Prescriptive literature and animal history

Author / Creator

Nance, Susan, author

Available as

Online

Summary

This case study will help you build skills for researching and explaining the history of animals, particularly in the modern, industrial age (ca. 1850-1950). It will focus on the contrast between p...

This case study will help you build skills for researching and explaining the history of animals, particularly in the modern, industrial age (ca. 1850-1950). It will focus on the contrast between prescribed uses of animals in human endeavors and the actual lives of people and animals. By the end of the case study, you will be equipped to find and analyze a variety of primary sources documenting the lives of historical animals and people and to explain the larger lessons they hold about animal life, human-animal relationships in the modern era. Between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, human relationships with animals changed dramatically. In the beginning, whether people lived in the countryside or the city, they lived and worked with livestock and other domesticated animals. Wild animals they kept at arms length, seeking them out only in hunting, capturing them for food or imagining them as spirits and agents of nature who helped to explain humankind's place in the world. Industrialization and capitalism changed these relationships and alienated most people from working animals and subsistence uses of wild animals. By the beginning of the twentieth century, increasingly, people lived in cities where working animals (except equines) had largely been purged from the city, although products made by and from animals were everywhere. Meanwhile, when most people engaged with animals personally, it was in their role as consumers of entertainment by way of petkeeping, visiting the zoo, or reading or watching stories about animals. There are countless primary sources documenting human-animal relationships over the last several centuries. They tell us both how people imagined animals and human control over them, as well as the ways animals unknowingly defied those beliefs. In studying the primary sources of animal history, you will learn how to identify evidence of actual animal life versus the many ways people represented animal life in order to satisfy human needs or politics.

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