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Review of Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History, by William T. Taylor (2024)

Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History is an ambitious project that sets out to present a narrative of human-horse interactions in every corner of the globe from the deep evolutionary past to the twenty-first century. The result is a lucid survey drawing on fresh archaeological research—including some by the author—as well as interdisciplinary insights from oral history, linguistics, and veterinary medicine. The book is a pleasure to read and beautifully presented, with delightful in-text illustrations and 20 full-color plates. Blending erudition and accessibility, Taylor demonstrates the absolute centrality of horses to human cultures, economies, and technologies, as access to horses and expertise in horsemanship repeatedly shifted geopolitical balances on the broadest scale. Though one study cannot exhaust the interpretive potential of this material, Hoof Beats is an indispensable guide to the contours of the human past as they were drawn through contact with horses.

The book is divided into four parts, each referred to as a ‘beat.’ Beat One is dedicated to early connections between horses and people before domestication. Ancestral equids first evolved in North America approximately four million years ago and spread to Eurasia by the Bering land bridge. North American equids did not survive the warm conditions of the early Holocene, so our first evidence for interactions with hominins comes from the eastern hemisphere. According to archaeological remains of slaughtered animals in their grassland habitats, our ancestors were preeminent hunters of equids, including early horses and a separate lineage of donkeys and related animals. Taylor’s own research focuses on the domestication of horses, and he skillfully guides readers through the archaeological debate about when and where this first happened. He explains that research on domestication is not “a search for any particular trait or behavior but instead…a deep dive into the relationship between humans and animals and how it has changed over time.”[1] This relationship is clearly perceived by pathological changes or damage to a horse’s skeleton caused by bridles, mouthpieces, or the direct impact of a rider’s body.

Drawing of horse anatomy with parts signaled by numbers — *A compend of equine anatomy and physiology (1896). Source: Wikimedia Commons*

Beat Two begins with an analysis of donkeys as the first domesticated equids. Taylor shows that evidence for their domestication can be found in early dynastic Egypt, where the “vertebral deformation” of donkey skeletons along with iconography depicting the animals hitched to carts suggests that they were widely used.[2] The cart and later the chariot spread throughout the Near East by donkeys and their hemione relatives. New research shows that this technology was eventually applied to domesticated horses in the early second millennium BCE by the Sintashta culture, along the border of what is now Russia and Kazakhstan. Burials including horses, chariots, and the world’s oldest bridles and bits provide conclusive proof of horse domestication and use in transport. The chapter shows how horse-drawn chariots spread rapidly across Eurasia in just a few centuries while also revolutionizing pastoral life in the steppes, encouraging greater mobility and larger herds. Especially in the Mediterranean world, horse-drawn chariots became the key to political and military power.

In Beat Three, Taylor describes the shift to horseback riding, a practice likely pioneered around 1000 BCE in what is now the Xinjiang Province of China. Evidence for riding in the area comes from whips, saddle pads, and notably “the world’s oldest trousers,” uniquely suitable for sitting astride a horse.[3] Though Taylor considers mounted riding across African and Eurasian societies in this section, the real protagonists are steppe cultures, especially from Inner Asia. People of the steppes drove “technological progress,” developing the frame saddle, stirrups, and curb bits.[4] They were well positioned to dominate the supply of horses, which were always in demand by surrounding civilizations. Taylor’s insights on the crucial role of horses and climate changes in the extraordinary success of steppe empires—from the Xiongnu to the Mongols—serve as much-needed context for the radical impact of these supposedly marginal societies.

Grave Figures of Horses and Camels, Anonymous, ca. 650 – ca. 750
Source: Rijksmuseum

Finally, Beat Four explores the global expansion of horses and horsemanship. Many Eurasian societies developed shipbuilding technologies to transport horses by water, leading to herds in Japan, Iceland, and beyond. Taylor is particularly interested in the “return” of horses to their distant homeland with the advent of European colonization in the Americas.[5] He demonstrates that archaeology can modify historical timelines for the spread of horses and their adoption by Indigenous societies. More importantly, in the Great Plains and elsewhere, he argues that “the rapid emergence of strong relationships between people and horses disrupted the trajectory of European colonialism and helped sustain the sovereignty of Indigenous nations deep into the modern era.”[6] This section concludes with a brief discussion of the fate of horses in the industrializing world—a story of intensified labor and, finally, marginalization.

