Nature's Metropolis

William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: WW Norton, 1991)

Here, Cronon looks at Chicago as both a product of and a shaper of the "first-nature" environment surrounding its metropolitan areas. This is the best possible example of how environmental history could integrate the urban and the rural and downplay the concept of "wilderness," a goal that everyone is always talking about. Cronon shows how Chicago used its position on Lake Michigan to attract railroads, which in turn attracted trade from the "great West"'s hinterlands, which in turn located Chicago as a gateway city: raw goods would enter the city and exit as value-added commodities, with Chicago performing the work of abstracting the commodity from its original context. Chicago was dependent on the strength and financial capital of New York and Philadelphia, which financed the railroads and established Chi-town as the broker of Midwestern ecological capital.

Commodities that Cronon looks at include wheat, lumber, and meat. In each case, Cronon argues, manufacturers in Chicago figured out how to use economies of scale to aggregate these goods into mass quantities and to abstract their value from their physical presence. This last happening worked especially well with wheat, which created the modern concept of the "exchange," at which people traded wheat without ever even seeing the wheat in question. (Here is where I figured out what a "futures market" is - it's more fascinating than one could ever imagine.)

Cronon writes that Chicago's effect upon the rural sites which came within its orbit was both positive for people's lives (easier selling of their goods; better access to cheaper things) and negative (they were at the mercy of distant forces for their livelihood; if they were merchants, they were undercut by cheaper Chicago prices). Cronon shows how certain small-potatoes merchants and farmers resisted the pressure of the giant Chicago firms through associations (sometimes more effective, other times less).

I've been waiting to read this one for a long time, and it was definitely un-disappointing. Cronon's ability to be both a good storyteller and a "man of infinite research" (as TR said about Henry Adams) is a thing to envy. His inclusion of financial records, technological analysis, and cultural productions (novels, esp. in the World's Fair chapter) makes this book a model of enviable American Studies practice.

American Technological Sublime

David Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994)

Nye teaches at the University of Southern Denmark, and has written several other books on technology and modernity in the US, including Electrifying America (on my list) and Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies. I'm not sure if he was trained in American Studies, but he apparently got his degree from Minnesota, so it seems likely. Regardless, this book could easily be used to answer the question "What does an ideal American Studies book look like?"

This book approaches its subject not through some artificially delineated rubric defined by race, age, gender, or time ("Italian immigrants in the cities, 1881-1911"). Nye picks an idea - that there is a particularly American form of expression/social interaction, called the "technological sublime" - and then picks a bunch of examples throughout American history in order to develop this idea. He effectively, then, creates a new rubric or a new category. And he uses the breadth of methodological sources that I would want from an American Studies book - responses from observers both "high" and "low"; examples from public entertainment settings (such as from expositions) and from cityscapes and defense departments (this shows how "technological sublime" is produced and managed by various agencies, with a larger or smaller degree of intent); the inclusion of fiction. I do think he could have had more in here about film, though.

Nye traces how the sublime, originally a concept articulated by Burke and Kant in order to describe a response to a natural object of great magnitude or impressiveness, shifted its boundaries in America to encompass the technological. On the way, Nye argues, the experience of facing the sublime shifted from an individual to a crowd context; from being provoked by nature to being provoked by machinery; and from an experience of "substance" into an electric image (277). His examples of various varieties of "technological sublime" include the electric sublime (see: lighting displays at World's Fairs); the industrial sublime (the curving, uniform lines of the factory walls at Manchester, NH's Amoskeag Mills - "complexity and order on a massive scale" [113]); the geometric sublime (skyscrapers and dams) and the dynamic sublime (the railroads).

His penultimate chapter, which describes the rededication of the Statue of Liberty in 1986, shows how the technological sublime as practiced in these public contexts participates in a utopianism that promises not a difference in social interactions but a difference in the kind of "stuff" that we own. These sort of un-radical (or even repressive) historical precedents for the technological sublime of television can be found way earlier, however, in the "industrial sublime," which subsumed images of workers below images of machinery, beginning in the late nineteenth century, and in the "geometric sublime," embodied by skyscrapers that shut out and alienated the street-level public while impressing a generalized "public" with their mass.

There is interesting thought in here too about the interplay between nature and technology - Nye claims that if a naturally sublime site faces down a technologically sublime possibility, as in the case of dam construction, the naturally sublime will always lose to the potential of construction, because while the natural sublime speaks of limits, the technological sublime speaks of "the idea of reason in constant evolution" (60).

