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Brad D Lookingbill, Taking the Field: Soldiers, Nature, and Empire on American Frontiers, Journal of American History, Volume 111, Issue 3, December 2024, Pages 595–596, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaae217
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Taking the Field is a special kind of environmental history that illuminates the intermingling of U.S. soldiers, specimen collections, and imperial circuits around the end of the nineteenth century. Amy Kohout, contemplates the complicated process of knowledge production while examining a handful of transnational sources that reveal the assumptions surrounding U.S. colonialism. Even if many Americans became more removed from nature through industrialization and urbanization, military personnel found themselves facing “frontiers” of conquest on the continental mainland and in the Philippine archipelago. The perspectives shared by “agents of empire” insinuated continuities between armed actions on both sides of the Pacific Ocean (p. 17). As Kohout argues, the circulation of these discourses revealed “the shape, reach, and texture of U.S. empire and especially how ideas about nature became further entangled with understandings of imperial work, even in sites far from fields and battlefields” (p. 15).
Keeping the labor of men in uniform in mind, Kohout details how they identified, collected, and preserved the flora and fauna of faraway places. A few reproduced the violence of displacement, relocation, and extraction in occupied territories. For example, Bluecoats in the Black Hills and the Yellowstone Valley wrote letters about a barren, empty, and savage landscape. At the same time, they manned outposts to subdue Indigenous populations such as the Lakota Sioux. Elsewhere, Edgar Alexander Mearns, an army surgeon and amateur ornithologist, catalogued specimens at Fort Verde, while Apache bands on the reservation wore metal tags. The same types of collection practices, in other words, affected birds, artifacts, and living people. When Mearns later reached the tropical island of Mindanao, he listed the numbers of Moro fighters killed in action alongside the names of exotic birds shot and collected. Many items were shipped to the Smithsonian Institution, where they fulfilled the visions of progressive thinkers.
