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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social issues > Animals & society
Winner of the 2017 Virginia Marie Folkins Award, Association of
King County Historical Organizations (AKCHO) Winner of the 2017 Hal
K. Rothman Book Prize, Western History Association Seattle would
not exist without animals. Animals have played a vital role in
shaping the city from its founding amid existing indigenous towns
in the mid-nineteenth century to the livestock-friendly town of the
late nineteenth century to the pet-friendly, livestock-averse
modern city. When newcomers first arrived in the 1850s, they
hastened to assemble the familiar cohort of cattle, horses, pigs,
chickens, and other animals that defined European agriculture.
This, in turn, contributed to the dispossession of the Native
residents of the area. However, just as various animals were used
to create a Euro-American city, the elimination of these same
animals from Seattle was key to the creation of the new
middle-class neighborhoods of the twentieth century. As dogs and
cats came to symbolize home and family, Seattleites' relationship
with livestock became distant and exploitative, demonstrating the
deep social contradictions that characterize the modern American
metropolis. Throughout Seattle's history, people have sorted
animals into categories and into places as a way of asserting power
over animals, other people, and property. In The City Is More Than
Human, Frederick Brown explores the dynamic, troubled relationship
humans have with animals. In so doing he challenges us to
acknowledge the role of animals of all sorts in the making and
remaking of cities.
In Civilized Creatures, Jennifer Mason challenges some of our most
enduring ideas about how encounters with nonhuman nature shaped
American literature and culture. Mason argues that in the second
half of the nineteenth century the most powerful influence on
Americans' understanding of their affinities with animals was not
increasing separation from the pastoral and the wilderness;
instead, it was the population's feelings about the ostensibly
civilized animals they encountered in their daily lives.
Americans of diverse backgrounds, Mason shows, found it
attractive as well as politic to imagine themselves as most closely
connected to those creatures who shared humans' aptitude for
civilized life. And to the minds of many in this period, national
prosperity depended less on periodic exposure to untamed, wild
nature than it did on the proper care and keeping of such animals
within suburban and urban environments.
Combining literary analysis with cultural histories of
equestrianism, petkeeping, and the animal welfare movement,
Civilized Creatures offers new readings of works by Susan Warner,
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Charles W.
Chesnutt. In each case, Mason demonstrates that understanding
contemporary relationships between humans and animals is essential
for understanding the debates about gender, race, and cultural
power enacted in these texts.
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