Humans, Animals, and U.S. Society in the Long Nineteenth Century: Volume V: Wild Animals (1)

By: Dominik Ohrem

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Synopsis: 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.