Lesson Plan: Nature and Empire - Discussion questions for “Kingdom Under Glass: A Tale of Obsession, Adventure, and One Man’s Quest to Preserve the World’s Great Animals” by Jay Kirk

Nature and Empire: Discussion questions for “Kingdom Under Glass: A Tale of Obsession, Adventure, and One Man’s Quest to Preserve the World’s Great Animals” by Jay Kir

Melville, Orwell, and a Brief Theory of Empire

A brief comparison of the work of two authors who lived almost a century apart reveals two literatures driven by a common concern with the processes and consequence of empire. A review of their lives shows that both Herman Melville and Eric Blair (George Orwell) were disenfranchised children of empire — writers with a foot in both camps, the colonizer and the colonized. In excerpts from their work, we find shared themes in passages from Melville’s master work Moby Dick, Orwell’s essays, and Animal Farm. Through their depictions of everyday labor in the lower reaches of the American commercial empire and the British Raj, these two very different writers were able to capture universal themes

Review of Nicholas Christopher's Somewhere in the Night

“Somewhere in the Night” is an insightful look into one of the most influential genres of the 20th century. Poet and scholar Nicholas Christopher delivers to his readers a compelling personal journey into the mysteries of movies as diverse as D.O.A., Sunset Boulevard, and even Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. It is a sprawling subject, since there are up to 300 films spread over three decades that can be called “noir,” and Christopher approaches the subject with zeal

The Woman in Melville

Claudia Dixon is a bold thinker and a natural writer. I wish writers like Claudia Dixon were producing all of our textbooks. In chapter three, she looks at Melville’s friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, and how much it meant to Melville that a fellow author understood what he was trying to do. In the following interview and excerpt from her dissertation, we see a hint of the author’s grand reinterpretation of Melville

Nature and Empire Jay Kirk's Kingdom Under Glass: A Tale of Obsession, Adventure, and One Man’s Quest to Preserve the World’s Great Animals, a Book Review

Jay Kirk’s Kingdom Under Glass examines the life and career of taxidermist/adventurer Carl Akeley. Kirk, a professor of creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania, follows Akeley on his life-long quest to perfect methods of the preservation and presentation of natural specimens, and to establish himself as an artistic talent within the burgeoning world of large-scale American history museums at the beginning of the twentieth century

Nature and Empire: On Jay Kirk’s Kingdom Under Glass: A Tale of Obsession, Adventure, and One Man’s Quest to Preserve the World’s Great Animals

The relationship between man’s empire and nature is critical, as we are finding out today. Overwhelmingly the relationship is one of sheer exploitation, but the style and content of our attitude towards nature in all its forms has taken vastly different form in different societies. Nature and empire is an impossibly sprawling and complex field, encompassing everything from Temple Grandin and humane slaughterhouse practices to the fracking controversy to the history of British gardens to modern genetic recombination. We need nature’s stored energy and stored beauty, but we seem to be tragically clumsy in our extraction of it. As to animals in particular, we cherish wildlife in zoos and children’s movies even as we demolish it with our insatiable demand for its habitat. Recent books like Andrea Wulf’s The Brother Gardeners and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra’s Nature, Empire, and Nation explore how different cultures capture nature, both in commerce and in the imagination. In his new biography of the early Twentieth Century naturalist Carl Akeley, author Jay Kirk examines many of these contradictions: Akeley, sometimes labeled the father of modern taxidermy, was a hunter (“collector”) as well as a preservationist, a safari explorer as well as museum curator. Coming at a time when Americans are coming to terms with their own “empires” of nature, the book raises timely questions

WAR AND THE NATURAL WORLD: Discussion questions for “Scarred Lands and Wounded Lives: The Environmental Footprint of War” by Alice and Lincoln Day and related sources

WAR AND THE NATURAL WORLD: Discussion questions for “Scarred Lands and Wounded Lives: The Environmental Footprint of War” by Alice and Lincoln Day and related sources

Mr. Gatling’s Terrible Marvel

It is easy to forget what a cultural sensation technology can produce – and perhaps no instance was greater than that of the Gatling gun. In her outstanding 2006 book, Mr. Gatling’s Terrible Marvel, author Julia Keller gives a detailed and lucid account of Richard Gatling and his quest to create a true machine gun — and the unintended consequences his invention had for modern man. Anyone who has read Winston Churchill’s account of the Battle of Omdurman will not forget the horrific, at first lopsided battles made possible by this invention. In this excerpt, the author introduces her broad topic. She is a journalist by trade and writes scholarly prose that is clear and concise – a rare combination. Even in this brief passage, we can see the ease with which she portrays how a weapon can embody an entire set of ideas; she makes an epic story seem simple. You can certainly see echoes of Mr. Gatling’s marvel in the uneasy relationship between technology and warfare that we struggle with today

Nationality and Colonial Strategies: Germany and America – How the American Expansion Resonated in Germany

We all tend to see what we want to see — in ourselves, in our friends, in our culture, and in other cultures. In his dissertation, Jens-Uwe Guettel takes a penetrating look at how Germany viewed America over the course of the 19th century, the period of America’s great expansion westward. In the following interview and excerpt, you will find highlights of Prof. Guettel’s wide-ranging consideration of the many authors, themes and images which were part of this cultural “moment.” In the dissertation itself, you will find a deeper look at the novels and writings which reflect the complex attitudes and ideas of the times. Germans certainly noticed what Americans were doing as they expanded the nation westward, but not always the same we saw ourselves. What makes this dissertation so explosive (to me, anyway) is what comes next – what is off-screen, so to speak. When Prof. Guettel brings up the concept of lebensraum, we realize that his thesis is by no means an obscure topic of study: the colonial attitudes of the 19th century can be seen to lead directly to the German nationalism of the modern era and to the rise of the Third Reich. Most certainly, German views of American colonialism formed the roots of the two world wars which dominated the 20th century. Understanding the deeper cultural roots of war is important to all of us. As I write this, our entire nation is at war – two wars, actually – and each and every citizen is part of that decision. We need to understand why these conflicts have happened in the past, are happening today, and may break out again soon

Dracula as a Foretelling of WWI

We have long been fascinated with the connection between monsters and our underlying fears. Jerome Cohen’s 1996 book Monster Theory looks at horror stories as a sort of Rorschach test for the culture as a whole. If we look carefully, we can see in them our fears and anxieties about ourselves. According to this theory, each monster is specific to a particular time: The Invasion of the Body Snatchers grew out of the 1950’s fear of Communism, for example, and the recent spate of virus-driven zombies can be seen as a metaphor for AIDS ( the ‘living dead’). In this provocative article, Ph.D. candidate Genesea Carter argues that Bram Stoker’s Dracula can be read as a premonition of World War One. Carter sees the novel’s depiction of a siege of vampirism descending on England as a foreshadowing of the destruction that would soon befall England when her young men encountered the terrible death dealt by modern warfare. The very scenario which frightened readers of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel – that a monstrous foreign entity (from the Austro-Hungarian Empire) invades innocent England using unforeseen, forbidden tactics to slaughter her citizens – came horrifyingly true less than two decades later. Dracula’s blood-drinking and attack on unsuspecting women and children can be paralleled to Germany’s poison-gas and machine-gun attacks upon defenseless villagers. Just as Dracula rabidly craved blood, so did Germany crave imperial expansion