The Devil in the Shape of a Woman

"Examination of a Witch", by Thompkins H. Matteson, 1853. Karlsen points out that artists, writers and historians who have been interested in Salem stretch in a continuous genealogy beginning with the events themselves.

Title: The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (New York: Norton, originally published in 1987)

Author: Carol F. Karlsen, professor of history at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Minimal information available on the departmental website, but Karlsen graduated from Yale history dept. in 1980, and thanks John Demos, Edmund Morgan, Kai Erikson, and Nancy Cott for their help in the process of writing the book. It looks like she's come out with one other book, an edited diary of a colonial woman, and was at one point working on another one about gender relations and the Iroquois, though I don't think it's come out.

My review: For Karlsen, the black hole in the middle of all other explanations of the social meanings of witchcraft has been the gender question. She acknowledges that class-based rationales for the crises have found some kind of pattern, but then seeks to more conclusively situate these class patterns within questions of gender.

By performing a series of parsings of demographic information, Karlsen arrives at the conclusion that an accused witch was likely to be a woman who stood to inherit or had recently inherited property, because of a lack of brothers or sons in her family, thereby exposing the fault lines of a society based on the orderly succession of possession from father to son.

Other demographic characteristics of accused witches were advanced age, in a time during which older women were seen as a burden because of their inability to bear children or do work; contentiousness or dissatisfaction with their lot, which Karlsen compassionately ascribes either to the "eye of the beholder" or to the fundamentally unfair social conditions of the time, instead of to the personalities of the accused, as previous historians had done; or a family relationship to an accused witch or an executed witch. Karlsen goes beyond other analysts in asking not only which persons were accused - a number which would include men, young women, and even children - but which were actually convicted, and given severe punishments. This group most often included women of the older, property-holding persuasion.

Karlsen writes that the social conditions of gender relations in the colonies were set up to foment maximum confusion and upset on the part of male members of the society when it came to their view of women. The sexual double standard meant that, in order to allow for their own sexual freedom, men had to also allow women to occasionally have adulterous affairs, which might disrupt succession of property; the economic dependence of women meant that men had to support women; and the laws of primogeniture meant that they had to live with whatever their fathers decided to do in the matter of property (which might sometimes include making decisions which favored mothers or sisters over brothers, or favored only one older son while slighting younger ones). Meanwhile, older religious views of women held that these Eves were the temptresses who had caused mankind to fall. Although Puritan elders tried to set up a more kind attitude toward women, in order to facilitate harmony between the sexes in the small-scale enterprises of living in the colonies, this fundamental view of female treachery surfaced when females threatened the gender hierarchies of life. "It was," she writes ominously, "a formula which invited the Devil" (218).

"Repentance of Judge Sewall", a painting whose provenance I cannot seem to figure out for the life of me, though it is in the "Examination of a Witch" style (I got it from a site that doesn't cite authors/painters...but has a nifty "Salem Jeopardy" feature, which kind of makes up for it.) Judge Sewall, who publicly apologized for his role in the trials no more than five years after their conclusion, also became an anti-slavery advocate. There are a couple of books about his life, one of which, by Richard Francis, was well-reviewed. Karlsen points out that a remarkable feature of the Salem trials was how definitively they marked the end of an era. She writes that Enlightenment thinking finally began to predominate in the colonies, which made witchcraft obsolete as a concept (some, like Sewall, had already had mixed feelings about the validity of executing people accused of it).

Reviews of others: Paul Boyer, in the Journal of American History, called Karlsen's interpretation "provocative" and lauds it for its subtlety and reach, but says that she does not sufficiently confront the established scholarship on the subject. In the New England Quarterly, Bernard Rosenthal wrote that the book advanced a very valuable argument, but took a couple of pages to quibble with various points of historical interpretation, particularly when it comes to the analysis of the possessed children/women who accused women in Salem (this is a criticism that Karlsen also discusses in her afterword). Rosenthal also pointed out, somewhat weirdly, that any explanation of why witches were mostly women would have to reach back to Europe, and says that Karlsen could solve that problem by either looking at particular conditions of New England, which, Rosenthal says, would "falsify" the issue, or by skirting it. I don't get why incorporating elements of English tradition with local conditions in the analysis (which is what I thought Karlsen did, by the way) would be "falsification".

