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Discover how categorisation has shaped our view of the natural world with this book. The text unveils wild truths and even wilder myths about animals, as perpetuated by zoologists - revealing how much more there is to learn, and unlearn.

Does the natural world divide neatly into 'animal, vegetable, mineral'? Discoveries in the 18th century threw the question wide open; debates raged, and fed into wider religious and political battles concerning God's creation and the natural social order.

In an essay appearing below, Alan Dawley reflects upon Marianne's work and its influence among scholars on both sides of the Atlantic. Dawley's piece is followed by the publication of some selected papers in full. The preceeding summary aims to relate the concerns of researchers present from Quebec, the US and Europe (France, Italy, Germany), whose debt to Debouzy and international concerns are perhaps not well enough known due to barriers of geography and language. Contributions have been regrouped into broad categories of labour and social history: The Working Class: Struggles, Employer Relations, Representations (Bruno Cartosio, Ferdinando Fasce, Annick Foucrier, Pierre Gervais); Immigration ([Catherine Collomp], Michel Cordillot, Bruno Groppo, Dirk Hoerder); Workers and the State (David Brody, Alan Dawley, Donna Kesselman); Other Contributions (Ronald Creagh, Nelcya Delanoe, Michele Gibault, James Green, Hubert Perrier, Bruno Ramirez, Sylvia Ullmo). The categories are not mutually exclusive. To the contrary, as James Green notes in his concluding paper below, what characterizes the maturation of our field of social history is its very complication, its attempt to weave the multiple threads of human interaction into a more complete historical fabric, a central strand of which is class relations in all of their complexity. In his paper about 19th century Mexicanos' attempt to control their land in New Mexico, Bruno Cartosio (Bergame University) developed the theme of working-class representation: how myths are formed and carried on in relation to struggle, and how social groups -- especially when structured along ethnic lines -- use myths differently. (\"Robin Hoods in the Southwest: Reality and Myth of Resistance to Capitalist Transformation in Territorial New Mexico.\") A dangerous outlaw in American Wild West folklore, Billy the Kid, became a Robinhood-style legend for the Mexican community. The fight of the Mexicanos' Gorras Blancas (White Caps) movement, engaging in direct action to cut fences placed on their land, was comparable to the mythification of Billy, perceived as fighting against the common enemy of Anglo expropriators (land speculators, cattle growers, railroads) and the courts promoting such interests. Fundamentally, like in Lowell, Mexicanos were straggling against emerging capitalist property relations, here regarding land ownership. Billy symbolized the Mexicanos themselves, the little guys fighting against an unjust social order of Anglo tyranny based on wealth. Myths and their representation can have multiple functions, interpreted differently according to class interests. Bruno Groppo (CNRS) and Catherine Collomp presented their new research on the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC), based on the recently opened Tamiment Library archives. The project sheds new light on the internationalist campaigns of American labour within the us and relations with the European labour movement in the pre-Cold War years. Jewish unionists organized labour and broader public resistance to nazism and anti-semitism, while carrying out concrete solidarity actions for victims of fascist regimes. The degree of commitment was at least partially cooled by support for the Roosevelt administrations' war effort, CIO leaders including Sidney Hillman, avid JLC activist during the 1930s, trailed far behind AFL unionists, who relentlessly pursued this internationalist cause for democratic and trade union liberties throughout the war. David Dubinsky and the Jewish Daily Forward's B.C. Vladek pulled the AFL's strings in Washington, lobbying the Roosevelt administration to loosen its strict application of immigrant quota policies and grant visas to Jewish labour activists, personalities of the arts, and others victimized by European nazism.