In 1909, after the end of his second term as president, Theodore Roosevelt went on safari in Africa with his son Kermit. Financed by Andrew Carnegie and a $50,000 advance from Scribner’s Magazine, the Roosevelts travelled from Kenya to the Sudan, sending back samples to the Smithsonian as they went. The African porters gave the paunchy ex-President a mocking nickname, Bwana Tumbo (“Mister Stomach”) in Swahili. When he overheard and asked what it meant, they told him it was “the man with the unerring aim.” Perhaps the joke was also metaphorical, since Roosevelt did have quite the appetite—and stomach—for shooting things. By the end of the trip, he and Kermit had personally bagged 11 elephants, 17 lions, and 20 rhinos.

THE FAIR CHASE: THE EPIC STORY OF HUNTING IN AMERICA by Philip Dray Basic Books, 416 pp., $32.00

A century ago, these hunting exploits made Roosevelt the toast of the American press—a reaction that is hard to understand today, when social attitudes toward trophy hunting have sharply reversed. As for attitudes toward hunting more generally, the picture is complicated: Some 70 percent of Americans say they approve of it, but only a small proportion now regularly do it themselves—around 12.5 million a year. Meanwhile, the cultural politics of hunting have become thornily intertwined with debates over guns and gun control. Liberals frequently concede a right to bear arms for hunting (although the Constitution specifies no such thing) and conservatives often present gun ownership for hunting and self-defense as politically indistinguishable (even though many hunters support various gun control measures, and self-defense, not hunting, is now the primary stated reason for gun ownership in America).

In his lively and compelling book The Fair Chase: The Epic Story of Hunting in America, Philip Dray acknowledges these tensions, deepening and complicating them by putting them in historical context. His book offers a capacious and erudite history of the practice and meanings of hunting in American life, from settlers trapping beaver on the Colonial frontier to twenty-first century fights over land use and endangered species. If any book might possibly foster “dialogue between nonhunting lovers of nature and adherents of the chase,” The Fair Chase is it. Written with sensitivity and bracketed judgment, it describes a culture and asks questions, telling a story full of paradoxes and nuance.

Hunting in America has always been criss-crossed by social and political faultlines. Like many popular and longstanding American phenomena—from football to racing cars—hunting and its roots are simultaneously aristocratic yet plebian, aspirational and visceral all at once. On the one hand, from the start, American settlers hunted as a matter of day-to-day survival, and appropriated the techniques of Native Americans to that end. But Americans were also drawn to the glamour and cachet of aristocratic British hunting culture. This combination produced a uniquely American hunting culture that was at once cosmopolitan yet local, patrician yet democratic. And what became a core part of the American identity for some, others have strongly rejected.

In England, hunting had long been a pursuit of royal courts and wealthy nobles. Like her father, Henry VIII, Queen Elizabeth adored hunting, and did it in on horseback well into her late seventies. With a keen eye for colorful detail, Dray narrates the elaborate rituals of the English hunting tradition, and samples its rich vocabulary, from “nouns of assembly” (“a sloth of bears” or “a business of ferrets”) to nomenclature (a six-year-old stag that evades a king or queen is dubbed “a hart royal proclaimed”) to flowery euphemisms for different kinds of scat. (Bears, it turns out, do not shit in the woods: They leave “lesses”).