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InBeastly Possessions, Sarah Amato chronicles the unusual ways in which Victorians of every social class brought animals into their daily lives. Captured, bred, exhibited, collected, and sold, ordinary pets and exotic creatures - as well as their representations - became commodities within Victorian Britain's flourishing consumer culture. As a pet, an animal could be a companion, a living parlour decoration, and proof of a household's social and moral status. In the zoo, it could become a public pet, an object of curiosity, a symbol of empire, or even a consumer mascot. Either kind of animal might be painted, photographed, or stuffed as a taxidermic specimen. Using evidence ranging from pet-keeping manuals and scientific treatises to novels, guidebooks, and ephemera, this fascinating, well-illustrated study opens a window into an underexplored aspect of life in Victorian Britain.

This book is an excellent read and opens your eyes to the secretive world of freshwater fish. Even as someone who has been involved with fish and fisheries for all of their professional life, I still found out lots of things I didn’t know. I particularly liked the chapter on what have freshwater fishes ever done for us, and who doesn’t like to dig a bit deeper into the weird and wonderful sex lives of fish? This book would make a great addition to the bookshelves of anyone who works with, or is interested in, fish and their biology. You cannot fail to pick it up and learn something new, even if you think you know all there is to know about fish.

In the last few decades, new discoveries have pushed the beginning of the biface-rich European Acheulian from 500 thousand years (ka) ago back to at least 700 ka, and possibly to 1 million years (Ma) ago. It remains, however, unclear to date if handaxes arrived in Europe as a fully developed technology or if they evolved locally from core-and-flake industries. This issue is also linked with another long-standing debate on the existence and behavioral, cognitive, and social meaning of a possibly chronological trend for increased handaxe symmetry throughout the Lower Paleolithic. The newly discovered sites can provide a link between the much older Acheulian in Africa and the Levant and the well-known assemblages from the later European Acheulian, enabling a rigorous testing of these hypotheses using modern morphometric methods. Here we use the Continuous Symmetry Measure (CSM) method to quantify handaxe symmetry at la Noira, a newly excavated site in central France, which features two archaeological levels, respectively ca. 700 ka and 500 ka old. In order to provide a context for the new data, we use a large aggregate from the well-known 500 ka old site of Boxgrove, England. We show that handaxes from the oldest layer at la Noira, although on average less symmetric than both those from the younger layers at the same site and than those from Boxgrove, are nevertheless much more symmetric than other early Acheulian specimens evaluated using the CSM method. We also correlate trends in symmetry to degree of reduction, demonstrating that raw material availability and discard patterns may affect observed symmetry values. We conclude that it is likely that, by the time the Acheulian arrived in Europe, its makers were, from a cognitive and motor-control point of view, already capable of producing the symmetric variant of this technology.

This book undertakes a critique of the pervasive notion that human beings are separate from and elevated above the nonhuman world and explores its role in the constitution of modernity. The book presents a socio-material analysis of the British milk industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It traces the dramatic development of the milk trade from a cottage industry into a modernised and integrated system of production and distribution, examining the social, economic and political factors underpinning this transformation, and also highlighting the important roles played by various nonhumans, such as microbes, refrigeration technologies, diseases, and even cows themselves. Milk as a substance posed deep social and material problems for modernity, being hard to transport and keep fresh as well as a highly fertile environment for the growth of bacteria and the transmission of diseases such as tuberculosis from cows to humans. Milk, Modernity and the Making of the Human demonstrates how the resulting insecurities and dilemmas posed a threat to the nature/culture divide as milk consumption grew along with urbanization, and had therefore to be managed by emergent forms of scientific and sanitary knowledge and expertise. Milk, Modernity and the Making of the Human is an ideal volume for any researcher interested in the hybrid socio-material, economic and political factors underpinning the transformation of the milk industry. Dr. Richie Nimmo is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Manchester, UK. His research explores the ambiguous status of nonhumans in modern knowledge-practices and the constitution of ‘the social’ across materially heterogeneous relations, systems and flows. Introduction: modernity, humanity and nonhumans 1. The anthropocentrism of 'culture': a critique of humanist discourse 2. Milk and modernity Part I: commodities, networks and monopolies 3. Culture, order and disease in late nineteenth-century British dairying 4. Purifying milk: knowledge, sanitation and discipline 5. Milk and modernity Part II: measurement, rationalization and control 6. Beyond 'culture' and 'nature': towards a post-humanist knowledge

A detailed consideration of the history of racing in British culture and society and an exploration of the cultural world of racing during the inter-war years. It shows how racing's pleasures were enjoyed even by the supposedly respectable middle classes.

Negotiating national identity amidst flying bullets was just one aspect of the emotional, politically important, cultural encounters taking place behind Soviet lines from Nov 1944 to Apr 1945. Some 300 US and British pilots bailed out or crash-landed. Within a few weeks of their forced landing, most downed flyers were picked up by mixed Soviet-American aircrews or flown to the US base at Poltava in the Ukraine, and then home. This article focuses on how these encounters were selectively remembered, recounted, recorded and categorized in the first half of 1945.

Discusses the roots of the modern travelling circus, which can be traced to open-air displays of horsemanship in the late eighteenth century and early fairs and travelling menageries. Notes that an active play and performative dimension appeared in the menagerie displays when the animal-keepers themselves started venturing into the cages. Details the performances of a British travelling circus during the late 1970s, taking its 'Big Cats\" act as an example. Adds that the purpose of this study is to point up the difference in the presentations of the wild animals in the eighteenth and nineteenth century and the nineteenth and twentieth century travelling genres, and anchor the change in patterns within larger historical transformation. Remarks that the analysis will thus account for transformations in the concept of Nature versus Culture.

Discusses the competition between Burton's National Circus and Bird and Taylor's Great American Circus, which culminated in a contest in Australia on May 24, 1873. Remarks that in the context of the development of the circus in Australia, the contest held significance in that it was an example of how the Australian circus was continually shaped by international developments. Notes that in the 1870s, the American circus increasingly became the influential model over the previous British influence. Describes both circuses and the proprietors of each, Henry Burton, Thomas Bird and Robert Taylor.