Smalley, Andrea L. (Author)
Winner of the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title. From the time Europeans first came to the New World until the closing of the frontier, the benefits of abundant wild animals―from beavers and wolves to fish, deer, and bison―appeared as a recurring theme in colonizing discourses. Explorers, travelers, surveyors, naturalists, and other promoters routinely advertised the richness of the American faunal environment and speculated about the ways in which animals could be made to serve their colonial projects. In practice, however, American animals proved far less malleable to colonizers’ designs. Their behaviors constrained an English colonial vision of a reinvented and rationalized American landscape. In Wild by Nature, Andrea L. Smalley argues that Anglo-American authorities’ unceasing efforts to convert indigenous beasts into colonized creatures frequently produced unsettling results that threatened colonizers’ control over the land and the people. Not simply acted upon by being commodified, harvested, and exterminated, wild animals were active subjects in the colonial story, altering its outcome in unanticipated ways. These creatures became legal actors―subjects of statutes, issues in court cases, and parties to treaties―in a centuries-long colonizing process that was reenacted on successive wild animal frontiers. Following a trail of human–animal encounters from the seventeenth-century Chesapeake to the Civil War–era southern plains, Smalley shows how wild beasts and their human pursuers repeatedly transgressed the lines lawmakers drew to demarcate colonial sovereignty and control, confounding attempts to enclose both people and animals inside a legal frame. She also explores how, to possess the land, colonizers had to find new ways to contain animals without destroying the wildness that made those creatures valuable to English settler societies in the first place. Offering fresh perspectives on colonial, legal, environmental, and Native American history, Wild by Nature reenvisions the familiar stories of early America as animal tales.
...MoreReview Amy Kohout (July 2018) Review of "Wild by Nature: North American Animals Confront Colonization". Environmental History (pp. 656-658).
Review James Taylor Carson (2019) Review of "Wild by Nature: North American Animals Confront Colonization". Agricultural History (pp. 202-204).
Thesis
Pastore, Christopher L.;
(2011)
From Sweetwater to Seawater: An Environmental History of Narragansett Bay, 1636--1849
(/isis/citation/CBB001567330/)
Book
Auricchio, Laura;
Cook, Elizabeth Heckendorn;
Pacini, Giulia;
(2012)
Invaluable Trees: Cultures of Nature, 1660--1830
(/isis/citation/CBB001420322/)
Book
Jeffers Lennox;
(2017)
Homelands and Empires: Indigenous Spaces, Imperial Fictions, and Competition for Territory in Northeastern North America, 1690–1763.
(/isis/citation/CBB284858078/)
Book
Cox, Thomas R.;
(2010)
The Lumberman's Frontier: Three Centuries of Land Use, Society, and Change in America's Forests
(/isis/citation/CBB001212244/)
Book
MacDowell, Laurel Sefton;
(2012)
An Environmental History of Canada
(/isis/citation/CBB001422385/)
Thesis
Christopher Michael Blakley;
(2019)
Inhuman Empire: Slavery and Nonhuman Animals in the British Atlantic World
(/isis/citation/CBB485703529/)
Thesis
Newman, Megan Haley;
(2001)
The Vermin-Killers: Pest Control in the Early Chesapeake
(/isis/citation/CBB001562392/)
Article
Beisaw, April M.;
(2012)
Environmental History of the Susquehanna Valley around the Time of European Contact
(/isis/citation/CBB001200341/)
Book
Lisa T. Sarasohn;
(2021)
Getting Under Our Skin: The Cultural and Social History of Vermin
(/isis/citation/CBB825215949/)
Book
Lynn Festa;
(2021)
Fiction Without Humanity: Person, Animal, Thing in Early Enlightenment Literature and Culture
(/isis/citation/CBB396379434/)
Book
Cruikshank, Julie;
(2005)
Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination
(/isis/citation/CBB000740952/)
Chapter
Vetter, Jeremy;
(2012)
Field Life in the American West: Surveys, Networks, Stations, and Quarries
(/isis/citation/CBB001210267/)
Article
Clement, Alain;
(2002)
Les références animales dans la constitution du savoir économique (XVIIème- XIXème siècles)
(/isis/citation/CBB000751023/)
Article
Stefano Gensini;
(2015)
Cureau de la Chambre sulla conoscenza e il linguaggio degli animali
(/isis/citation/CBB741633575/)
Article
Thomson, Ann;
(2010)
Animals, Humans, Machines and Thinking Matter, 1690--1707
(/isis/citation/CBB000932599/)
Book
Salvatore Califano;
(2015)
Storia dell'alchimia: misticismo ed esoterismo all'origine della chimica moderna
(/isis/citation/CBB559415425/)
Book
Abbott, Carl;
(2008)
How Cities Won the West: Four Centuries of Urban Change in Western North America
(/isis/citation/CBB000954271/)
Article
Stefano Gensini;
(2017)
"E io in Napoli vidi un cane polacco…": ancora sui linguaggi animali, da Gesner a Campanella
(/isis/citation/CBB435419422/)
Article
Stefano Gensini;
(2011)
Il "De brutorum loquela" di Girolamo Fabrici d'Acquapendente
(/isis/citation/CBB674890412/)
Article
Heasim Sul;
(2017)
The Medicinal Usage and Restriction of Ginseng in Britain and America, 1660-1900
(/isis/citation/CBB037211859/)
Be the first to comment!