Leads: Secondary: Mary Douglas, Implicit Meanings (1975)

Poster from the 1996 version of The Crucible, dir. Nicholas Hytner. (Interestingly enough, this jpg was taken from a site called lovefilm.com. If this is love, I'll take tomato juice.) Karlsen argues that the vision of Miller's play, in which the sexpot servant Abigail Williams screws everyone over by accusing her master/lover's wife of witchcraft, minimizes the true sexual politics behind the witchcraft scares, which were more based on boring questions of property ownership than on adulterous affairs like this fictional one.

Dominion

Title: Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy (New York: St. Martin's, 2002)

Author: Matthew Scully, who, in an alternate universe, used to be a "special assistant and senior speechwriter" for George W. Bush. That George W. Bush. Apparently he wrote the post-9.11 presidential addresses - and, what's more, is proud of that fact. He's also involved with the National Review, and writes for other pubs including the NYT, the WaPo, and the WSJ.

Argument: Arguing from Scripture, Scully holds that because God put humans in "dominion" over the non-human world, we are obligated to exercise "stewardship". This means that we must not treat animals as though they are there for our pleasure and our pleasure alone. Scully believes that our motivations towards animals could be called "love", and that this speaks well of our humanity - and that cruel actions toward animals, on the other hand, indicate that some part of our morality has been lost. (This is very similar to the arguments of early animal rights activists, who thought that animal cruelty would lead a human down the road to worse and worse crimes against their own Christian nature.) Scully sometimes veers close to making a critique of consumer culture and capitalism as a whole (!), but always somehow steers clear.

Chapter-by-chapter:
The Things That Are: An exploration of the phenomenon of fellow-feeling between men and animals. Scully looks back at previous Christian thinkers who have spoken out against cruelty, and wonders why today's church doesn't have a stance on the issue. In a section called "Practical Ethics", he points out that "traditional" animal rights activists seek to place animals on a level with humans, but that his own thought is based on the idea that animals are "less" than humans - weaker, more vulnerable - but that this must require more care from us for their welfare, not less. He then makes the case for his inclusion of farm animals in the book (even though, as he says, he feels like it'll lose him readers). Looking at animals and deciding "right action" toward them, he says, "requires discernment and care and humility before Creation...it means understanding that habits are not always needs, traditions are not eternal laws, and the fur salon, kitchen table, or Churchill Room are not the center of the moral universe" (45). In other words, refraining from animal cruelty is, for him, an act of rational morality.

The Shooting Field: Scully gains access to safari club conventions, and interviews several safari club outfits and patrons. (This is a good example of a reporting situation in which I bet it really helped to have the Republican connections and credentials.) Lots of details about the fetishization of particular animals, the masculine society, the money it costs, the videos they watch of "greatest charges" or "chases", etc. Scully goes OFF on the "canned hunts", in which animals who are fenced in and unable to get away are shot. Describing one patron of the canned hunts, Scully writes, "These are his needs, his demands as a paying customer, and of course all things of the earth must be reordered to meet them - whatever creature Ray Baxter desires located, seized, trucked to Arkansas, and brought before him for a quick and convenient shot" (65). This is one of those places where Scully is almost, almost, almost anticapitalist. Sort of. I like the way Scully ends the chapter by interviewing professional hunters - the men who take the customers out, find the animals, and arrange the kill.

Matters of Consequence: Returning to "the beginning" (this he means biblically), Scully looks at the concept of "dominion" and asks "where on earth they [the people at the Safari Club, etc] got this idea of dominion as a relentless, merciless merchandising and pillaging of our forests and their inhabitants" (90). Scully faces right up to the inherent contradiction of his being a conservative who supports animal rights, saying "habits, customs, and impulses, just because they are ancient, are not necessarily venerable" (doesn't sound very conservative to me!) (101)

Riches of the Sea: What better place to explore the ethics of "resource harvesting" than when it comes to fishing? Whaling is where Scully focuses most of his energy here, going into International Whaling Commission business and into issues of indigenous whale hunting rights (he's not for them). But he also has some interesting things to say about the WTO, which he writes creates a "kind of mania" for fair trade, which becomes "not just a good but the highest good", stripping us of our ability to have moral standards (184). Yeah, it does.

The Laws: Here Scully looks at the current research on animal "thinking" and "feeling", asking how, if at all, this research has an impact on our understanding of what animal cruelty laws should entail (for he now believes that our system of laws doesn't go far enough, because as it is, "the creatures under our dominion thus inhabit a moral void of subjective human desires and situational ethics" [192]). Some theorists of animal intellect, like Stephen Budiansky, are actively trying, according to Scully, to prove that animals can't think, and therefore that we should not have laws to keep them from being killed. "I am not sure which is the worse evil, the kill or the theory," he writes (229).

