Reproduction of the original: Our Vanishing Wild Life by William T. Hornaday

The Routledge History of Emotions in the Modern World brings together a diverse array of scholars to offer an overview of the current and emerging scholarship of emotions in the modern world. Across thirty-six chapters, this work enters the field of emotion from a range of angles. Named emotions – love, anger, fear – highlight how particular categories have been deployed to make sense of feeling and their evolution over time. Geographical perspectives provide access to the historiographies of regions that are less well-covered by English-language sources, opening up global perspectives and new literatures. Key thematic sections are designed to intersect with critical historiographies, demonstrating the value of an emotions perspective to a range of areas. Topical sections direct attention to the role of emotions in relations of power, to intimate lives and histories of place, as products of exchanges across groups, and as deployed by new technologies and medias. The concepts of globalisation and modernity run through the volume, acting as foils for comparison and analytical tools. The Routledge History of Emotions in the Modern World is the perfect resource for all students and scholars interested in the history of emotions across the world from 1700.

It may be surprising to us now, but the taxidermists who filled the museums, zoos, and aquaria of the twentieth century were also among the first to become aware of the devastating effects of careless human interaction with the natural world. Witnessing firsthand the decimation caused by hide hunters, commercial feather collectors, whalers, big game hunters, and poachers, these museum taxidermists recognized the existential threat to critically endangered species and the urgent need to protect them. The compelling exhibits they created—as well as the scientific field work, popular writing, and lobbying they undertook—established a vital leadership role in the early conservation movement for American museums that persists to this day. Through their individual research expeditions and collective efforts to arouse demand for environmental protections, this remarkable cohort—including William T. Hornaday, Carl E. Akeley, and several lesser-known colleagues—created our popular understanding of the animal world and its fragile habitats. For generations of museum visitors, they turned the glass of an exhibition case into a window on nature—and a mirror in which to reflect on our responsibility for its conservation.

Environmental law expert Lowell E. Baier reveals how over centuries the federal government slowly preempted the states’ authority over managing their resident wildlife. In doing so, he educates elected officials, wildlife students, and environmentalists in the precedents that led to the current state of wildlife management, and how a constructive environment can be fostered at all levels of government to improve our nation’s wildlife and biodiversity.

He was complex, quirky, pugnacious, and difficult. He seemed to create enemies wherever he went, even among his friends. A fireplug of a man who stood only five feet eight inches in his stocking feet, he began as a taxidermist and an adventurer who tracked tigers in Borneo with friendly headhunters, lead crocodile-hunting expeditions in the Orinoco, and scouted the last remaining bison in the Montana territories. William Temple Hornaday (1854–1937) was also a man ahead of his time. He was the most influential conservationist of the nineteenth century, second only to his great friend and ally Theodore Roosevelt. When this one-time big-game collector witnessed the wanton destruction of wildlife prevalent in the Victorian era, he experienced an awakening and devoted the rest of his life to protecting our planet’s endangered species. Hornaday founded the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., served for thirty years as director of the renowned Bronx Zoo, and became a fierce defender of wild animals and wild places. He devoted fifty years to fighting gun manufacturers, poachers, scandalously lax game-protection laws, and the vast apathy of the American public. He waged the “Plume Wars” against the feathered-hat industry and is credited with having saved both the Alaskan fur seal and the American bison from outright extinction. Mr. Hornaday’s War restores this major figure to his rightful place as one of the giants of the modern conservation movement. But Stefan Bechtel also explores the grinding contradictions of Hornaday’s life. Though he crusaded against the wholesale slaughter of wildlife, he was at one time a trophy hunter, and what happened in 1906 at the Bronx Zoo, when Hornaday displayed an African man in an “ethnographic exhibit,” shows a side of him that is as baffling as it is repellant. This gripping book takes an honest look at a fascinating, enigmatic man who both represented and transcended his era’s paradoxical approach to wildlife, and who profoundly changed the course of the conservation movement for generations to come.

Organ, James Peek, William Porter, John Sandlos, James A. Schaefer

Publisher description

This book provides in-depth coverage of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the federal agency that manages the national wildlife refuge system, protects endangered species, and conducts fish and wildlife research. In addition to detailing the history and organization of the service, the authors take a hard look at its current—and often controversi

The Game of Conservation is a brilliantly crafted and highly readable examination of nature protection around the world. Twentieth-century nature conservation treaties often originated as attempts to regulate the pace of killing rather than as attempts to protect animal habitat. Some were prompted by major breakthroughs in firearm techniques, such as the invention of the elephant gun and grenade harpoons, but agricultural development was at least as important as hunting regulations in determining the fate of migratory species. The treaties had many defects, yet they also served the goal of conservation to good effect, often saving key species from complete extermination and sometimes keeping the population numbers at viable levels. It is because of these treaties that Africa is dotted with large national parks, that North America has an extensive network of bird refuges, and that there are any whales left in the oceans. All of these treaties are still in effect today, and all continue to influence nature-protection efforts around the globe. Drawing on a wide variety of primary and secondary sources, Mark Cioc shows that a handful of treaties—all designed to protect the world’s most commercially important migratory species—have largely shaped the contours of global nature conservation over the past century. The scope of the book ranges from the African savannahs and the skies of North America to the frigid waters of the Antarctic.