Humans, Animals, and U. S. Society in the Long Nineteenth Century: A Documentary History

This volume focuses on the relations between humans and domesticated animals in British and American society and illuminates how these relations were shaped by key phenomena and developments of the long nineteenth century. The areas covered include the ways in which domesticated creatures participated in various contexts of work life and the "invention" of the pet as a distinct category of animal that significantly reshaped family life and idea(l)s of domesticity against the background of a developing middle class culture. Both pets and other domesticated animals also played a significant, if sometimes ambivalent, role in the lives of enslaved Black people (as reflected in various slave narratives) and the genre of abolitionist literature, an often neglected area that warrants a section of its own. The sources in the final section documents the intensification of national and international debates about animal cruelty.