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Andrew A. Robichaud. Animal City: The Domestication of America.

Andrew A. Robichaud. Animal City: The Domestication of America. Early on in this fascinating and thought-provoking new book, Animal City: The Domestication of America, Andrew Robichaud vividly describes the combined economic and ecological relationships that brought distilleries and dairy feedlots together in nineteenth-century American cities. In an era of limited refrigeration options and no railroads, perishable goods from the countryside could not easily reach cities, and burgeoning urban populations required dairies within or just beyond city limits if they wanted access to fresh milk. Dairy cows housed in the crowded, malodorous feedlots and dirty, packed stables of the antebellum city, however, made “fresh” a relative term. Still worse, distillery owners’ need for waste disposal and dairymen’s desire for cheap sources of feed produced a symbiotic economic relationship in which cows’ bodies processed distillery slop into milk. Cows and human consumers both suffered as a result. The cows endured severe gastrointestinal illnesses and nutritional deficiencies that came from forced survival on distillery waste, and humans drank poor quality and frequently bacteria-laden swill milk, a product that was often further adulterated in order to transform its thin, bluish appearance into something that could be mistaken for a reasonable source of nourishment. In the midst of contemporary concerns about industrial agriculture—not to mention a twenty-first-century pandemic—one can hardly contemplate such scenes without immediately envisioning the social and biological assemblages that bind humans, animals, market relations, and the production of illness and disease today. Historians formerly paid little attention to such matters, just as most consumers remained blissfully ignorant of the harsh industrial conditions that generated packaged and well-refrigerated meat in shiny, clean, bright, and spacious supermarket aisles. For the vast majority of professional historians in the twentieth century, the animals that people lived with, ate, and used as sources of labor constituted no more than part of the background noise of daily life. Animals belonged in biology classrooms, nature shows, or heartwarming memoirs about veterinary life in the English countryside. But outside certain topics within the history of biology and evolution, or as occasional objects of economic analysis in histories of agriculture, they remained far removed from the realms of human thought and action that formed the stuff of meaningful historical inquiry. Although Upton Sinclair’s famous 1906 novel and exposé The Jungle prompted both immediate political responses and generations of historical discussion about immigrant labor in the American meat-packing industry, the dubious quality of canned meat products, and the history of US federal regulations governing food, the animals themselves remained largely invisible in these discussions. Over the past two decades, history of animals, along with the broader interdisciplinary field of animal studies, has grown from its formerly marginal position to become a thriving academic enterprise. Within this “animal turn,” urban settings have become increasingly prominent as subjects for contemplating the nature and implications of human-animal relations. Animal City is the latest among a spate of recent studies, including Dawn Day Biehler’s Pests in the City (2013), Catherine McNeur’s Taming Manhattan (2014), and Frederick L. Brown’s The City Is More Than Human (2016), that are reckoning with the full extent to which animals have shaped urban life and governance in the United States. At one level, these works underscore animals’ presence as an unmistakable constant in daily city life, whether as sources of food, clothing, muscle power, or companionship, or as vexing and unruly presences that thwarted human designs for controlled and orderly social spaces. For example, the ubiquitous hogs that roamed the streets of nineteenth-century New York City and the peripatetic and sometimes aggressive dogs that threatened dog bites and rabies left behind strong impressions. Historians have traced such animals’ imprint on everyday life in New York and other cities through letters to editors from frustrated city residents or other news stories; the travel narratives of Charles Dickens and other visitors; the reports and regulations of public health bodies and other organs of city government; and the pamphlets and treatises of public health advocates, moral reformers, and, after the 1860s, animal welfare organizations. The opening vignette of Animal City, for example, revisits Dickens’s arrival in New York City in 1842 and his bemused response to the hogs that milled among the crowds along Broadway. Animals also provide ample material for illuminating familiar themes in urban history, such as McNeur’s revealing account of the class-based anxieties about “the swinish multitudes” that equated swelling populations of struggling people with the unruly hogs that disrupted city streets. Elite suspicions of persons who lived in close proximity to animals, or the civilizing forms of self-discipline and moral feeling that animal welfare advocates sought to instill by normalizing kindness toward animals, were intricately tied to cultural battles over public space that pitted bourgeois visions of constrained, self-disciplined personal conduct against the exuberant, rough-and-tumble norms of working-class folkways. Susan Nance has argued that accounts of the materiality of animal experiences and human-animal