Into the COLAverse – Episode 10: Janet Davis

[00:00:00] Intro: Welcome to Into the Colaverse, a podcast that takes us on the unique journeys of faculty in the College of Liberal Arts at UT Austin. Join me your host, Frederick Luis Aldama as we learn of the many ways that our faculty and their cutting edge work is transforming the world today.

[00:00:23] Frederick: It is my absolute pleasure and honor to have Janet Davis, University distinguished teaching professor in American Studies and award-winning author of the 2002. The circus age, culture, and society under the American big top, as well as the 2016, the gospel of kindness, animal welfare, and the Making of Modern America.

[00:00:52] Frederick: Welcome,

[00:00:53] Janet: Janet. Thank you so much. It is just absolutely my pleasure to be here. It’s, it’s a real honor to be talking to you,

[00:01:03] Frederick: you know. I know you mentioned some of this, um, in your biography on your website and elsewhere, but you were born in Hawaii, in Honolulu, but spent your childhood and young adulthood in the upper Midwest.

[00:01:19] Frederick: Um, and I know it was this moment at the, in Chicago, at the Museum of Science and Industry that seemed to switch the tracks for you. Was there something early in your childhood, your, your origin story that where you were like, Gosh, I, I think I wanna become a professor, or I, I think I wanna do something really cool with Tinker Bell in my future

[00:01:48] Janet: Yeah, sure. Um, yeah, all of these things came swirling together, over the years. Um, but you know, it really started as a kid. There were two kind of moments, actually, several moments. Um, one was a life of, you know, spending. All of my time away from school outside and finding snakes and looking at insects and looking at animals and having, you know, just being immersed in the world outdoors.

[00:02:20] Janet: But the second was that I was always a really avid reader and watcher of television. So as a very young kid, I was reading the Laurel Engel’s Wilder books, and I loved like the sensoria that she brought into her. Descriptions of harvest and locust plagues and storms, you know, and just all these kinds of.

[00:02:48] Janet: Artifacts of ordinary life, but that were so imbued with kind of pulling a reader into the world of the, you know, mid to late 19th century. Just, just totally captivated me. And then the second thing that happened was when I was in second grade, um, there was a series on pbs. It was Masterpiece Theater. And it was the six wives of Henry the eighth.

[00:03:18] Janet: And oh my goodness, I was totally, totally enthralled with the lives of, you know, the, the poor women that Henry married, but also his kind of. Focus on divorcing his first wife, his marriage to Anne Lynn, his desire for his son and marriage to Jane Seymour, and then three more women thereafter. And just the costumes, the, you know, the gorgeous kind of world, at least the physical appearance of it, again, totally captivated me, but also the kind of.

[00:03:55] Janet: Some of the stuff that was a little over my head as a, you know, second grader regarding the Reformation and Henry becoming the head of the Church of England. Like all of that was kind of inkling though, like, what’s that all about? And I began reading history, you know, really from an early age and just loved it.

[00:04:14] Janet: But the kind of history I was reading on my own outside of school was not. Typically the history that I was getting inside the classroom. And so that was a bit of a disjuncture. I was really more of a passionate student of literature because it allowed me, you know, this kind of portal into these other worlds.

[00:04:34] Janet: And it wasn’t until I got to college that I really found the kind of deep. Sensory everyday worlds of historical analysis that I just love so much. Studying popular culture, studying social change, social thought, and doing so across, you know, lots of different cultural locations. So it was really in college where things clicked and I knew that’s it.

[00:05:02] Janet: I’m gonna be a history major. And I was always interested in circuses as a kind of background to my life because I was, I spent most of my, um, childhood in Madison, Wisconsin, and that was only, you know, about 40 miles away from Barbo, Wisconsin, which happened to be home to the world’s largest circus archive.

[00:05:26] Janet: Something I didn’t know as a kid. Just knew that location is a place that we went on field trips, class field trips, and we’d watch the circus and I’d see this circus rumbling through town on railroad cars, um, in the summertime and Circus parade in Milwaukee. So there was always kind of a lot of circus around.

[00:05:46] Janet: Um, I also played fearless Fanny, the lion tamer in a. In a student play when I was in high school as well. So that was also part of my experience. But, um, but anyway, so yes, it was college where things really began to, to gel in terms of my interests. But I wasn’t quite ready to go to graduate school, so I decided after graduation that I needed to take some time off.