Book cover of Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History

Taylor is a skilled writer and a superb science educator. Hoof Beats can serve as a kind of primer in archaeological research methods for non-specialists. No region of the world remains untouched by his judicious treatment, making the book an excellent reference text and catalyst for further research. His incorporation of interdisciplinary material is impressive, but it is worth noting that he does not engage with critical animal studies (CAS) or historiographical approaches to animals.[7] This is understandable considering his disciplinary expertise and the goals of his project, but readers could be excused for coming away from his work with the assumption that horses exist for humans. Indeed, while Taylor proposes a relational model for human-horse history early in the book, his narrative actually prioritizes the human use (and, to a lesser degree, care) of horses. It would be worthwhile to flip Taylor’s perspective by taking a non-anthropocentric stance. For example, what can archaeology and veterinary medicine tell us about the quality of life for domesticated horses across time and space, whose skeletal remains seem to tell a constant tale of over-exertion and bodily harm? Taylor concludes his book by gesturing to the lessons for our modern world from the more sustainable, “golden age of horse transport.”[8] But for horses, this was clearly no golden age. Perhaps there are other lessons to be learned from this history.

Hannah McClain is a third-year PhD student in UT Austin’s Department of History. She studies early modern Europe with a regional focus on the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

[1] Hoof Beats, 31. Italics in the original.

[2] Hoof Beats, 65.

[3] Hoof Beats, 113.

[4] Hoof Beats, 150.

[5] Hoof Beats, 180.

[6] Hoof Beats, 193.

[7] Readers interested in these alternative approaches can begin with Erica Fudge’s theoretical and methodological reflections in “A Left-Handed Blow: Writing the History of Animals,” in Representing Animals, ed. Nigel Rothfels (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 3-13.

[8] Hoof Beats, 219.

Review of Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914 (2010) by J. R. McNeill

For approximately three centuries, the greater Caribbean hosted the Spanish empire‘s most important social, environmental, and political connections. Interactions between people, the environment, and mosquitoes played an essential part in this history, as John McNeill explains in Mosquito Empires. A professor of history at Georgetown University, McNeill uses his book to explore the links between ecology, disease, and Atlantic politics in the Greater Caribbean from 1620 until 1914. Mosquito Empires won the Albert J. Beveridge prize from the American Historical Association in 2011.

Mosquito Empires serves as an excellent introduction to the field of environmental history. It opens an exciting pathway to understanding how the past’s ecological, political, and epidemic problems continue to impact our present. McNeill makes an important contribution to the field of environmental studies through connections to different fields, including history, politics, epidemiology, climatology, ecology, and others.

Book cover for Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914 (2010) by J. R. McNeill.

Throughout Mosquito Empires, we find examples that show ecology shaped the history of the Americas because of environmental changes and human agency. Its title is suggestive of the relevance of mosquitoes in an imperial age. McNeill also touches on other subjects, including the transport of animals between continents and the ways in which existing fauna exercised agency to influence how people occupied territory. Furthermore, Mosquito Empires allows us to recognize the role of disease in human and environmental history. As such, it may be even more interesting today, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. As McNeill points out, humans prefer to understand and explain history based on human affairs such as war, revolutions, or conquest. But sometimes, we forget our ecological agency in the environment as a part of our history. McNeill’s book shows co-evolutionary processes bridging the gap between society and nature, demonstrating that the agency of mosquitoes is as important as human agency.

Mosquito Empires also helps us comprehend how the significance and understanding of disease has changed over time. For instance, many diseases did not impact all of the Spanish Empire’s diverse populations in the same way. Diseases encounter different environments, immunities, and susceptibilities as they spread. Moreover, as parts of an ecological chain, certain diseases depended on specific circumstances for transmission: temperature, flora, and land conditions determined how contagious they were. Consequently, McNeill also considers some unique features of malaria and yellow fever, which required mosquitos to spread.

