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As one of the world's most popular cultural activities, wild animal collections have been attracting visitors for 5,000 years. Under the direction of Vernon N. Kisling, an expert in zoo history, an international team of authors has compiled the first comprehensive, global history of animal collections, menageries, zoos, and aquariums. Zoo and Aquar
Wild animals have been housed in zoos and aquariums for 5,000 years, fascinating people living in virtually every society. Today, these institutions are at a new milestone in their history. This second edition of Zoo and Aquarium History takes the reader on a journey through the transition of private collections to menageries, to zoos, then zoological gardens, and more recently conservation centers and sanctuaries. Under the direction of Vernon N. Kisling, an expert in zoo history, an international team of authors has thoroughly updated the only comprehensive, global history of animal collections, menageries, zoos, and aquariums. The resulting book documents the continuum of efforts in maint...
In Eco-Spirituality and Human-Animal Relationships Mark Hawthorne examines the all-too-often difficult and exploitative relationship between animals and humans. Eco-spirituality seeks to reassess our relationship with the environment, where humans are understood as not morally superior but rather equal to the life forms with whom we share this planet. Our kinship with animals has perhaps always been fragmented, but it’s not too late to embrace a new paradigm. For us, for them, and for all life on Earth.
In the Middles Ages, the edges of one's world could represent different meanings. On the one hand, they might have been situated in far-away regions, mainly in the east and north, that one most often only knew from hearsay and which were inhabited by strange beings: humans with their faces on their chest, without a mouth, or with dog heads. On the other hand, the edges of one's world could just mean the borders of the community where one lived and that one sometimes might not have had the possibility to cross during one's whole life.In this volume specialists from eight European countries offer their ideas about different edges of the medieval world and contribute to a discussion that has been increasing greatly in Medieval Studies in recent times.
Animals and War is the first collection of essays to study its topic. Using sociology, history, anthropology, and cultural studies, it analyzes a wide range of phenomena and exposes the often paradoxical contours of human-animal relationships.
William Stimpson was at the forefront of the American natural history community in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Stimpson displayed an early affinity for the sea and natural history, and after completing an apprenticeship with famed naturalist Louis Agassiz, he became one of the first professionally trained naturalists in the United States. In 1852, twenty-year-old Stimpson was appointed naturalist of the United States North Pacific Exploring Expedition, where he collected and classified hundreds of marine animals. Upon his return, he joined renowned naturalist Spencer F. Baird at the Smithsonian Institution to create its department of invertebrate zoology. He also founded and l...
What strange transactions take place in the mobile spaces between loci? How does the flow of forces between fixed points enliven texts, suggest new connections, and map out the dizzying motion of myriad interactions? The essays in this volume were first presented at the 2014 New Chaucer Society Congress in Reykjavik, Iceland where a meeting of minds in a shared intermediate space initiated dialogue from diverse perspectives and wended its way through the invisible spaces between concrete categories, objects, and entities. The resulting volume asks a core question: what can we learn by tarrying at the nexus points and hubs through which things move in and out of texts, attempting to trace not...
Tracing the global trade and trafficking in animals that supplied U.S. zoos, Daniel Bender shows how Americans learned to view faraway places through the lens of exotic creatures on display. He recounts the public’s conflicted relationship with zoos, decried as prisons by activists even as they remain popular centers of education and preservation.
A history of wildlife in China, tracing the changes the country’s fauna and flora have endured from the rise of the earliest civilizations to the present. China is home to one of Earth’s largest and most diverse mix of plant and animals. Many are among the rarest creatures alive, some now surviving only in captivity. An unfortunate few went extinct early this century. How did this come to pass? Great Joy Under Heaven tells the history of dozens of species spread across the breadth of China: from the taiga of Manchuria to the burning deserts of the far west, from the bamboo forests of Sichuan to the tropical island of Hainan, and from the Roof of the World down the Long River to the sea. Spanning the ancient expulsion of rhinos and elephants from the Chinese heartland to the disappearance and return of the elaphure and takhi, this volume recounts the drastic effects of humanity on the wildlife of China over the past 4,000 years and the ongoing struggles to save and restore some of what has been lost.
What do Texans' pastimes and recreations say about their characters? Looking at Texas history from a new angle, David McComb starts from the premise that how people spend their leisure time may well reveal more about their true natures and interests than the work they do or their family connections. In this innovative book, McComb traces the history of various types of recreation in Texas, gathering significant insights into the characters of Texans from the pleasures they have pursued. Reflecting the frontier origins of Texas, McComb starts with the recreations that were most popular with men in a crude, still-developing society—drinking, gambling, and whoring. He goes on to show how, as ...