Dominik Ohrem - Böcker

This set of five volumes offers scholars and students a selection of historical source materials thematically arranged and edited to provide an overview of key phenomena and developments pertaining to animals and human-animal relations in long-nineteenth-century U.S. society. Subjects include contemporary debates about human-animal difference and their interweaving with the politics of race, gender, and sexuality; the emergence and development of animal advocacy; labour and travel with animals; urbanisation and animals in the American city; pet culture; animal-focused forms of entertainment and competition; institutions of animal display; hunting; and the evolving debate about (anthropogenic) extinction. A general introduction and five elaborate volume introductions bring the collected materials into conversation with current research in historical animal studies, the environmental humanities, and related fields, illustrating how Americans have imagined, managed, and contested the place of animals within U.S. society across the long nineteenth century.

Volume I traces the significance of animals, and the "problem" of animality, within the currents of U.S. social and scientific thought during a period marked by a rapid expansion of American and transatlantic print culture. It provides insights into how evolving ideas about animal intelligence, sociality, morality, and language interacted with contemporary notions of human nature in ways that could be mobilised both to defend and to challenge traditional claims to human uniqueness and rigid distinctions between human and animal life.

Volume II continues the discussion of animals/animality in U.S. social and scientific thought to address the ways in which the nexus of ideas surrounding human-animal distinctions became intertwined with interhuman hierarchies and power relations, including through the synergistic dynamics between race and species as co-implicating “taxonomies of power” (Claire Jean Kim) that informed both chattel slavery and settler violence against Indigenous peoples. A second section traces the evolution of animal advocacy from early individual voices to the formation of an organised movement following the Civil War, documenting a shift – however limited by structural constraints – from largely anthropocentric concerns with the social consequences of human cruelty towards other creatures to a broader moral consideration for nonhuman animals in their own right.

Volume III hones in on the relations between humans and domesticated animals in U.S. society, illuminating how these relations were integral to key developments of the long nineteenth century. A first section explores the role of domesticated animals in what for most of the nineteenth century remained a predominantly agrarian world (albeit one undergoing significant change), focussing on the labour and products that could be extracted from animal bodies, the “education” of working animals, contemporary attempts at “improving” animal breeds to increase agricultural productivity and market value, the rise of veterinary medicine, and other topics. The second section demonstrates that, the “transportation revolution” of the antebellum decades notwithstanding, animals remained essential for moving around goods and people in both rural areas and the growing U.S. cityscapes, where horses powered everything from carriages to streetcars, as well as in other nineteenth-century contexts that relied on equine, bovine, and, sometimes, canine traction. A third and final section is centred on domesticated animals in entertainment and competitive settings, ranging from the prestigious if embattled sport of Thoroughbred horse racing to pigeon fancying and the brutal spectacles of dog- and cockfighting, which quickly became the target of a spirited post-Civil War anticruelty movement.

Volume IV comprises two sections dealing, respectively, with the development of pet culture and its evolution as a cultural institution over the course of the long nineteenth century, and with the variegated presence of domesticated (and feralised) animals in U.S. cities. Closely tied to the antebellum rise of the American middle-class family and the sentimentalisation of (certain) human-animal relationships, by the turn of the twentieth century American petkeeping had become the target of an expansive industry that offered everything from gourmet pet foods and fashionable accessories to healthcare and boarding services. This proliferation of companion animals also had a significant impact on urban life. Besides walking, sitting, or lying on sidewalks and being sold in city stores and on street corners, in cases of abandonment the animals swelled an ever-increasing population of canine and feline strays. Together with horses, pigs, cows, chicken, and urban wildlife, these animals fundamentally shaped the routines, rhythms, and general experience of nineteenth-century urban life for human city dwellers.

Volume V covers three key areas of interaction and concern that shaped Americans’ relations with wild animals. The sources in section one focus on hunting – a practice that among early republicans was still associated with the “savage” existence of Indigenous peoples and regarded as incompatible with the agrarian virtues they deemed essential, yet which eventually became emblematic of settler identity and masculinity and tangled up in the politics of race and class. The second section examines practices and sites of animal display – natural history museums, zoological gardens, and circus menageries – for commercial or educational purposes, highlighting the evolution of such displays from the private collections and traveling exhibitions of the early republican and antebellum decades into significant institutions that shaped American perceptions of wild animals. A third section discusses the growing awareness of anthropogenic species extinction in U.S. society, focusing especially on the dramatic decline of the American bison and the passenger pigeon and the cultural and political responses to these losses, tracing a long-nineteenth-century arc that began with opposition to the very idea of extinction and concluded with Progressive-Era campaigns that managed to save the bison from the brink but amounted to too little too late for the pigeon.

This volume explores the potential of the concept of the creaturely for thinking and writing beyond the idea of a clear-cut human-animal divide, presenting innovative perspectives and narratives for an age which increasingly confronts us with the profound ecological, ethical and political challenges of a multispecies world.

This collection of essays offers multifaceted explorations of animal encounters in a range of philosophical, cultural, literary, and historical contexts.