interactions are justification enough in and of themselves for the significance of animal history. As she wrote in a 2015 essay, “The total past of animals is important on its own terms and intrinsically valuable.” Urban historians skeptical of such assertions, however, might wonder whether the history of animals actually changes anything fundamental about how scholars understand the historical evolution of the city. As much as revelations about animals’ presence might intrigue and delight, historians at large understandably expect something beyond thick description, more lavishly textured depictions of daily urban life, and the familiar dynamics of class conflict and contestation for control over public space. Robichaud and other scholars are meeting this challenge by demonstrating just how deeply animals and the social and political orders constructed to regulate them have shaped modes of governance, residential patterns, zoning, the political economy of access to basic necessities, and the contours of urban inequality. The most striking contributions from Animal City come from Robichaud’s ability to bring together insights from animal studies, environmental history, urban geography, and the history of capitalism to demonstrate how human decisions about domestic animals powerfully molded the relationship between city and hinterland, the nature of urban space, and the dynamics of political power. As the history of swill milk in New York City shows, animal physiology, technology, and market relations formed a complex social and economic apparatus that combined the biological productive capacities of cows’ bodies with the evolving infrastructure to sell milk in the urban marketplace. Mid-nineteenth-century reformers promised clean and pure milk through better rail transport to facilitate urban access to the countryside, but high levels of demand tended to favor larger units of production in the backcountry, which encouraged stabling of animals under conditions scarcely better than those of dairies within city limits. As Robichaud concludes, “The pressures of the market reached country dairies, which began resembling city dairies in ways reformers did not imagine” (42). As with organic products today, the question of whether “pure country milk” constituted a superior product or a marketing sleight of hand remained a difficult problem for New York consumers. Robichaud’s incisive analysis of slaughterhouses and urban zoning in San Francisco similarly illuminates how the animal-based apportionment of space made the modern American city. As Robichaud argues, “the development of strict regulations and physical separation of urban animal populations” was far more than mere happenstance—it “marked an important moment in human history” (48). The creation of San Francisco’s Butchertown did much more than simply remove cattle from city streets, hide the violence of slaughter from consumers’ eyes, and help to bring about a world in which American urbanites no longer expected to see large livestock on an everyday basis. The physical removal and confinement of the slaughterhouses set patterns of land use and urban inequality that continue to hold sway more than a century and a half later. The slaughterhouse district established on Mission Bay constituted a literal wasteland, sited deliberately so that effluvium from meat processing could be dumped directly into San Francisco Bay in accordance with the era’s standard assumptions about the ocean’s supposedly endless capacity to absorb human garbage. The intense pollution created by the disposal of massive quantities of blood and offal generated a spatial segregation between a “civilized” downtown and the decay and rot of Butchertown. Indeed, the slaughterhouse district generated what San Franciscans perceived as a distinctive environment and culture, one that bred particularly ugly and vicious street dogs, supremely tough and combative rats suited to the blood sport of rat-baiting, and game birds no longer fit for human consumption. As twentieth-century economic development created new types of pollution-generating industries, they, too, were regulated into Butchertown: “Nearly every unpleasant, polluting, and noxious industry in San Francisco found its home in or around Butchertown in the twentieth century” (124). With the nuclear age, Butchertown became host to the US Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, and in 1989 the Environmental Protection Agency designated it a high-priority Superfund site. Racial segregation—in the form of a late nineteenth-century attempt to relegate the local Chinese population to an area by the slaughterhouses, followed eventually by World War II–era settlement patterns and 1960s redevelopment policies that ghettoized San Francisco’s African American community—went hand in hand with Butchertown’s history of environmental degradation. Readers who decide to pair Animal City with Biehler’s Pests in the City will gain an even greater appreciation for the relationships between animals, race, urban ecology, and housing policy that have perpetuated social inequalities for more than a century and exposed poor and marginalized city residents disproportionately to miserable, unsanitary, and dangerous living conditions. Although animals are not the only stuff of urban politics, histories of urban animals underscore the depth of political contestation and the high governmental stakes that undergird modes of everyday life that now seem normal and mundane—namely, city streets free from cattle drives and roaming pigs; backyards without sheep, goats, or roosters, although urban chickens and their eggs are making a comeback; disciplined behavior on the part of dogs in public spaces; expectations of kindness to animals, at least the ones outside industrial farms and slaughterhouses; and a level of sentimentality toward pets that most nineteenth-century Americans would have considered completely ridiculous. Robichaud, for example, emphasizes the animal-related laws and ordinances behind a considerable portion of the forms of everyday regulation that animated William J. Novak’s classic study The People’s Welfare (1996). The famous Slaughterhouse Cases that the Supreme Court decided in 1873, Robichaud reminds us, were not simply about the legal reach of the Fourteenth Amendment. They grew out of the material reality of slaughterhouses as sites subject to regulation under well-established nineteenth-century legal concepts and practices surrounding nuisance, police power, and local governance. Animal City, along with Susan J. Pearson’s The Rights of the Defenseless (2011) and my own account of the history of canine animal control in New York City, has also tried to take inspiration from Novak’s writings and other scholarship on state power and US political development to cultivate new insights about the forms of governmental authority that voluntary organizations acquired in the late nineteenth century. The delegation of the police power that allowed the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and other animal welfare organizations around the country to enforce anti-cruelty laws and run animal pounds did not emerge from chance arrangements. It represented a blended public-private relationship characteristic of the diffused, decentralized character of the American state and its blurred boundaries between state and society. The study of animals and their regulation thus provides one entryway for novel understandings of governmental practices in the United States and how they belie standard assumptions about public and private as fundamentally separate spheres. Plenty of additional topics await scholars who want to explore the intricate relationships between animals and urban life. The intersection of animals and capitalism highlights the importance of animals’ bodies as sites of production. Physiological processes in living creatures transformed plant material—or refuse—into meat to make protein for human consumption; manufactured vaccines against smallpox and other infectious diseases; and turned muscle power into usable work in order to transport goods and people or to power machines. For some time now, historians have recognized the centrality of equine labor to urban transport and infrastructure, thanks in particular to Susan D. Jones’s Valuing Animals (2003), Clay McShane’s and Joel Tarr’s The Horse in the City (2007), and Ann Norton Greene’s Horses at Work (2008). Dog power has remained largely unnoticed, but Animal City’s brief account of dog-powered devices raises some intriguing possibilities. In an age that preceded the internal combustion engine or electrically powered motors, any process that required more portability than what waterpower or a steam engine could provide generally meant reliance on muscles, whether human or nonhuman. What did mechanization mean in this muscle-driven world? How did humans use dogs and other small animals as, in essence, portable generators to power equipment? How should historians think about these particular assemblages of human and nonhuman as part of the larger history of energy, technology, and power? Robichaud’s analysis of industrial meat processing also raises questions about contingency, particularly as related to the forms of subsistence that persisted in the nineteenth-and early twentieth-century city versus the industrialized systems that now dominate American food consumption. James C. Scott’s ever-fertile writings—from The Moral Economy of the Peasant (1976) to The Art of Not Being Governed (2009) and beyond—have long alerted scholars to the nature of subsistence as a functional way of life. By normalizing the logic of subsistence, Scott also highlights the strangeness of the familiar, which forces readers to recognize their unspoken acquiescence to modern economic interdependence and the complex of governmentality, institutions, and market relations that defines how they eat and otherwise maintain their basic needs. Animal City devotes little direct attention to subsistence, but Robichaud’s references to the “two-cow limit” under San Francisco city ordinances raises suggestive possibilities. How long did cow keeping within the two-cow limit and cultivation of other livestock continue within the residential sections of the city, and to what extent did a significant portion of San Franciscans’ diets depend on their own animals and crops? Beekeeping, backyard chickens, and pandemic-inspired vegetable gardens may be less recent fads and more part of a larger pattern of everyday provisioning embedded within the urban nexus of shifting market relations over the past two centuries. As Animal City and other recent studies show, human-animal relationships and their histories are essential to life and livelihoods, and the systems designed to regulate animals’ urban presence have had profound implications for the spatial structure of the modern city, the workings of political power, and the evolution of the market economy. Animals are not just “good to think,” as Levi-Strauss’s famous formulation put it. They are part and parcel of human lives, institutions, economic systems, and folkways. © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png The American Historical Review Oxford University Press

Andrew A. Robichaud. Animal City: The Domestication of America.

