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Events
Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
Oct. 1 | Travel Grants for Graduate Students
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Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Mizelle, Brett. "To the Curious: The Cultural Work of Exhibitions of Exotic and Performing Animals in the Early American Republic," University of Minnesota, October 2000.
This dissertation enhances our understanding of early national culture and politics, demonstrating how Americans used ideas about animals to construct, contest, and comprehend their rapidly transforming public and political culture. I begin by situating the animal exhibition business within the broader market revolution in chapter one. After showing how cultural entrepreneurs acquired, traded, and exhibited animals for their livelihood, I demonstrate how they attempted to create and sustain a market for their animal curiosities by responding to the concerns of their audiences. Audiences reinterpreted and mobilized ideas about animals to a wide range of purposes. Chapter two charts the development of a distinction between displays of exotic animals (viewed as useful and instructive amusements) and animal acts (increasingly disparaged as both a waste of time and for the cruelty involved in training. Emerging rational and sentimental ways of seeing animals shaped, in turn, the debate over the relationship of public culture to the nation during the transition from a republican world of virtuous self-sacrifice toward a modern, self-interested America. Chapter three examines the use of animals as national symbols during the period from the American Revolution through the War 1812 before turning to show how efforts to create an audience for “American productions” helped display the expanding nation to itself. After demonstrating how Americans used ideas about the natural order in wishes for national unity, I explore specific uses of animals in the new nation’s contentious partisan politics. As part of this process, ideas about animals were used by elites to bestialize the people and their representatives and to lament the loss of an old political world of deference. The fourth chapter examines the centrality of human ideas about animals and animality to conceptions of race, gender, and hierarchy. Focusing on exhibitions and representations of non-human primates, I show how acts featuring performing animals, along with museum displays and moralizing accounts of monkeys and apes in literature for adults and children, reflected intense interest in the boundaries between the human and the animal while both re-inscribing and undermining human identities and social relationships thrown into question by the revolution.
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