Deliver Me From My Necessities: Here we have an unusual thing: Scully actually manages to get inside a pig farm in North Carolina, where he writes vividly about the physical experience of entering the place where all the pigs are kept, and also about the people he meets who work in the industry ("Gay embodies in her ample frame all of humanity's contradictions about animals, capable of touching solicitude one moment and staggering disregard the next" [266]).

Nature and Nature's God and Justice and Mercy: "When our own fundamental interests are at stake, in short, and our suffering in the balance, we are moral absolutists, and with animals and their suffering we are moral relativists," Scully writes, pointing out the hypocrisy of humanity in his final appeal to change (298). He writes that if we need to find a moral basis for defining our approach to animals, we should look at the plan of "the nature of things" for a guide, striving not to transgress against what would seem to be the program of each organism by torturing it into a "machine of our own invention" (303). "For me," he writes, "it comes down to a question of whether I am a man or just a consumer" (325).

Reviews: The book won the PETA award for "Book of the Year", after it came out, though this fact is not on the book jacket! Positive reviews have come from a motley crue, everybody from Michael Pollan to Christopher Hitchens to Peter Singer to Charles Colson.

The Circus Age

Title: The Circus Age: Culture and Society Under the American Big Top (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002)

Author: Our own Janet Davis!

Argument: "This book argues that the turn of the century railroad circus was a powerful cultural icon of a new, modern nation-state" (10) - that the circus took shape in the way it did, where it did, because of the particular society in which it flourished. The circus represented the diversity and pleasure of the spectacle of a multitudinous America, but often in a way which reiterated cultural norms.

Chapter-by-chapter:

Circus Day: Rich descriptions of the public spectacle that was a circus coming into town in "railroad circus" days, followed by a basic overview of the historical currents which fed into the phenomenon (immigration, "the search for order", racism, empire, expanding overseas markets, incorporation - see Alan Trachtenberg). Davis then describes the three largest railroad circuses upon which the book will focus (Barnum & Bailey, the Ringling Bros, and Adam Forepaugh & Sells Brothers), making a case for them as the three largest, most widely-traveled, and most influential of the circuses, and differentiating them from Wild West Shows (the circus was less historically minded, more eclectic in subject matter, and employed the definitive "big top" canvas covering).

This photo of Barnum & Bailey camels on a main street parade was found on a website called camelphotos.com. Cue the "I love the Internet" theme song.

The Circus as Historical and Cultural Process: This chapter dips back in time to the 1790s, describing the evolution of the circus during the 1800s as "a metonym for national expansion and infrastructural development" (12). (In other words, the railroad, Western expansion, and the circus were intimately linked.) This chapter also discusses, using cultural theory of Stuart Hall, Edward Said, and Judith Butler, how the different groups involved in the production of the circus came together to produce its "ideological content" (25). NB: On p 35, Davis discusses children's circus culture, including a circus toy set which modeled itself after TR's African safari of 1909.

These men were supposed to be "pearl divers from the Sandwich Islands" - an instance of American imperialism's absorption into circus-world.

Spectacular Labor: This chapter "illuminates the thick, physical framework in which the circus produced its ideological content" (39) - in other words, how did it all get done, and how does this "how" help us understand what workers, supervisors, and spectators expected? Spectators who watched the circus were not only intrigued with the parts of the show specifically designated as performance. They also congregated to watch the set-up and strike of the tent, and were fascinated/repelled by the lives of circus performers. Davis argues that these performers created a social world apart from "regular life", and also that the tightly wound methods and processes of the circus (they had to be tight, to fit onto the railroad schedule) brought the industrial order of organization to small towns far away from factories.

Respectable Female Nudity: Women were becoming more and more visible in the public sphere (see the "New Woman"), and the people who ran these circuses faced an interesting gender conundrum: what to do about their very visible female performers? In general, they tried to "reconfigure strong Euroamerican circus women into dainty, domestic ladies, and women of color into educational artifacts" (12). They did so with an eye to a subtle titillation of the viewer, playing with transgression, referring to sex obliquely, through "emphasis on female performers' lives, loves, and body-hugging tights" (85). Here is also a discussion of presentation of "untouched" tribes or "savages" in the circus context.

From the King of Beasts to Clowns in Drag: Masculinity in the circus and its contrasting meanings is the subject of this chapter, which holds that "performances...were sites of gender play that could provide audiences with liberating alternatives to disciplined lives of manly capital accumulation" (12). Although circus men were seen as exemplars of the athletic, "strenuous" ideal, they were also sometimes androgynous or dressed in drag - or, they were actually animals, dressed up as men. Here are examples of the animals' roles in particular tableaux, as well as the integration of evolutionary theory (chimpanzees used as examples of "Man, Previous to His Degeneration" [153]) and the emphasis placed on "ideal" or "alpha" specimens of megafauna (just like Carl Akeley and his Giant of Karisimbi). Men of color, even African-Americans, were often used as examples of apes or savages (182). Do hippos really have teeth that look like that?

Instruct the Minds of All Classes: Through the circus (and the Wild West show), American involvement in foreign countries was processed, naturalized, and contained. Episodes of foreign entanglement were re-broadcast in circus format, reenacted or dramatized. The overriding philosophy behind these representations was that circuses were "moral cheerleaders of expansionism" (194). Meanwhile, on a material level, animals and labor from overseas were used in performance, dramatizing the advantages of selective American extraction of talent and labor from foreign countries - however, Davis points out, the freakiness of these performers may have served to subtly uphold an anti-imperialist racial logic of exclusion (see Eric Love).

Looks like kind of a scary dream for a kid to have.

Legacies: From Las Vegas to the Bridges of Madison County: Contemporary analogues of circus culture, and some speculation as to what forms of culture may have taken its place.

Reviews: In the Journal of American History, Don Wilmeth lauded the book for being "clearly written, persuasively argued, exhaustively documented", and wrote that it did an admirable job of completing its project of connecting the circus to the cultural history of the time. The book was also well-reviewed in non-scholarly pubs, including the NYT and the Times Literary Supplement.

Books to follow up on: Primary: Peter Harkness, Andy the Acrobat; or, Out with the Greatest Show on Earth (1907); William Hornaday, The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals (1922); Harvey Root, Tommy with the Big Tents (1924).

Secondary: Harvey Green, Fit for America: Health, Fitness, Sport, and American Society (1986); Elizabeth Haiken, Venus Envy: A History of Cosmetic Surgery (1997); RJ Hoage and William A Deiss, New Worlds, New Animals: From Menagerie to Zoological Park in the Nineteenth Century (1996); Michael Kammen, American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the Twentieth Century (1999); Robert Kanigel, The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Engima of Efficiency (1997); Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (1990); Patricia Vertinsky, The Eternally Wounded Woman: Women, Doctors, and Exercise in the Late Nineteenth Century (1990).

Spectacular Nature

Title: Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)

Author: Susan G. Davis, professor of communications at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her PhD is in "folklore and folklife," from UPenn. Her first book was Parades and Power: Street Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (1986). She lists her interests as "politics of contemporary public and commercial space; nature and its relation to mass commercial culture; history and memory on the landscape; the contemporary history of tourism, southern California and San Diego history and culture." She doesn't seem to have written another book since this one.

Argument: Davis takes a holistic look at the production of the Sea World experience, seeking to outline the park's positioning as public and as educational space. To this end, she describes the park's interaction with the community; analyzes the corporation's advertising and packaging, both in print media and within the exhibits and the park itself; conducts ethnographic research within the population of those who work at the park and within the population of visitors; and parses the physical space of the park. Through all of this work, Davis hopes to understand how Sea World, and other examples of what she calls "spectacular nature", are "corporate culture's philanthropic answer to a world of environmental emergencies," through which "the possibility of alternatives" (to environmental destruction, especially species extirpation) "collapses into the consumption of images" (237-8). Theoretically, she draws from Raymond Williams' concept of nature's ability to obscure hidden social relationships of power, as well as Donna Haraway's work on museum exhibits.

This picture was attached to a blog post about an article about applying Sea World's animal-training techniques to husbands. Human husbands, that is.

Chapter-by-Chapter:

One: Another World: Theme Parks and Nature: Davis sets up the framework for understanding theme-park nature as a product, and the theme park industry as the producer. This chapter is a cultural history of theme parks, concentrating on the ways in which theme parks produce multiple streams of income for corporations (through licensing, tie-ins, concessions). Davis sees Sea World, owned by Anheuser-Busch, as a powerful way for a company to associate itself with neutral and pristine white-washed ideals of nature.