The American Historical Review , Volume 126 (2): 4 – Sep 6, 2021

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Publisher
Oxford University Press
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com
ISSN
0002-8762
eISSN
1937-5239
DOI
10.1093/ahr/rhab347
Publisher site
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Abstract

Early on in this fascinating and thought-provoking new book, Animal City: The Domestication of America, Andrew Robichaud vividly describes the combined economic and ecological relationships that brought distilleries and dairy feedlots together in nineteenth-century American cities. In an era of limited refrigeration options and no railroads, perishable goods from the countryside could not easily reach cities, and burgeoning urban populations required dairies within or just beyond city limits if they wanted access to fresh milk. Dairy cows housed in the crowded, malodorous feedlots and dirty, packed stables of the antebellum city, however, made “fresh” a relative term. Still worse, distillery owners’ need for waste disposal and dairymen’s desire for cheap sources of feed produced a symbiotic economic relationship in which cows’ bodies processed distillery slop into milk. Cows and human consumers both suffered as a result. The cows endured severe gastrointestinal illnesses and nutritional deficiencies that came from forced survival on distillery waste, and humans drank poor quality and frequently bacteria-laden swill milk, a product that was often further adulterated in order to transform its thin, bluish appearance into something that could be mistaken for a reasonable source of nourishment. In the midst of contemporary concerns about industrial agriculture—not to mention a twenty-first-century pandemic—one can hardly contemplate such scenes without immediately envisioning the social and biological assemblages that bind humans, animals, market relations, and the production of illness and disease today. Historians formerly paid little attention to such matters, just as most consumers remained blissfully ignorant of the harsh industrial conditions that generated packaged and well-refrigerated meat in shiny, clean, bright, and spacious supermarket aisles. For the vast majority of professional historians in the twentieth century, the animals that people lived with, ate, and used as sources of labor constituted no more than part of the background noise of daily life. Animals belonged in biology classrooms, nature shows, or heartwarming memoirs about veterinary life in the English countryside. But outside certain topics within the history of biology and evolution, or as occasional objects of economic analysis in histories of agriculture, they remained far removed from the realms of human thought and action that formed the stuff of meaningful historical inquiry. Although Upton Sinclair’s famous 1906 novel and exposé The Jungle prompted both immediate political responses and generations of historical discussion about immigrant labor in the American meat-packing industry, the dubious quality of canned meat products, and the history of US federal regulations governing food, the animals themselves remained largely invisible in these discussions. Over the past two decades, history of animals, along with the broader interdisciplinary field of animal studies, has grown from its formerly marginal position to become a thriving academic enterprise. Within this “animal turn,” urban settings have become increasingly prominent as subjects for contemplating the nature and implications of human-animal relations. Animal City is the latest among a spate of recent studies, including Dawn Day Biehler’s Pests in the City (2013), Catherine McNeur’s Taming Manhattan (2014), and Frederick L. Brown’s The City Is More Than Human (2016), that are reckoning with the full extent to which animals have shaped urban life and governance in the United States. At one level, these works underscore animals’ presence as an unmistakable constant in daily city life, whether as sources of food, clothing, muscle power, or companionship, or as vexing and unruly presences that thwarted human designs for controlled and orderly social spaces. For example, the ubiquitous hogs that roamed the streets of nineteenth-century New York City and the peripatetic and sometimes aggressive dogs that threatened dog bites and rabies left behind strong impressions. Historians have traced such animals’ imprint on everyday life in New York and other cities through letters to editors from frustrated city residents or other news stories; the travel narratives of Charles Dickens and other visitors; the reports and regulations of public health bodies and other organs of city government; and the pamphlets and treatises of public health advocates, moral reformers, and, after the 1860s, animal welfare organizations. The opening vignette of Animal City, for example, revisits Dickens’s arrival in New York City in 1842 and his bemused response to the hogs that milled among the crowds along Broadway. Animals also provide ample material for illuminating familiar themes in urban history, such as McNeur’s revealing account of the class-based anxieties about “the swinish multitudes” that equated swelling populations of struggling people with the unruly hogs that disrupted city streets. Elite suspicions of persons who lived in close proximity to animals, or the civilizing forms of self-discipline and moral feeling that animal welfare advocates sought to instill by normalizing kindness toward animals, were intricately tied to cultural battles over public space that pitted bourgeois visions of constrained, self-disciplined personal conduct against the exuberant, rough-and-tumble norms of working-class