Animal Metropolis

Animal Metropolis brings a Canadian perspective to the growing field of animal history, ranging across species and cities, from the beavers who engineered Stanley Park to the carthorses who shaped the city of Montreal. Some essays consider animals as spectacle: orca captivity in Vancouver, polar bear tourism in Churchill, Manitoba, fish on display in the Dominion Fisheries Museum, and the racialized memory of Jumbo the elephant in St. Thomas, Ontario. Others examine the bodily intimacies of shared urban spaces: the regulation of rabid dogs in Banff, the maternal politics of pure milk in Hamilton and the circulation of tetanus bacilli from horse to human in Toronto. Another considers the marginalization of women in Canada's animal welfare movement. The authors collectively push forward from a historiography that features nonhuman animals as objects within human-centered inquiries to a historiography that considers the eclectic contacts, exchanges, and cohabitation of human and nonhuman animals.With contributions by: Kristoffer Archibald, Jason Colby, George Colpitts, Joanna Dean, Carla Hustak, Darcy Ingram, Sean Kheraj, William Knight, Sherry Olson, Rachel Poliquin, and Christabelle Sethna

"Animal Metropolis includes a diverse array of work on the historical study of human-animal relations in Canada. In doing so, it aims to create a starting point for an ongoing conversation about the place of animals in historical analysis and, in turn, about the way issues regarding animals fit into Canada's political, social, cultural, economic, environmental and ethical landscapes. One of the most striking aspects of this collection is its capacity to present a wide variety of topics, sources and methodologies within a tightly focused theme. The sources employed in these articles cover a broad spectrum, from state and legal documents to the popular press, from corporate records and NGO reports to personal diaries, and from materials on industrial agriculture to those of the tourism industry. Even more compelling than the sources are the methodological issues that the collection raises. One of our key objectives is to highlight the sheer diversity of approaches historians are employing in their efforts to analyze non-human subjects that do not produce documentary records of their own. By focusing explicitly on urban contexts the book aims deliberately to cleave from a more obvious focus on wild animals and the wilderness environment that are so iconic to Canada. Readers will be impressed by the range of creatures, both domestic and wild: from horses and dogs to beavers and wolves to whales, fish, polar bears and captive elephants. Covering small and larger regions, and in some instances the nation as a whole, the collection offers impressive breadth in scope. Varying widely in the lenses through which human-animal relations are viewed, it brings to the forefront the contemporary as well as the historical dimensions of the issues it raises."--

"Animal Metropolis brings a Canadian perspective to the growing field of animal history, ranging across species and cities, from the beavers who engineered Stanley Park to the carthorses who shaped the city of Montreal. Some essays consider animals as spectacle: orca captivity in Vancouver, polar bear tourism in Churchill, Manitoba, fish on display in the Dominion Fisheries Museum, and the racialized memory of Jumbo the elephant in St. Thomas, Ontario. Others examine the bodily intimacies of shared urban spaces: the regulation of rabid dogs in Banff, the maternal politics of pure milk in Hamilton and the circulation of tetanus bacilli from horse to human in Toronto. Another considers the marginalization of women in Canada’s animal welfare movement. The authors collectively push forward from a historiography that features nonhuman animals as objects within human-centered inquiries to a historiography that considers the eclectic contacts, exchanges, and cohabitation of human and nonhuman animals."--Site wbe de l'éditeur.

Andreas Huyssen explores the history and theory of metropolitan miniatures—short prose pieces about urban life written for European newspapers. His fine-grained readings open vistas into German critical theory and the visual arts, revealing the miniature to be one of the few genuinely innovative modes of spatialized writing created by modernism.

This book presents new research on spaces for science and processes of interurban and transnational knowledge transfer and exchange in the imperial metropolis of Vienna in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Chapters discuss Habsburg science policy, metropolitan natural history museums, large technical projects including the Ringstrasse and water pipelines from the Alps, urban geology, geography, public reports on polar exploration, exchanges of ethnographic objects, popular scientific societies and scientifically oriented adult education. The infrastructures and knowledge spaces described here were preconditions for the explosion of creativity known as 'Vienna 1900.'

The result is a probing history of medicine that details the social world of New York physicians, their ideas about a rare and perplexing disorder, and the struggles of an ever-changing, ever-challenging urban society.