[00:06:15] Janet: Um, and I should just, Back real quickly to say that when I was in college, I decided that I wanted to study abroad in my junior year. Something that, oh my gosh, I’m so glad I did this. I studied abroad when I was in high school, in what was then West Germany, um, in the summer of my junior year. and knew that I had to do something in college, and so I decided that there were a couple different programs I thought, you know, maybe I’ll go to, maybe I’ll go to Yugoslavia or India, but you know, I’ll have many opportunities in my life to, to go to.

[00:06:54] Janet: A place like Yugoslavia, but probably not so much to go to India. And of course, you know, it was a total child of the Cold War and I didn’t realize that, you know, just some years later that the, the Eastern block would dissolve. And so, In any case, I decided though at the time I’m gonna go to India. And so I studied in India, lived with an Indian family, studied Mirati, um, traveled all over the country while I was there during my junior year.

[00:07:23] Janet: And really, really got a, you know, firsthand deep experience doing scholarly research because we had to do a big final project. So that kind of wedded my appetite for my senior thesis. Um, looking at. English imperialism and. Indian kind of grapplings with empire through the realm of art and architecture.

[00:07:50] Janet: It was a huge topic, you know, big, bold undergraduate plans. And, um, I had to, you know, I, I did primary work at, um, you know, at a, at a research library connected to the University of Minnesota. So that was also, you know, also really wonderful. Um, but again, so circling back to where I was going before, I didn’t wanna go to grad school right away.

[00:08:11] Janet: I just felt like I needed a little more time before that actually happens. And so, um, after I graduated from college, I ended up and happily so working as a flight attendant for the next three years. And that was a great experience. It was truly, Truly phenomenal because, um, I was exposed to the kind of culture of a large corporation.

[00:08:40] Janet: Um, it was a very regimented, you know, had to be punctual and on the dot and moving through space and time and going all over the world and meeting all sorts of truly fascinating people. And I learned how to pack really fast, which has served me well in my career as a professor. Um, but also it was a really good experience in learning how to really deal with the world of, you know, kind of one’s emotional place in, um, you know, in the airplane.

[00:09:16] Janet: Sometimes stressful things can happen. And so it was good training overall. Um, but I knew that I ultimately did wanna go back to school, flirted with journalism as a possible place for me. Um, thought about law school, went and talked to my professors to solicit letters of recommendation. This is a pre-internet age.

[00:09:39] Janet: And they said, You know what? You should go to grad school, . And so they totally convinced me and I did an 11th hour switch and applied to PhD programs in South Asian history. And this all culminates ultimately. So I started graduate school, quit the airlines after working there for three years, and began my graduate program with a summer intensive language program in Hindi, um, at the University of Wisconsin Madison.

[00:10:12] Janet: And the year, you know, continued, enjoyed my coursework. But then in the spring of 1990, um, this is where, um, you know, you were alluding to regarding, uh, kind of change in path. Um, I was in Chicago visiting friends and at the Museum of Science and Industry where it is a kind of spectacle of the body at this place.

[00:10:37] Janet: You know, there. Pendulums, there’s slices of human bodies on display. It’s a pretty wild, weird place. And amid all of this, there was this pictorial display of circus parades. And these circus parade photos, um, were, they just totally blew me away because what I saw in them was such a powerful testament, first of all, to.

[00:11:03] Janet: Pop cultural form that was so incredibly powerful and ubiquitous. These photographs were from parades around the United States, um, you know, coast to coast. Thousands of people in the street, people bursting out of second and third story windows. People lining the streets, people just crowded. Watching these parades of circus animals.

[00:11:34] Janet: Going down Main Street, and it just got me thinking, first of all, wow, they’re dressed. The elephants, the animals, the people who are performing are dressed very similarly to the people and animals that I’m studying in terms of, you know, understanding imperial popular. Culture, spectacles, parades, and you know, the kind of world of colonial India.

[00:12:02] Janet: And so I thought, what is going on here? That is what ultimately that big question led me to study the circus, and it led me to change my major from South Asian history to. American history and that’s how I got into it. And you know, it just, I wrote a paper about the circus, a very first kind of preliminary paper, um, in looking at questions of American Empire, cuz these American shows recreated all of these kind of foreign relations events in the early 20th century under Canvas.

[00:12:40] Janet: You know, it’s kind of the. You know, the, the information, super highway of its day. Um, and it really was something that, you know, reached everyone. So that’s where it all began. And it was, you know, really it, it was a wondrous kind of entree into the world of graduate research because, Sources were located in bunch of different archives around the country, but all of which had just such rich, rich, rich holdings.

[00:13:14] Janet: And the people I met were incredible and you know, was really. Over time welcomed into a community of people who both study circus, but also people who perform, people who own shows, people who were artists, um, who did the gilded detailing on the wagons. You know, you name it. Um, You know, I really had the privilege of getting to work with these people and also to be involved in a whole bunch of different cultural productions, um, in film, in museum exhibitions, um, that, you know, just brought it all alive, in ways that I so enjoy.

[00:13:59] Frederick: Um, Janet very like, amazing this journey and, and of course artifacts of ordinary life, you know, Of course you’re in American studies, um, . Um, so what, for our, our listeners, um, What is American Studies in a nutshell, I suppose, And then I wanna jump back and ask you a little bit about the kind of the dark side of the circus as this sort of force of creating a national imaginary,

[00:14:30] Janet: Yeah, yeah, thanks.

[00:14:33] Janet: So, American Studies is, you know, kind of in a nutshell, the interdisciplinary exploration of. American culture and society through all sorts of different portals culturally, but also disciplin and also, you know, with a real dedication to exploring so many different sources. And I know that can sound really broad, but we’re really dedicated to questions.

[00:15:04] Janet: Belonging and exclusion in American studies. And also the big question of, you know, thinking about America as both a kind of physical entity as a, an ideological entity and thinking about. What this America means, intersectionally. So we’re really dedicated to thinking about the interconnections among race, among gender, among class, among sexuality, and also thinking about America’s place in the world that geographic.

[00:15:43] Janet: Borders. Borders of nations are one thing, but there’s also this kind of, you know, the place of the transnational, both thinking about kind of the flow of American ideas, American cultural products, American economy, um, but also the kinds of comparative approaches, um, and thinking America. In terms of what it means, Hemispherically, what does it mean in the Atlantic world, the Pacific world?

[00:16:14] Janet: Thinking about indigeneity and thinking about all of these questions, you know, Woven into each other. So it’s a really, you know, it’s, it’s just endlessly so, so exciting to me to be in this field and I feel really privileged to be here. When I was in grad school, um, my advisor, Linda Gordon, who is a historian of, um, you know, she’s a women’s historian of social movements.

[00:16:43] Janet: and she said to me one time when I was, you know, was in the process of finishing my dissertation and she said, I just have this feeling you’re gonna get a job in American Studies. That’s just, your mind thinks like that, Janet. And you know what? She was totally spot off and. And, you know, I was really grateful to her for, you know, for, for believing in me in that regard.

[00:17:05] Janet: So, yeah, so that’s what I would say, and I know that’s a bit of a long, long circuitous answer, but the interdisciplinary analysis of American culture and society dedicated to questions of belonging and exclusion. and America’s place in the world and in relation to other nations.

[00:17:27] Frederick: Yeah. Yeah. And so, yes, really.

[00:17:30] Frederick: So the circus age, which is the book, uh, I, I believe that came out of the dissertation really. Award, award winning book. I might add. Uh, multiple award winning. Um, let me, So in terms of, of course, you know, the identities and kind of real material impact on. Uh, subjects, um, gender, race, et cetera. The circus for you certainly had a dark side.

[00:18:03] Janet: Yeah. Yeah. It’s a, you know, it’s, it’s a, it’s a cultural form that quite honestly, you know, even to this day, it. It still has the power to just continually surprise me. So it’s a question of, you know, Yeah, there is, there is this way in which the circus, um, you know, there are elements of the circus in which people and animals for sure, um, you know, faced incredible exploitation and.

[00:18:37] Janet: Incredible. Um, you know, a, a kind of ideological space that could, you know, really reify and reinforce the, you know, the kind of horrors of, you know, kind of thinking in terms of, um, American racism, um, violence, um, and, you know, everything that is deeply disturbing. You know, our nation’s history. Um, just to give an example, in the world of this traveling, you know, entertainment form, people who worked on the show, there were some of the very largest circuses had as many as 1,200 people on these shows, you know, so this is a, this is in the late 19th, early 20th century on these big, big railroad shows.

[00:19:35] Janet: Ringling Brothers Circus Barn and Bailey’s Circus. Um, Adam for Paw Circus, the SALs Brother Circus. These are some of the big, big shows and so on. These shows, they would hire people to work as laborers. Who would. Roll the wagons on and off the train cars, who would set up the tents? You know, who did the, you know, incredible physical labor in building this kind of ephemeral tented city.

[00:20:07] Janet: And in this era, you know, this is right in the thick of the Jim Crow era. There were often black circus workers on these crews. Depending on the show. There were shows that would not, you know, that were very dedicated to kind of, you know, segregating and not even hiring, um, people of color in the laboring crews.

[00:20:34] Janet: But among those shows that did, um, those were people who were incredibly vulnerable when the shows would travel and. There are a number, I mean, shocking regularity where people would be targeted accused of committing a crime while the show is passing through a town and facing, you know, extraordinary violence.

[00:21:00] Janet: Um, the best, you know, one of the better known cases is a case that happened in 1920 in Duluth, Minnesota when the John Robinson Circus had performed. In June of, of 1920, and, um, several black circus workers were accused of, you know, totally fake, fake charges. A local man accused them of sexually assaulting a woman, and they were immediately arrested.

[00:21:31] Janet: The show rumbled on its way. No offer of protection for these surface workers. and within hours these men are held in the courthouse, you know, in the jail, in the town of Duluth. And a crowd estimated to be as big as 10,000 people appears in the streets, and three of the men were lynched. and it’s just a horror, you know, So there’s that kind of reality of violence.

[00:22:01] Janet: Mm-hmm. , um, there were fights on circus day. You know, it’s this incredible kind of force in a way of national identity, you know, is these shows rumble through the nation. Um, but yet at the same time, the presence of the circus could be this kind of catalyst for the very worst kinds of divisions in American society and.

[00:22:28] Janet: Some of the performances in these circuses were of a nature that would reify some of these white supremacist notions. Um, you know, people hired William Henry Johnson as an example, a man who, um, was hired to play zip, What is it, dressed in, like this first suit with a spear, contractually bound, not to speak.

[00:22:55] Janet: and, you know, he was so effective in his performance that he, you know, has been remembered by some scholars as someone who suffered from, you know, some pretty tremendous, um, intellectual disabilities. Um, but. In reality, and this is where one of the people whose manuscript I edited and annotated and synthesized down from a thousand pages into a, a form that one could read.

[00:23:24] Janet: This is Tiny Kline, a woman who worked as in a number of different capacities on circuses in the. Early to mid 20th century, but she most famously hung by her teeth, um, in performances. But she worked with William Henry Johnson on the circus and remembered him as, He was just a totally normal guy. Like he was someone who would sit around on the lot with his fellow, you know, sideshow performers and other members of the circus community and they’d, you know, they’d be rolling dice and he’d be like, Come on, baby needs a new pair of shoes.

[00:24:02] Janet: Come on, come on. You know? Totally normal person, but yet, you know, performing in ways that would reify the very kind of racist stereotypes that circulated in American life. And yet, and here’s where the kind of contradictions of the circus come into play. He was part of a really strong community on the show among his fellow performers, and he also had, you know, a decent job.

[00:24:34] Janet: Like he made money, he support himself and. You know, he traveled, traveled all over the place. Mm-hmm. . So you know, there’s these kinds of dis junctures in a way, you know, which I think I really appreciate that about studying circus because it is a space that really reveals how complicated and how nuanced.

[00:25:00] Janet: Kind of historical analysis, um, you know, how hard it can be and how challenging, and the kind of, you know, the ways in which people live. Um, you know, definitely have, um, you know, participating in structures that oppress them, but yet at the same time finding their own. Spaces mm-hmm. for, you know, rich lives.

[00:25:23] Janet: So,

[00:25:23] Frederick: yeah. Beautiful. Janet, you know, I was, Gospel of kindness also brings to mind, uh, these fascinating contradictions. And I know that, um, this, your book came out in 2016, um, and relates to nation building and the reformist movements, but also, Uh, I know that it can shed and does shed light on, right. It p epidemiological changes in technologies, um, impacts of disease.

