Julia Brock's "Closed Seasons"

Julia Brock is assistant professor of history at the University of Alabama.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Closed Seasons: The Transformation of Hunting in the Modern South, with the following results:

Page 99 of Closed Seasons: The Transformation of Hunting in the Modern South brings us into Chapter 3, which tells the story of Charlie Young (1883-1970), an African American hunter, dog trainer, and hunting guide who spent most of his life and career in southwest Georgia. The page itself offers analysis on how Young’s position served the priorities and preferences of elite white sportsmen, who used black subordinates as part of their enactment of hunting pageantry. The page also quotes Young, who wrote a short memoir in 1964 reminiscing on his time as a hunter and hunting guide, reflecting on historical change in his corner of the U.S. South. His voice reveals the deep joy he took in hunting and dog training, and acts as a counterpoint to the meaning of the hunt imposed by wealthy sportsmen.

Page 99 then, highlights a central tension in Closed Seasons: the attempts by sportsmen in the early twentieth century to make the natural world fit their priorities–one open to hunting for sport yet often closed to those who hunted purely for subsistence or the market. These elite hunters, who sincerely argued on behalf of imperiled species, made bogeymen of “pothunters,” market hunters, and black men, and campaigned successfully for laws that reinforced their exclusive access to field and prey. Yet rural, non-elite southern hunters, black and white, cherished their own meaning of the hunt and struggled to assert their right to keep hunting traditions intact, often by refusing to follow new, Progressive-era laws. The book follows the evolution of game and fish laws with a close eye on the social imagination of conservation advocates, the response by everyday southerners, the changing field of wildlife science, and the increasing role of the federal government in wildlife protection.

Learn more about Closed Seasons at the University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue