One article in that collection, explicitly about that, was called ‘Sex and the Single Animal’. These are the sorts of topics that you delved into in Noble Cows and Hybrid Zebras? How else did you expand on the topic in that book? Or when breeders write about their efforts to get female dogs to accept the advances of the mate who’s been chosen for them, they use terms very much like those you might see in a Victorian novel where, in a typical trope, a father is angry with his daughter for not marrying the right sort of person. When you get to pets, where the audience for breed books and kennel magazines includes a large number of women, you get extraordinary columns with headlines like, ‘Weddings,’ meaning stud visits. When they write about relationships between cows and bulls, you get a sense of what they think about interactions between men and women. The business of animal breeders is-to use a euphemism-romantic. “The business of animal breeders is-to use a euphemism-romantic” They describe what the breed is supposed to be like and how you decide if an individual animal is good or not how you make your decisions about mating what to call the animals: all these things. Their purpose is to establish the pedigrees of individual animals and the validity of the breeds themselves. Breed books list pedigree after pedigree. One type of material I read a lot, especially in the Cambridge University Library and at the University of Reading, is breed books, which began in the 18th century but really took off in the 19th century. But human relationships with other animals are more complex, and primary sources show that. That’s the way industrial-scale farming treats animal: as cash in, cash out. How does the lens of a historian change the understanding of the material?īusiness and agricultural historians who focus on the economic aspect of livestock husbandry tend to abstract the animals and treat them as a group to be quantified. The historical material about animal agriculture and husbandry in Harvard’s library system was almost exclusively located in the Harvard Business School library. For example, when you talk about agricultural animals, the only place I found much attention to the history of livestock was in the economic analysis of agriculture. So, you could say that in that book I looked at a range of practices that hadn’t been examined as a group before and also that I introduced some topics that hadn’t had much attention from historians at all. But I also explored areas general historians hadn’t looked at much at all, such as the breeding of pets and livestock. The women’s and animal’s movements often overlapped-in fact the child protection movement was an offshoot of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. During the Victorian era, the movement for the humane treatment of animals got the attention of people focused either on protest politics generally or women’s issues in particular. For example, the history of science has always included zoology. Some of the things that I focused on were written about before. It looks at a range of different ways that animals figured in British society and culture from the early or middle 18th century through the 19th century that’s what we historians call “the long 19th century.” The book is organised thematically as well as chronologically. Tell us about the book and its introduction to this topic. In The Animal Estate, your prizewinning history of human interaction with other animals, you introduced readers to this hybrid animal history. And since I was a graduate student I’ve been a manager of two or three cats at a time. I had an uncle who was a veterinarian he used to let his young relatives hang round his practice. I’m not a biologist, but I have some background as a student of biology. I fixed on this subject for reasons that reflect on my own background. Historians also focus on certain subjects for personal reasons. The emergence of animals as legitimate subjects for research and scholarship, in different fields of the humanities and social sciences, probably reflects the re-emergence of the animal rights movement for example in the 1960s and ’70s. For instance, women’s history emerged as women attained greater political standing. As human groups got greater political standing throughout the late 19th and through the 20th century, they became objects of historical investigation and were recognised as historical actors in a way they hadn’t been before. Often the focus of historians reflects, even when exploring things from the past, concerns in the present. Before we delve into the books, can you tell us how this species of history came to be? The role of animals in human history is our subject, a field you’ve forged.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |