Title: Beastly natures : animals, humans, and the study of history /
Authors: Brantz, Dorothee.
Publisher: University of Virginia Press,
Year: 2010
Subjects: Human-animal relationships History; Animals Social aspects History.
Abstract: ""This new collection is a thoughtful menagerie. The essays collected here offer a fresh way of looking at animals in their context, and give us a whole new way of doing natural history. The boundaries between humans and animals are provocatively redrawn."--Stephen T. Asma, Columbia College, author of Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums" "Although the animal may be, as Nietzsche argued, ahistorical, living completely in the present, it nonetheless plays a crucial role in human history. The fascination with animals that leads not only to a desire to observe and even live alongside them, but to capture or kill them, is found in all civilizations. The essays collected in Beastly Natures show how animals have been brought into human culture, literally helping to build our societies (as domesticated animals have done) or contributing, often in problematic ways, to our concept of the wild." "The book begins with a group of essays that approach the historical relevance of human-animal relations seen from the perspectives of various disciplines and suggest ways in which animals might be brought into formal studies of history. Differences in species and location can greatly affect the shape of human-animal interaction, and so the essays that follow address a wide spectrum of topics, including the demanding fate of the working horse, the complex image of the American alligator (at turns a dangerous predator and a tourist attraction), the zoo gardens of Victorian England, the iconography of the rhinoceros and the preference it reveals in society for myth over science, relations between humans and wolves in Europe, and what we can learn from society's enthusiasm for "political" animals, such as the pets of the American presidents and the Soviet Union's "space dogs." Taken together, these essays suggest new ways of looking not only at animals but at human history."--Jacket.
Contents: Does "the animal" exist? Toward a theory of social life with animals / Susan J. Pearson and Mary Weismantel -- Touching animals : the search for a deeper understanding of animals / Nigel Rothfels -- Wolves in sheep's (and others') clothing / Garry Marvin -- Darwin in the monkey cage : the zoological garden as a medium of evolutionary theory / Oliver Hochadel -- Why the rhinoceros doesn't talk : the cultural life of a wild animal in America / Kelly Enright -- The alligator's allure : changing perceptions of a charismatic carnivore / Mark V. Barrow Jr. -- Nature bridled : the treatment and training of horses in early modern England / Peter Edwards -- The public and private lives of "first dogs" : Warren G. Harding's Laddie Boy and Franklin D. Roosevelt's Fala / Helena Pycior -- The legacy of Laika : celebrity, sacrifice, and the Soviet space dogs / Amy Nelson -- The horse in the nineteenth-century American city / Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr -- "Poor dumb brutes" or "friends in need"? Animals and river floods in modern Germany and the United States / Uwe Lübken -- Counting sheep in the English Lake District : rare breeds, local knowledge, and environmental history / Harriet Ritvo.