Two by Two: Bringing Animals into American History

Virginia Dejohn Anderson. Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 322 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. $37.50.

Mark Derr. A Dog's History of America: How Our Best Friend Explored, Conquered, and Settled a Continent. New York: North Point Press, 2004. 400 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $25.00 (cloth); $15.00 (paper).

Donna Haraway. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. 100 pp. $10.00.

Robert Sullivan. Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants. New York: Bloomsbury, 2004. 242 pp. Notes. $23.95 (cloth); $14.95 (paper).

On October 12, 1730, three hundred people from Mount Holly, New Jersey, gathered together to perform experiments on four of their neighbors. Two of the four, a married couple, stood accused of witchcraft. The other pair, also married, was among the loudest of the accusers. They agreed to serve as the day's ringers, to undergo the same trials as the prisoners in the hopes that the contrasting results would damn the witch and warlock. The indicted couple had not hexed anyone, flown on broomsticks, or consorted with the devil. They were charged with "making their Neighbours Sheep dance in an uncommon Manner, and with causing Hogs to speak, and sing Psalms, &cs."¹ For these crimes, they would be weighed against the Bible and thrown hands and feet bound into a mill pond. If the Bible proved heavier than the accused or the trussed necromancers managed to stay afloat, then they might die for causing rams to jig and sows to croon.

I first met the singing, speaking, and dancing livestock of Mount Holly in the question and answer period following a job talk—my own job talk. No one erected a scaffold for me, but like the drenched and weighed New Jerseyans I could thank that herd of uncommonly expressive and agile domestic beasts for an ordeal. "As a proponent and practitioner of animal history," my inquisitors began, "how would you interpret dancing sheep and talking pigs differently than, say, a cultural or social historian? Moreover, how does including animals in American history alter our understanding of the past? Are animals the same as other previously ignored groups? Do sheep and pigs deserve the same attention as African Americans, Native Americans, Latinos and Latinas, Asian Americans, women, workers, and homosexuals?"

Witnesses say I spoke and gestured. I have to trust their reports. I've repressed all memory of the event. Apparently someone uttered something intelligible. They offered me the position, but my performance still leaves me cheerless. The questions were good and weird; they deserved a better response. Luckily, the publication of several American animal histories over the past of couple years has given me a chance to revisit the psalm-singing swine and the waltzing sheep in order to try to answer the query again: what happens to American history when the beasts wander in?

Animals, all the books under review here make clear, invaded the American past long ago and never left. They are already "in"—in the town records, in the journals, in the Bible, in the newspapers, in the folktales, and in the correspondence. Hounds preoccupied George Washington as much as the Constitution. Pigs and cows ignited devastating conflicts in colonial Virginia and New England. Rats disrupted New York City politics in the 1960s, giving rent-strikers a powerful symbol to wave before landlords and television cameras. Famous beasts dot the nation's past. Lassie, Mrs. O'Leary's Cow, Seaman, Trigger, Silver, Bambi, Mighty Mouse, Traveler, Fala, Sox, Rin Tin Tin, and Seabiscuit captured as much or more attention as their human handlers. Rural people depended on animals for food, clothing, companionship, and sport throughout American history, while at the turn of the millennium urban-, suburban-, and exurbanites continue to wrangle with pests and dote on pets. When...