McNeill uses a scalar perspective, beginning his analysis on a global scale before moving towards a local space. Mosquito Empires starts by looking at the Spanish empire from an Atlantic perspective and then focuses on its Caribbean ecology. From 1620 until 1820, the linkages between ecological and political affairs occupied most of the central historical interactions in the Caribbean. Atlantic American geopolitics gave local politics an ecological focus during the early colonial period when Spanish authorities focused on preserving Indigenous and enslaved populations because they provided a labor force for the Spanish empire. The colonizers also built plantations, which occupied most territories in Brazil and the Americans during this period and were more important than silver and gold mines or other sources of economic activity. Also, the creation of plantation systems helped the permanence of mosquitos, producing the conditions necessary for the ongoing existence of diseases. At the same time, geopolitical turbulence in Atlantic America coincided with ecological transformations in the Greater Caribbean. Most of their impacts were related to the introduction of new plants and animals in the Americas, which affected preexisting environmental conditions.

A drawing depicting a plantation on the San Juan River in Nicaragua. — *This nineteenth-century drawing depicts a plantation on the San Juan River in Nicaragua. Source: Wikimedia Commons.*

One of the most exciting contributions made by Mosquito Empires is its creation of a unified historical and ecological framework for analyzing epidemiologic problems. Through his book, we can gain new insights into diseases by studying them in a single ecological and historical context. Mosquito Empires considers many variables: demography, ecology, immunity, and climate changes which could affect the spread of diseases in the Caribbean. McNeill compares how yellow fever affected Caribbean locals and European immigrants; he also shows that the disease impacted rural areas (where plantations were located) more than urban ones.

Other factors such as climate change and European immigration, contributed to the spread of diseases, leading to variations across time and space. McNeill’s framework shows how yellow fever’s agency operates and examines its transmission, immunity, and impact on humans and across landscapes. Nonetheless, the disease did not make its history by itself. As McNeill demonstrates, yellow fever acquired historical relevance only when it became an epidemic and had a persistent cycle of transmission. Through this argument, the author shows how human activity converted a diminutive organism into a historical and ecological concern for many years.

Another outstanding feature of McNeill’s book is the diversity of manuscript sources it taps, many of which come from Iberic-American archives. The demographic and health features presented in the book are essential to consider the perception of the disease, but also the knowledge (scientific or empirical) to cure or resolve the epidemics. Case studies examine Brazil, Jamaica, Kourou, Darien, and The Viceroyalty of New Granada. Mosquito Empires performs a valuable service just by gathering so much information. But the information is also critical to the book’s central aim because it documents the disasters created by geopolitical colonialism. According to McNeill, these events show “the power of imported diseases, after the 1640s establishment of yellow fever in the region, to prevent new large-scale European settlement in the Greater Caribbean (p. 135).”

Mosquito Empires serves to remind historians of the role of diseases in our environment. McNeill’s book presents a history of empire’s power as shown through the links between ecological and political matters. McNeill describes the mosquitoes as shields of empire, but readers should also consider them as actors in this geopolitical puzzle. Mosquitoes were protagonists with agency and specific power, capable of defending (through immunity) or destroying (through mortality) an army or a population group; they could also transform the environment.

Cindia Arango López is a doctoral student at UT Austin at the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies. She studies the relationship between the environmental and social history of the Magdalena River and its navigators, the bogas, during the 18th century in Colombia. She has researched thematics about enslaved history in the colonial period in Colombia. Also, she published relating to the current territorial dynamics of displacement in Colombia from a human geography perspective.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Review of The Butterfly Effect: Insects and the Making of the Modern World (2020)

Most of us prefer to avoid insects. A bee, a cockroach, or a fat yellowish worm confront us with nature’s “ugliness” and present a disconcerting threat to our modern, comfortable being. Perhaps even less appealing than meeting these weirdly shaped creatures is the thought of reading about them. And yet, despite this instinctive response, Edward Melillo’s The Butterfly Effect: Insects and the Making of the Modern World demonstrates that the same very creatures that we try so hard to avoid are the ones that enabled this comfort to begin with.

book cover for The Butterfly Effect: Insects and the Making of the Modern World

The book accounts for the shared history of people and insects in the last three millennia and is divided into two parts. Part one, made of five chapters, explores the interactions of people with insects through three main perspectives. The first chapter covers some main preconceptions and prejudices about bugs, and how these became a part of contemporary culture. Chapters two to four follow three main insect-related commodities – shellac, silk, and cochineal. These are, in my opinion, the best sections of Melillo’s current project, as they exemplify the capacity of transnational history to help understand the modern world. Chapter five covers the rise of “the synthetic age,” and focuses mainly on the environmental impact of the post-WWII synthetic boom. Part two contains two chapters about the centrality of insects to the scientific discoveries of (to name a few) Thomas Hunt Morgan, Charles Henry Turner, and Karl von Frisch. The final chapter stands as a delicacy of its own and covers the history and future of eating insects.

Melillo’s book is an example of an academic work worth reading for both its substance and style. Students of commodity history, history of science and technology, environmental historians, and curious readers alike will find this work both helpful and inspiring. Through the narrow prism of a bug’s viewpoint, Melillo tackles important questions about the biases of contemporary culture, the inherent contradictions of modernity, tensions between scientific and local knowledge systems, and the future of our decaying plant. Especially impressive are his arguments about the centrality of non-humans to the history of our species. He is careful enough not to call the symbiotic relations between humans and insects coevolution – as our shared history modified neither our nor our six-legged cousins’ genetics. Instead, Melillo proves once and again how the things we take for granted as the result of human ingenuity owe, in reality, a great debt to these creatures.

Melillo’s style appeals to both the academic and the general readership. His previous book – Strangers on Familiar Soil – explored how California and Chile coevolved through mutual displacement, exchange, and influence of people, commodities, and plants since the 18^th century. Melillo’s model of shifting back and forth between these two locations inspired scholars to think about cross-regional histories that, until then, remained obscured.

His current book project raises a new challenge – how to write about people and insects, two hyper-globalized creatures that are not bound to a specific location? Melillo’s solution is taken from the rich literature on commodities that might be summarized in one phrase: follow the thing itself. He refuses to bound himself to a specific place and time and takes the readers on a fascinating journey that benefits from an impressive array of historical cases. And so, we get to learn about insects as symbols of beauty in Chinese folklore, their importance to American parachute-making before WWII, and how they are used as social analogies in French literature. Such rich source material and methodological imagination will certainly inspire students and scholars to pursue global and trans-regional history. At the same time, Melillo’s elegant style and clear writing create a smooth narrative from what could have been a dreadful and disorienting collection of various histories. Furthermore, Melillo cleverly avoids convoluted language, historiographical debates, and exhausting footnotes, making the book an accessible read for non-academic curious readers.

“One striking characteristic of commodity history…” Bruce Robbins notes, “is a certain overkill in their subtitles.” And indeed Melillo cleverly never argues that insects were the ones who “made the modern world.” Rather, he confronts his readers with a strong statement – that what we think of as fundamentally modern, and therefore inherently human-centric, is the result of millennia-long inspiration from, cooperation with, and fight against insects. Our music, art, clothes, food, and science were never always exclusively ours, for we owe nature and its tiny beings a huge debt. The book concludes with a critique of another key feature of modernity: rather than accepting the naïve belief that somehow people will find a way to leave nature behind, we should resume one of our longest human traditions – listening to insects.

Atar David is a Ph.D. student in the History department at UT Austin, interested in the social, economic, and environmental history of the modern Middle East, with special attention to agricultural policies, commodities, knowledge production, and food provision policies. He is currently working on the circulation of agricultural commodities and their cultural networks throughout and beyond the eastern Mediterranean during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Together with Raymond Hyser, Atar founded the “Material History Workshop” – a bi-monthly graduate workshop centered around material culture. You can read more about the workshop here: https://notevenpast.org/uts-material-history-workshop/

His Whaleship: The Stories of Real, Authentic, Dead Whales

By Lydia Pyne

In 1873, there weren’t very many options for the public in the United States to see what a real whale looked like.

The occasional whale could wash up on a beach somewhere, of course, but it would rapidly begin to shuffle off its mortal coil, leaving beachgoers with the decidedly unpleasant process of natural decomposition. On the other hand, seeing the animal’s skeleton neatly hung in a museum was a bit incomplete because it required imagination or an artist’s reconstruction to put muscle and skin on the whale. Unlike other large mammals, whales can’t be taxidermied; consequently, stuffed whales weren’t part of the dioramas of charismatic megafauna installed in natural history museums at the turn-of-the-twentieth century. And photographing whales underwater – to see real whales in their natural habitats – was almost a full century away.

The Columbus Evening Dispatch, Tuesday, March 8, 1881, front page.

So, in 1873, the best possibility for people to see real whales was thanks to Great International Menagerie, Aquarium, and Circus, that touted its exhibit of “A Leviathan Whale, a grand and magnificent specimen, the King of the Deep” as “the only show in the world that exhibits a WHALE,” per then-contemporary newspaper articles.

By WHALE, the Menagerie meant a real, actual dead whale. This WHALE was quasi-preserved through the constant injection of chemicals and carted around via rail from one American town to the next in a bit of Music Man-like showmanship. Their competitor, the Burr Robbins Circus, exhibited a giant paper-mâché whale a few years later, determined to not be outdone by the Menagerie. The two whales dueled their way across the United States for the better part of a decade, vying for publicity, audiences, and the money to be made from the venture. And the Menagerie’s WHALE was all about just that – turning the public’s awe and wonder at nature’s unknown into spectacle for profit.

The Columbus Evening Dispatch, Saturday August 27, 1881, front page.

Whether visitors knew anything about whales after they had visited the Menagerie was irrelevant. The showmanship, the bustle of activity, the anticipation of the WHALE was something so singularly extraordinary, that it never failed to draw huge crowds. And, yet, the decades-long success of the traveling WHALE largely depended on the experience being personal. Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, and see for yourself. You know what a real whale looks like now because you saw one here and paid for the privilege to do so. It’s as though the Menagerie was able to curry a sense of authenticity or even expertise about whales since that was, technically, what visitors saw.

But the WHALE lacked scientific or natural history context. For example, when the Menagerie’s King of the Deep arrived in Columbus, Ohio, on March 8, 1881, the headlines from the Columbus Evening Dispatch sensationalized the exhibit, “He is coming! He is coming! The Monster Whale! The Monarch Supreme of the Ocean! The Giant of the Gigantic Creation of the Universe! Don’t Fail To Bring The Children!”

The exhibit and its publicity were as big as its cetacean. “It requires a great deal of elbow room, because his whaleship is sixty feet long in the clear,” the Columbus Evening Dispatch reported. Visitors invariably wanted to know how the exhibit was possible – exactly how the whale’s entrails were removed and replaced with first ice and then chemicals, how the sawdust underneath the whale corpse kept the leviathan’s leaking in check. How yet more chemicals applied to the whale’s skin kept the outer parts of the animal from decomposing and how iron hoops within the body cavity kept His Whaleship from collapsing in on himself. (The Dispatch assured its readers that the exhibit was “free from unpleasant odor.”) In short, the WHALE wasn’t really so much about whales inspiring awe and wonder in nature, so much as it was about how the WHALE’s keepers and revenue collectors had so effectively cheated the animal’s mortal decay.

D. Finnan, Blue Whale, American Museum of Natural History

Meanwhile, in the museum world, curators, scientists, and exhibitors began to push to “properly” introduce audiences to the life, history, and biology of whales. The 1907 blue whale model at the American Museum of Natural History was built out of iron, wood, and canvas, and was eventually covered with a very believable paper-mâché exoskeleton of sorts. “They are building a whale at the Museum of Natural History,” the Wilkes-Barre Record of Pennsylvania reported on January 4, 1907, “from wooden strips, iron rods, piano wires, paper, and glue. They are carpenters, horsesmiths, and wallpaper hangers and when the work has been done in rough, the naturalists will give the finishing touches.”

Even though this wasn’t a “real” whale – it was a model – it represented the best knowledge about whales that the scientific community could offer at the beginning of the twentieth century. And as curators and showmen found, there’s only so much whale authenticity that audiences were willing to tolerate – no leaking, dripping, or smelling – even if those details are just as “real” as the other parts of an exhibit.

Rather than spectacle, credible institutions like the American Museum of Natural History argued, audiences ought to have accuracy. Scientific accuracy, to be precise. Unlike the free-wheeling world of sideshows, museums run by conservators, curators, and biologists could offer scientifically modeled and expertly credible specimens.

Understanding the Blue Whale (National Geographic)

Both sorts of whales – the menagerie act and the model in the American Museum of Natural History – have real and less-than-real parts to them: neither is in its natural habitat. So what makes one of these fake whales more real than the other? The intent? Its manufacture? The materials? What visitors take away? Some combination of everything? Both whales made audiences consider what was real, what was authentic, and how each aspect of the whales changed over time.

