“American cities in the 19th century were ecologically diverse places, invariably made up of a multitude of domesticated, semidomesticated, and undomesticated species.”
Andrew Robichaud explores the peculiar coexistence of people and farm animals in America’s cities. In the 1800s, it wasn’t unusual for men wearing top hats and formal attire to stride down tony Manhattan avenues right next to goats and cows. After the Civil War, treatment of domesticated animals and our cultural view of what animals might be thinking and feeling changed dramatically. “During that period, reformers were looking to rebuild a certain set of social relationships by improving how people related to animals and therefore how they’d relate to one another,” Robichaud says.
With intervention, animals’ lives improved. Fewer animals lived in cities. Most were better suited to farm life.
But an unintended byproduct was that direct contact between humans and animals became more infrequent. Today, it’s so rare for most urban dwellers to see a cow or a pony that they’re kept in zoos next to lemurs and penguins.
How to Find Out More About Andrew’s Work
The best way is to buy his wonderful book, Animal City: The Domestication of America at your local bookseller, or you can purchase it online from The Shape of the World’s favorite bookstore, in Hyde Park in Chicago. It’s also available from the publisher, Harvard Press.
Other ways to learn more: if you’re a student at Boston University, you can take one of Andrew’s classes. (Lucky you!) If you’re just a regular non-student type person, follow Andrew on twitter at @aarobichaud and visit his website. If he is giving a lecture or making some other sort of public appearance, he’ll post it there.
Andrew’s research is informed by digital mapping and some of those visualizations can be examined on the Animal City page of the Stanford Spatial History Project.
Andrew’s next book project is tentatively titled On Ice: Transformations in American Life, and is a history of America’s economic and cultural “ice age” in the nineteenth century.