folkways. Susan Nance has argued that accounts of the materiality of animal experiences and human-animal interactions are justification enough in and of themselves for the significance of animal history. As she wrote in a 2015 essay, “The total past of animals is important on its own terms and intrinsically valuable.” Urban historians skeptical of such assertions, however, might wonder whether the history of animals actually changes anything fundamental about how scholars understand the historical evolution of the city. As much as revelations about animals’ presence might intrigue and delight, historians at large understandably expect something beyond thick description, more lavishly textured depictions of daily urban life, and the familiar dynamics of class conflict and contestation for control over public space. Robichaud and other scholars are meeting this challenge by demonstrating just how deeply animals and the social and political orders constructed to regulate them have shaped modes of governance, residential patterns, zoning, the political economy of access to basic necessities, and the contours of urban inequality. The most striking contributions from Animal City come from Robichaud’s ability to bring together insights from animal studies, environmental history, urban geography, and the history of capitalism to demonstrate how human decisions about domestic animals powerfully molded the relationship between city and hinterland, the nature of urban space, and the dynamics of political power. As the history of swill milk in New York City shows, animal physiology, technology, and market relations formed a complex social and economic apparatus that combined the biological productive capacities of cows’ bodies with the evolving infrastructure to sell milk in the urban marketplace. Mid-nineteenth-century reformers promised clean and pure milk through better rail transport to facilitate urban access to the countryside, but high levels of demand tended to favor larger units of production in the backcountry, which encouraged stabling of animals under conditions scarcely better than those of dairies within city limits. As Robichaud concludes, “The pressures of the market reached country dairies, which began resembling city dairies in ways reformers did not imagine” (42). As with organic products today, the question of whether “pure country milk” constituted a superior product or a marketing sleight of hand remained a difficult problem for New York consumers. Robichaud’s incisive analysis of slaughterhouses and urban zoning in San Francisco similarly illuminates how the animal-based apportionment of space made the modern American city. As Robichaud argues, “the development of strict regulations and physical separation of urban animal populations” was far more than mere happenstance—it “marked an important moment in human history” (48). The creation of San Francisco’s Butchertown did much more than simply remove cattle from city streets, hide the violence of slaughter from consumers’ eyes, and help to bring about a world in which American urbanites no longer expected to see large livestock on an everyday basis. The physical removal and confinement of the slaughterhouses set patterns of land use and urban inequality that continue to hold sway more than a century and a half later. The slaughterhouse district established on Mission Bay constituted a literal wasteland, sited deliberately so that effluvium from meat processing could be dumped directly into San Francisco Bay in accordance with the era’s standard assumptions about the ocean’s supposedly endless capacity to absorb human garbage. The intense pollution created by the disposal of massive quantities of blood and offal generated a spatial segregation between a “civilized” downtown and the decay and rot of Butchertown. Indeed, the slaughterhouse district generated what San Franciscans perceived as a distinctive environment and culture, one that bred particularly ugly and vicious street dogs, supremely tough and combative rats suited to the blood sport of rat-baiting, and game birds no longer fit for human consumption. As twentieth-century economic development created new types of pollution-generating industries, they, too, were regulated into Butchertown: “Nearly every unpleasant, polluting, and noxious industry in San Francisco found its home in or around Butchertown in the twentieth century” (124). With the nuclear age, Butchertown became host to the US Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, and in 1989 the Environmental Protection Agency designated it a high-priority Superfund site. Racial segregation—in the form of a late nineteenth-century attempt to relegate the local Chinese population to an area by the slaughterhouses, followed eventually by World War II–era settlement patterns and 1960s redevelopment policies that ghettoized San Francisco’s African American community—went hand in hand with Butchertown’s history of environmental degradation. Readers who decide to pair Animal City with Biehler’s Pests in the City will gain an even greater appreciation for the relationships between animals, race, urban ecology, and housing policy that have perpetuated social inequalities for more than a century and exposed poor and marginalized city residents disproportionately to miserable, unsanitary, and dangerous living conditions. Although animals are not the only stuff of urban politics, histories of urban animals underscore the depth of political contestation and the high governmental stakes that undergird modes of everyday life that now seem normal and mundane—namely, city streets free from cattle drives and roaming pigs; backyards without sheep, goats, or roosters, although urban