Each of the genuinely fake whales from the Great International Menagerie and the American Museum of Natural History balanced a series of tradeoffs in cost, audience, and realness. Whether or not history considers each authentic – or if that could change in the future – is an open question.

The stories of these whales are retold, here, as they appear in my book, Genuine Fakes: How Phony Things Teach Us About Real Stuff (Bloomsbury, Sigma, 2019.)

Noah Charney. The Art of Forgery: The Minds, Motives and Methods of the Master Forgers. London (2015).
Historian Noah Charney takes up the question of fakes, frauds, and forgeries; his book traces truly fantastic stories and offers a perspective from art history as to the cachet that fakes carry.

Byung-Chul Han. Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese. Translated by Philippa Hurd. Bilingual edition. (2017).
“Shanzhai” is a contemporary Chinese neologism that means “fake” and in this longform essay Han discusses all of the ways that “fakes” can exists — from copies to replicas to counterfeits to facsimiles. Every object, every fake, take on a life of its own.

Michael Rossi. “Fabricating Authenticity: Modeling a Whale at the American Museum of Natural History, 1906–1974.” Isis 101, no. 2 (2010): 338–61. https://doi.org/10.1086/653096.

———. “Modeling the Unknown: How to Make a Perfect Whale.” Endeavour 32, no. 2 (June 2008): 58–63. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2008.04.003.
Michael Rossi’s work is key for anyone who want to dig into the specific details of the AMNH whale models.

Kati Stevens. Fake. Object Lessons. (2018).
In Fake, Kati Stevens offers a contemporary read on how “fake” has become a label, a judgement, and a moral judgement in the twenty-first century.

Erin L. Thompson. Possession: The Curious History of Private Collectors from Antiquity to the Present. (2016).
Possession traces the afterlives of antiquities and all of the many and bizarre ways that they’ve been collected and valued over millennia.

Header Image Credit: Richard Lydekker, Sperm Whale Skeleton 1894 (Wikipedia).

Yeas and Neighs: The Decline of the Urban Horse

by Abigail Finch

This year’s Claudio Segre Prize for Best History Honors Thesis went to Abigail Finch, a history major at the University of Texas at Austin. Her thesis chronicles the history of horse-drawn transport and the transformation of the image of a horse from industrial machine to human companion. Read her abstract and biography, and see some images of early twentieth century horse-drawn carriages, in the space below.

Abstract:

The transition from equine transport to electric car began very slowly in the 1890s. Gasoline-powered automobiles hastened the transition shortly after the turn-of-the-century, but still it moved at a snail’s pace. Certain commercial horse-drawn transport methods, such as milk carts and mail carts, continued well into the 1920s and 30s. This thesis will investigate the multiple values of the horse as an industrial machine, as well as attempt to understand the shift that transformed the horse’s image in the human mind from a power source into a living, breathing, and kindhearted companion. This shift did not occur overnight. Regardless, the introduction of electric transportation created a crisis in the city as cars and horses struggled to coexist, and change became necessary.

Interest in the urban horse spurred two thought provoking books: The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century (2007), written by Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr; the second Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America (2008) by Ann Norton Greene. Both books provide insight into the multiple values of the horse as an industrial machine. Numerous academic articles published in the last decade will also provide useful secondary source material. The New York Times archive, Humane Society periodicals from Massachusetts and New York, and 19th century books published on animal rights provide me with a firm foundation of primary source material. Through the use of these sources, I will ascertain the concerns of the nineteenth century public regarding the position of the equine in the city, as well as the various purposes it served, and which positions it continued to serve even after the “golden age” of the horse was past.

About Abigail Finch:

Abigail Finch began her higher education at Mt. Holyoke College, where she first fell in love with American History. A Texan at heart, Abigail made the decision to transfer to University of Texas at Austin in 2009, and completed her BA from the College of Liberal Arts in the spring of 2012 with High Honors and Phi Beta Kappa. Abigail is an English and History major, and a student of the History Honors Program. An avid equestrian, Abigail came to her thesis topic through a desire to merge her passion for horses and her interest in American History.

Photo credits:

All images courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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