[00:25:58] Frederick: Maybe we can, you can take us on a little journey through gospel of kindness and animals and animal studies and from your side of things.

[00:26:07] Janet: Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. So, you know, I think like so much of our scholarship, um, that book came out of my, you know, thinking about circuses. Um, because one of the things that, you know, so, so the kind of light bulb moments came when I was researching the circus age and came across somes.

[00:26:26] Janet: You know, material in circus route books, which were diaries that shows kept, um, of their day to day experiences on the road. And there was one tiny bit that I saw that talked about members of a local humane society in Denver. And being upset about the circus, um, being in town and what, you know, there was some rumor that the big cats, um, were being fed live prey.

[00:26:55] Janet: And I thought, Wow, that’s interesting about, you know, that this is, I, I just, it, it caught my eye. And then, I started digging a bit and learned then, you know, one of the aha moments in studying the history of animal protection is that the formal kind of animal protection movement precedes by a few years the formal child protection movement in the United States.

[00:27:22] Janet: And I thought, Wow, that’s, you know, again, interesting. Like, what’s going on here? And so, I was really interested in exploring kind of the relationship between animal protection and animal performances, you know, based on my interest in the circus. And so I began that research with that in mind, thinking like, okay, there’s gonna be a lot here to really grapple with.

[00:27:47] Janet: And I think that, you know, when you hit the archives, when you start digging into your sources, you often find things that. Didn’t expect a client . And so when I started digging, first and foremost, I found that yes, there were individuals who were part of this movement, who were, who were concerned about circus animals and who were worried about how they were treated and whether it was ethical for them to perform, but by and large, That was not really a focal point of the movement until much later.

[00:28:23] Janet: And here’s why. Because this was a world that was muscle powered. You know, animals transported people. Animals were, you know, the major movers and kind of levers of movement in a muscle powered world. And so labor. Among animals, really. You know, if they’re laboring in a circus ring or they’re laboring in the streets, in a way it was all of a piece.

[00:28:52] Janet: And so for most part, this is not the focal point of the activist concern, but what I, you know, But of course it begs the question, well, like how, how did they get going on this? You know, what was their, what was their a, what was the aha moment that got people interested in protecting animals and. As I began to really dig, um, I found that there had been little burling animal advocacy moments in American history that went back really far even in, you know, the, um, you know, in the era of the Continental Congress, like banning cock fi fighting or horse racing.

[00:29:35] Janet: But these were really acts that were less interested in the kind. You know, pain and sentience of animals and more interested in the kind of moral, um, degradation of humanity. You know, entertainments that involve gambling, entertainments that involve the consumption of alcohol that would cause people’s kind of base or nature to really take over, you know, the idea of self control.

[00:30:05] Janet: And so what happened is that, you know, I found the kind of coalescence of a movement really happening, um, in informal or ideological, kind of coalescing in the years of the second great awakening. So this is a time of enormous. Evangelical fervor in the United States. It really begins around in the 1790s and it lasts all the way up into the 1840s.

[00:30:36] Janet: And this is a time of camp meetings of the anxious bench where charismatic preachers would. Have people sit there and wait and if they were ready to announce that they were, you know, converting and they were going, willing to submit themselves to God. That was the whole kind of process of these very emotional meetings.

[00:31:02] Janet: And as a result, this kind of second grade awakening as a contrast to the first grade awakening of the years in the 1740s, fifties and sixties, the second grade awakening emphasized human agency and the notion that. You’re not predestined by a higher being, you know, to behave certain ways in the world or to be sanctified.

[00:31:31] Janet: This is something that is your own responsibility. So this notion of sanctification on earth through your own behavior and your decisions as a moral free agent was at the core of this new movement, and because of its emphasis on human agency. What it did was that it was part of an unleashing of reformist sentiment, and the people who were leading the way, of course, were the abolitionists.

[00:32:05] Janet: So black abolitionists in concert with white abolitionists, you know, protesting and moving to ban enslavement in this country. That was the biggest of the movements. Temperance becomes one of the big movements and the movement against corporal punishment in schools, the movement to reform the asylum.

