The Gospel of Kindness
Animal Welfare and the Making of Modern America
- Publisher's listprice GBP 29.99
-
13 540 Ft (12 895 Ft + 5% VAT)
The price is estimated because at the time of ordering we do not know what conversion rates will apply to HUF / product currency when the book arrives. In case HUF is weaker, the price increases slightly, in case HUF is stronger, the price goes lower slightly.
- Discount 10% (cc. 1 354 Ft off)
- Discounted price 12 186 Ft (11 606 Ft + 5% VAT)
Subcribe now and take benefit of a favourable price.
Subscribe
13 540 Ft
Availability
Estimated delivery time: In stock at the publisher, but not at Prospero's office. Delivery time approx. 3-5 weeks.
Not in stock at Prospero.
Why don't you give exact delivery time?
Delivery time is estimated on our previous experiences. We give estimations only, because we order from outside Hungary, and the delivery time mainly depends on how quickly the publisher supplies the book. Faster or slower deliveries both happen, but we do our best to supply as quickly as possible.
Product details:
- Publisher OUP USA
- Date of Publication 20 February 2020
- ISBN 9780190092443
- Binding Paperback
- No. of pages320 pages
- Size 236x155x22 mm
- Weight 476 g
- Language English
- Illustrations 34 illus. 0
Categories
Short description:
The Gospel of Kindness explores the historical significance of the American animal welfare movement at home and overseas from the Second Great Awakening to the Second World War. Focused on laboring animals at its inception, the movement evolved into an expansive "gospel of kindness," transforming animal mercy into a signature American value.
MoreLong description:
When we consider modern American animal advocacy, we often think of veganism, no-kill shelters, Internet campaigns against trophy hunting, or celebrities declaring that they would "rather go naked" than wear fur. Contemporary critics readily dismiss animal protectionism as a modern secular movement that privileges animals over people. Yet the movement's roots are deeply tied to the nation's history of religious revivalism and social reform.
In The Gospel of Kindness, Janet M. Davis explores the broad cultural and social influence of the American animal welfare movement at home and overseas from the Second Great Awakening to the Second World War. Dedicated primarily to laboring animals at its inception in an animal-powered world, the movement eventually included virtually all areas of human and animal interaction. Embracing animals as brethren through biblical concepts of stewardship, a diverse coalition of temperance groups, teachers, Protestant missionaries, religious leaders, civil rights activists, policy makers, and anti-imperialists forged an expansive transnational "gospel of kindness," which defined animal mercy as a signature American value. Their interpretation of this "gospel" extended beyond the New Testament to preach kindness as a secular and spiritual truth. As a cultural product of antebellum revivalism, reform, and the rights revolution of the Civil War era, animal kindness became a barometer of free moral agency, higher civilization, and assimilation. Yet given the cultural, economic, racial, and ethnic diversity of the United States, its empire, and other countries of contact, standards of kindness and cruelty were culturally contingent and potentially controversial. Diverse constituents defended specific animal practices, such as cockfighting, bullfighting, songbird consumption, and kosher slaughter, as inviolate cultural traditions that reinforced their right to self-determination. Ultimately, American animal advocacy became a powerful humanitarian ideal, a touchstone of inclusion and national belonging at home and abroad that endures to this day.
Enrich[es] our understandings of human-animal relations in American history, as well as force[s] us to revisit and reconsider larger historiographical assumptions about agency and causation....[Davis] deftly weaves the history of animal welfare in with that of other social movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries....Davis's final three chapters...are her most pathbreaking, for they move beyond the U.S. frame and put American animal advocacy in conversation with global dialogues about our young nation's empire taking place first in the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico under U.S. military occupation, and later in India and Spain via Protestant missionaries. Here, Davis is particularly skillful at synthesizing existing animal studies and global histories with her own close readings of animal advocacy texts.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter One: "A righteous man regards the life of his beast": The Roots of the Gospel of
Kindness in the Second Great Awakening and Antebellum Reform
Chapter Two: "A World of Kindness is a Copy of Heaven": Animals, Moral Uplift, and the
Woman's Christian Temperance Union
Chapter Three: From Dog Eaters to Mule Beaters: Representing the Accused as Alien Other
Chapter Four: An Empire of Kindness: American Animal Welfare Policy and Moral
Expansionism Overseas
Chapter Five: "A Country Rich in Cattle": Gospels of Kindness in Colonial South Asia
Chapter Six: "So Thoroughly Un-American": Making Historical Sense of the Bullfight
Conclusion
Notes
Index