Two: The Park and the City: Here, Davis does a site-specific historical analysis of Sea World's location in San Diego, concentrating on the ways in which the park must appeal "both to an audience of locals and tourists," situating itself in San Diego but responding to a national corporation and trying to attract national and international tourists as part of SD's tourism juggernaut (41). In early permutations, Sea World had a more cheesy, sideshow visual language - dolphins wore bikinis, etc - but later on it sought to reposition itself as an Educational Institution.

Sea World mascot.

Three: Producing the Sea World Experience: Landscape and Labor: Sea World's landscape, Davis points out, is a space constructed out of "human work, time, space, dirt, plants, and animals" (77). Here, using interviews with managers, she tells us about the way in which the corporation uses numbers to drive the park's physical workings, constantly recalibrating based on statistics derived from market research in order to achieve a "good length of stay" which will provide the maximum visitor utilization of concessions and other money-making components (extra shows, rides, etc) (87). She also unpacks the visual rhetoric of the exhibits, examining interactivity, levels of educational specificity, showcasing of certain animals, etc.

Four: Entertainment Lite: The Theme Park Classroom: Davis examines Sea World's actual functioning as an educational institution, questioning Sea World's claim to "make enlightenment available in a variety of ways" (117). Davis' stance is that "the theme park education that works its way into the life of the school and the family is so carefully crafted to meet Sea World's marketing and publicity needs that the union between spectacle and education is a lopsided one" (118). In heartbreaking ethnographic sequences, Davis writes about the experiences of disadvantaged schoolchildren with and at the park, pointing out that although Sea World claims to serve "San Diego's schoolchildren", the ones who actually come on a regular basis are the ones whose families own annual passes, and who come in casual fashion with their parents, while poorer schools may barely afford one official trip a year. On these trips, Davis writes, the children seem to learn very little on an unscripted, truly engaged basis.

Still from a Sea World X-Box game. Spiked purple floating globe unheard of in nature.

Five: Routine Surprises: Producing Entertainment: Here Davis strips Sea World's animal shows (which, she points out, take a lot of time to structure and revise) down to their elements, trying to understand what they say about SW's mass culture of nature. Davis interviews trainers, producers, and others involved in the making of these shows, finding that the behavioral possibilities of the animals, the desires of the corporation, and audience feedback all come together in the objectives of the show. In the end, Davis argues, the show's elements are carefully scripted, leaving the animal performer to provide all of the novelty and possibility of surprise within the performative space.

Six: Dreaming of Whales: The Shamu Show: Continuing with her analysis of the performances themselves, Davis writes of the Shamu-based show that it carries "an enormous weight", one which is "devilishly complex to analyze" (197). "Triangulating" between "performance, institutional context, and a larger cultural context", Davis finds that the Shamu show is a "kind of routinized magic", one which plays with expectations about nature and culture (198-9). The show contains and normalizes Shamu's dangerous nature as a "killer" whale. It reminds the audience of the ecological fragility of Shamu's habitat, then reconstitutes the corporation and related actors as those who are in Shamu's corner, trying to preserve his nature.

Shamu Southwest Airlines jet.

Reviews: In AQ, Brian Black wrote that Davis' analysis, situated as it was within corporate culture of the contemporary world, rather than in historical context, missed an opportunity to take what he sees as American Studies' "next step" into an understanding of "the role and nature and the environment in American life." However, in general Black found Davis' project compelling and superbly executed, pointing to her folkloric training as an definite advantage in this project. The Pacific Historical Review ran a piece by John Findlay which took issue with the book's attempt to link the politics of Sea World's space with what Findlay saw as a "free-floating academic malaise" about the state of modernity and specifically the conservative brand of capitalism flourishing in Southern California. (Findlay thought this part of the book was shallowly executed, comparing it to Sea World itself with its empty gestures toward greater meaning. What's with these reviews of books about edutainment that compare the books themselves to edutainment? Weird.)


Books to follow up on: Secondary: Lynn Barber, The Heyday of Natural History, 1820-1870 (1980); Warren J. Belasco, Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took On the Food Industry, 1966-1988 (1989); John Berger, "Why Look at Animals?" in About Looking (1980); Henry Giroux, Disturbing Pleasures: Learning Popular Culture (1994); Henry Giroux, et al, ed, Popular Culture, Schooling, and Everyday Life (1989); Peter Schmitt, Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America (1990); Michael Sorkin, ed., Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space (1992).