HUNTING & AMERICAN IMAGINATION

There are some problems in Herman's book. For one thing, it's unfortunate that Herman cites Michael Bellesiles' Arming America two or three times. Herman seems to have bought Bellesiles' arguments about how scarce guns were in early American history (maybe Herman sent his book to press before Clayton Cramer shot down Bellesiles' "facts" in American Rifleman).

On the other hand, I was convinced by Herman's arguments that early Americans had mixed attitudes about hunting. Colonists thought that white men who became full-time hunters were too much like Indians, especially since farming, for colonists, justified the acquisition of Indian hunting grounds. Herman's argument that Enlightenment philosophers and statesmen often regarded hunting as uncivilized and/or cruel also has merit (here's a little fact that Herman could have used: Thomas Jefferson kept a deer park but never hunted the deer!).

More importantly, Herman's central theme - that in the nineteenth century hunters became indigenous American heroes, or as Herman says, "American Natives" - is on the mark. The best chapters in the book are about Lewis and Clark and Daniel Boone as "American Natives." The chapter on the first promoter of sport hunting in America, Henry William Herbert, is also fascinating, as is Herman's discussion of women hunters in chapter 16.

If you like history, Hunting and the American Imagination is provocative and well worth reading.


For the Thoughtful Hunter   November 18, 2001
 1 out of 1 found this review helpful

Herman has written a fascinating book that examines how Americans have thought about hunting over the centuries. He shows that colonial Americans were ambivalent about hunting; that Revolutionary patriots celebrated hunters as defenders of natural rights; and that popular writers made hunter heroes into paragons of both modernity and tradition during the nineteenth-century market revolution. Herman (like historian John Reiger) also shows that hunters loved land and animals long before the word "environmentalism" was ever heard.

As someone who has given some thought to hunting's history, I would add a few things that Herman left out: for one, Herman might have discussed the attitudes of Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln toward hunting. Both men deplored it. I'm not sure that I buy Herman's argument that the nineteenth-century popularity of sport hunting and the eagerness for the Civil War were related, given the attitudes of Davis and Lincoln.

Herman also should have given more information on settlers' tendency to kill off or drive away game from Indian hunting grounds. Thomas Jefferson commented on this, as did Tocqueville, William Henry Harrison, Philip Schuyler, and numerous others. More info on this would have strengthened Herman's arguments.

Those are small flaws. My judgment is: if you are a hunter or a history buff, you should read this book. It's well-researched, nicely written, and philosophical.