Blockseminar The Great Hog Eating Confederacy Towards a Non human Animal Centered U.S History

This seminar examines the role of nonhuman animals in making material and cultural contributions to human history. More specifically, we will focus on some of the many ways in which animals, not just humans, have shaped the history and culture of the United States. After briefly discussing how nonhuman animals have been recent beneficiaries of a democratizing tendency within historical and cultural studies and addressing some of the many challenges involved in doing this history, we will explore how ideas and practices toward nonhuman animals are historically specific and rooted in lived multispecies relations in the United States. Focusing on American history through roughly 1900, we will bring tools and perspectives from several disciplines, including an emerging animal studies tradition, to chart the shared history of humans and animals in the American experience. Among the case studies to be considered will be the role of nonhuman animals in creating conflict between European colonizers and native Americans, the complexity of multispecies entanglements in developing American cities, the use of exotic and performing animals in American popular culture, destruction of wild animal populations (such as wolves and bison) in westward expansion, the role of animal power in an industrializing nation, the development of modern petkeeping, and transformations to the breeding of animals and the production of meat in American agriculture. Ultimately, our work together in this seminar will interrogate the many contradictions in Americans' relationships with animals and demonstrate how the human construction of nonhuman animals has had profound implications for humans and animals in American history. I also hope that our readings, assignments, and discussions will prompt all of us to think beyond ourselves to include other species in our imaginations and material existences. As the seminar will be held en bloc in June/July, students are expected to attend the prep meeting on April 21, where they will get their assignments for class and the dates for their one-to-one-session with Prof. Mizelle. Essays: Virginia Anderson, -King Philip's Herds: Indians, Colonists, and the Problem of Livestock in Early New England- (1994). Thomas G. Andrews, -Beasts of the Southern Wild: Slaveholders, Slaves, and Other Animals in Charles Ball's Slavery in the United States- (2015). Andrew Isenberg, -The Wild and the Tamed: Indians, Euroamericans, and the Destruction of the Bison- (2002). Catherine McNeur -The Swinish Multitude: Controversies Over Hogs in Antebellum New York City- (2011). Clay McShane & Joel Tarr, -The Horse in the Nineteenth Century American City- (2010). Brett Mizelle, A man quite as much of a show as his beasts': James Capen Grizzly' Adams and the Making of Grizzly Bears (2010).   Monograph: Jon T. Coleman, Vicious: Wolves and Men in America (2004). FB 05 Gesellschaftswissenschaften Uni Kassel SoSe 2016 Lehrveranstaltungspool FB 05 Geschichte Prof. Dr. Mizelle Brett