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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.
List 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
About the author
Janet M. Davis is Associate Professor of American Studies, History, and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of The Circus Age: Culture and Society under the American Big Top, as well as the editor of Circus Queen and Tinker Bell: The Life of Tiny Kline. Her opinion pieces have been published in the New York Times and Newsday.
Summary
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.
Additional text
The Gospel of Kindness shows how champions of animal welfare in the United States repeatedly framed their advocacy within the language of US benevolence and uplift. Well-written and thoroughly researched, Davis's fine history of the US animal protection movement, global in scope, illuminates the contested politics of empire, citizenship, gender, race, and religion.
