Back to Results
Cover image of Entertaining Elephants
On sale
Cover image of Entertaining Elephants
Share this Title:

Entertaining Elephants

Animal Agency and the Business of the American Circus

Susan Nance

Publication Date
Binding Type

How the lives and labors of nineteenth-century circus elephants shaped the entertainment industry.

Consider the career of an enduring if controversial icon of American entertainment: the genial circus elephant. In Entertaining Elephants Susan Nance examines elephant behavior—drawing on the scientific literature of animal cognition, learning, and communications—to offer a study of elephants as actors (rather than objects) in American circus entertainment between 1800 and 1940. By developing a deeper understanding of animal behavior, Nance asserts, we can more fully explain the common history of...

How the lives and labors of nineteenth-century circus elephants shaped the entertainment industry.

Consider the career of an enduring if controversial icon of American entertainment: the genial circus elephant. In Entertaining Elephants Susan Nance examines elephant behavior—drawing on the scientific literature of animal cognition, learning, and communications—to offer a study of elephants as actors (rather than objects) in American circus entertainment between 1800 and 1940. By developing a deeper understanding of animal behavior, Nance asserts, we can more fully explain the common history of all species.

Entertaining Elephants is the first account that uses research on animal welfare, health, and cognition to interpret the historical record, examining how both circus people and elephants struggled behind the scenes to meet the profit necessities of the entertainment business. The book does not claim that elephants understood, endorsed, or resisted the world of show business as a human cultural or business practice, but it does speak of elephants rejecting the conditions of their experience. They lived in a kind of parallel reality in the circus, one that was defined by their interactions with people, other elephants, horses, bull hooks, hay, and the weather.

Nance’s study informs and complicates contemporary debates over human interactions with animals in entertainment and beyond, questioning the idea of human control over animals and people's claims to speak for them. As sentient beings, these elephants exercised agency, but they had no way of understanding the human cultures that created their captivity, and they obviously had no claim on (human) social and political power. They often lived lives of apparent desperation.

Reviews

Reviews

Susan Nance's new book will appeal to those interested in the circus business, general lovers of the circus itself and its history, and lovers of elephants themselves and how they are treated, for better or for worse.

If you are a true lover of elephants... then you must add this book to your collection.

This book explores aspects of nineteenth-century American society and culture from an original and fascinating perspective. It is a worthy contribtuion to the burgeoning scholarship on the history of human-animal relationships.

Theoretically sophisticated, exhaustively researched, and elegantly composed, Entertaining Elephants will appeal to a broad range of readers, who will find themselves thinking in new ways about not only circuses, but also the myriad other human-animal relationships in American consumer culture, past and present, from rodeos, zoos, and aquariums to meat, pets, Disney characters, and other fictional animals.

Susan Nance’s study Entertaining Elephants: Animal Agency and the Business of the American Circus is an example of how pleasing a mix of cultural history and animal studies is when an author combines them well.

See All Reviews
About

Book Details

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Turning the Circus Inside Out
1. Why Elephants in the Early Republic?
2. Becoming an Elephant "Actor"
3. Learning to Take Direction
4. Punishing Bull Elephants
5. Herd

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Turning the Circus Inside Out
1. Why Elephants in the Early Republic?
2. Becoming an Elephant "Actor"
3. Learning to Take Direction
4. Punishing Bull Elephants
5. Herd Management in the Gilded Age
6. Going Off Script
7. Animal Cultures Lost in the Circus, Then and Now
Notes
Essay on Sources
Index

Author Bio
Susan Nance
Featured Contributor

Susan Nance

Susan Nance is an associate professor of U.S. history and an affiliated faculty member at the Campbell Centre for the Study of Animal Welfare at the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada. She is the author of How the Arabian Nights Inspired the American Dream, 1790–1935.