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The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America By Andrés Reséndez (review)

dogged research in disparate source bases. The range of sources used in this book is impressive: among them, judicial and legal records, periodicals and newspapers, plays and novels, petitions, slave narratives, abolitionist tracts, religious texts, coroners’ inquests, and ship logs, all of which, in some way, shed light on ideas, representations, and incidents of slave suicide. Snyder’s monograph is a model for how to mine and read sparse and equivocal evidence. With great analytical precision and patience, she interrogates her stingy sources for maximum results. Take Snyder’s close reading of eighteenth-century coroners’ reports, from which she teases out a link between slaves’ purported temperamental stubbornness, willful selfdestruction, and challenges to racial and social hierarchies. A less careful scholar might have glanced at the words used in the inquests and missed their larger meaning. Yet Snyder respects the limitations of her parsimonious sources and does not ascribe meaning to acts when her evidence is not forthcoming or clear. As a result, the author resists the recent methodological trend referred to as evocative history in which scholars liberally draw from a variety of sources, then patch together an imagined conversation or speculative circumstances to fill in the holes or gaps in the evidence. Rather than blurring the lines between fiction and nonfiction, imputing motive where motive is not evident or extrapolating meaning from a slave suicide when the record is silent, Snyder stays true to her sources and resists the temptation to supplement or embellish them. To her credit, she weaves those disparate sources together to craft a convincing, smart analysis that argues slave suicide had far-reaching cultural and political implications. Diane Miller Sommerville