Update on the Sunday Nov. 21, thread

Learning from History so that it does not repeat it's self.

Dublin_Seminar_publ.pdf

Wade,

You asked about the 1834 menagerie inventory you posted on Monday and to which Richard Reynolds responded. For your enjoyment and further enlightenment, I am attaching something I wrote that was published by Boston University nearly 25 years ago. I think it is a cogent and lucid account of a little known and difficult-to-comprehend period of the early circus and menagerie business. You’ll see on pages 140-141 (and in footnote 25) that I reference the document you posted. The original is at the Somers (NY) Historical Society, housed on the top floor of the Elephant Hotel.

I would also refer you to my essay “American Showmen and European Dealers: The Commerce in Wild Animals in 19^th Century America,” in New Worlds, New Animals: From Menagerie to Zoological Park in the Nineteenth Century edited by R.J. Hoage and William A. Diess with a foreword by Michael H. Robinson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 97-108. This book, which you ought to have and is still in print, was published in association with the Smithsonian Institution’s National Zoological Park and most of the chapters, including mine, are derived from papers delivered at a symposium held October 1989 to celebrate the centennial of the National Zoo that year.

Courtesy of Richard Flint