Cardiff University. She is the editor of To Feast on Us as Their Prey.
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 *