chickens and their eggs are making a comeback; disciplined behavior on the part of dogs in public spaces; expectations of kindness to animals, at least the ones outside industrial farms and slaughterhouses; and a level of sentimentality toward pets that most nineteenth-century Americans would have considered completely ridiculous. Robichaud, for example, emphasizes the animal-related laws and ordinances behind a considerable portion of the forms of everyday regulation that animated William J. Novak’s classic study The People’s Welfare (1996). The famous Slaughterhouse Cases that the Supreme Court decided in 1873, Robichaud reminds us, were not simply about the legal reach of the Fourteenth Amendment. They grew out of the material reality of slaughterhouses as sites subject to regulation under well-established nineteenth-century legal concepts and practices surrounding nuisance, police power, and local governance. Animal City, along with Susan J. Pearson’s The Rights of the Defenseless (2011) and my own account of the history of canine animal control in New York City, has also tried to take inspiration from Novak’s writings and other scholarship on state power and US political development to cultivate new insights about the forms of governmental authority that voluntary organizations acquired in the late nineteenth century. The delegation of the police power that allowed the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and other animal welfare organizations around the country to enforce anti-cruelty laws and run animal pounds did not emerge from chance arrangements. It represented a blended public-private relationship characteristic of the diffused, decentralized character of the American state and its blurred boundaries between state and society. The study of animals and their regulation thus provides one entryway for novel understandings of governmental practices in the United States and how they belie standard assumptions about public and private as fundamentally separate spheres. Plenty of additional topics await scholars who want to explore the intricate relationships between animals and urban life. The intersection of animals and capitalism highlights the importance of animals’ bodies as sites of production. Physiological processes in living creatures transformed plant material—or refuse—into meat to make protein for human consumption; manufactured vaccines against smallpox and other infectious diseases; and turned muscle power into usable work in order to transport goods and people or to power machines. For some time now, historians have recognized the centrality of equine labor to urban transport and infrastructure, thanks in particular to Susan D. Jones’s Valuing Animals (2003), Clay McShane’s and Joel Tarr’s The Horse in the City (2007), and Ann Norton Greene’s Horses at Work (2008). Dog power has remained largely unnoticed, but Animal City’s brief account of dog-powered devices raises some intriguing possibilities. In an age that preceded the internal combustion engine or electrically powered motors, any process that required more portability than what waterpower or a steam engine could provide generally meant reliance on muscles, whether human or nonhuman. What did mechanization mean in this muscle-driven world? How did humans use dogs and other small animals as, in essence, portable generators to power equipment? How should historians think about these particular assemblages of human and nonhuman as part of the larger history of energy, technology, and power? Robichaud’s analysis of industrial meat processing also raises questions about contingency, particularly as related to the forms of subsistence that persisted in the nineteenth-and early twentieth-century city versus the industrialized systems that now dominate American food consumption. James C. Scott’s ever-fertile writings—from The Moral Economy of the Peasant (1976) to The Art of Not Being Governed (2009) and beyond—have long alerted scholars to the nature of subsistence as a functional way of life. By normalizing the logic of subsistence, Scott also highlights the strangeness of the familiar, which forces readers to recognize their unspoken acquiescence to modern economic interdependence and the complex of governmentality, institutions, and market relations that defines how they eat and otherwise maintain their basic needs. Animal City devotes little direct attention to subsistence, but Robichaud’s references to the “two-cow limit” under San Francisco city ordinances raises suggestive possibilities. How long did cow keeping within the two-cow limit and cultivation of other livestock continue within the residential sections of the city, and to what extent did a significant portion of San Franciscans’ diets depend on their own animals and crops? Beekeeping, backyard chickens, and pandemic-inspired vegetable gardens may be less recent fads and more part of a larger pattern of everyday provisioning embedded within the urban nexus of shifting market relations over the past two centuries. As Animal City and other recent studies show, human-animal relationships and their histories are essential to life and livelihoods, and the systems designed to regulate animals’ urban presence have had profound implications for the spatial structure of the modern city, the workings of political power, and the evolution of the market economy. Animals are not just “good to think,” as Levi-Strauss’s famous formulation put it. They are part and parcel of human lives, institutions, economic systems, and folkways. © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)

Journal

The American Historical ReviewOxford University Press

Published: Sep 6, 2021

There are no references for this article.