[00:32:34] Janet: All of these different movements are swirling around and animal advocacy becomes. Very much a part of all of these other movements that are dedicated to, you know, this kind of moral free moral agency. And you see the kind of early legislation at the state and local level coming at this time period. and a lot of the folks who were involved said, you know, as they reflected upon it later, they said, you know, ultimately, you know, we were on the way to kind of institutionalizing all of this, but the, you know, the civil War got in the way, if you will, but it happens pretty quickly after the war.

[00:33:21] Janet: And if ever there was a kind of mass, mass consciousness raising about rights. The rights revolution of the Civil War about human freedom and human bondage and how its relationship, you know, to all who suffer, um, was something that was a kind of giant watershed. In 1866, that is the year that the very first formal Animal Protection Society is created in the United States.

[00:34:00] Janet: That’s the American, um, The, um, Oh God, now I can’t even . I’m so like I’m out of it. All of a sudden. The a s pca, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, um, is an organization that was local in its. You know, in its orientation, but it had a big grand American national name and, um, the people who were involved in it were very powerful people.

[00:34:28] Janet: They had Henry Berg, who was the first president and the longstanding president until his death president and founder. His father was a shipping magnet who became wealthy during the war of 1812. Um, you know, selling ships to the US government. . And anyway, what I was gonna say though is that Henry was connected as a result of his family’s stature and he and his friends, they presented legislation to the New York legislature in 1866, and they created a society vested with the powers to bring the cruelest to justice.

[00:35:06] Janet: In other words, they had policing powers. And they used those policing powers to patrol the streets. So it was a really odd thing in a way, You know this private organization that has this kind of public private interface, and he became the most familiar figure on the streets of New York. He’s. Stood over six feet tall.

[00:35:29] Janet: He wore a top hat. He was a dandy, he wore a very fancy coat, but he had his big badge. He liked the optics of law enforcement. So all of the off, you know, the, the officers for the a s PCA would wear these badges and they looked like police officers, and they would stop horses and say, Dismount, unload your horses, because the loads were too heavy and they were focused.

[00:35:54] Janet: Those animals that were involved in the kind of muscle powering of American society during the Giled age. So these horse cars that traveled on these railroad tracks, but they carried enormous loads in these. Car like structures. So this is where it begins in 1866, but it immediately explodes and other states incorporate their own SPCAs.

[00:36:24] Janet: It just grows like wildfire across the whole country. And. A woman in Philadelphia named Caroline Earl White, she wrote to Berg and she said, You know, I’m really, I love what you’re doing, however I am, but a woman, and for me to go out under the streets and essentially put my body on the line would be highly unseemly.

[00:36:47] Janet: I need another way to make my case. So she and her. Allies, they both petition the legislature in Pennsylvania to create the Pennsylvania S pca, but then she immediately removes herself from it because of social, kind of morays of her, you know, of her time. And so she and her female colleagues actually create dedicated women’s organization and they.

[00:37:16] Janet: become deeply involved in reforming animal sheltering and the treatment of strays. So any animal shelter in our world today has a debt to owe to what she and her colleagues started in Philadelphia. And there’s a lot that was going on in that regard too, in thinking about your, um, question about epidemiology, because this is an era when.

[00:37:44] Janet: A lot of, you know, stray dogs, especially roam the streets in America’s cities, and people in this era believed that in hot months rabies would proliferate. They had all sorts of theories about transmission. They thought that, you know, hot weather was a real catalyst for transmission. And so every summer in the nation’s biggest cities, there would be dog catchers who would round up stray dogs, and it was a gruesome spectacle as they were being rounded up.

[00:38:23] Janet: People were paid bounties for killing dogs. Um, there were a whole host of really just brutal practices that were visibly on display. Also purebred dogs carried a kind of premium on the resale market. So people who owned purebred dogs had to be very careful because these dog catchers would try to catch them and then spirit them away for sale and profit.

[00:38:51] Janet: There were cases where people. People of color and immigrant communities would be, you know, terrorized essentially by dog catchers who would come and forcibly remove pets from people’s arms. There were cases where people were killed, um, in encounters with these dog catchers. It was a really violent, violent world.

[00:39:16] Janet: And so this is what the women of the, um, Women’s Pennsylvania s pca, were really instrumental in changing all of this, transforming pounds into shelters, creating systems of adoption, and reforming the kind of capturing processes as well. And so that’s another kind of strand of the movement, and over time it really becomes kind.

[00:39:48] Janet: You know, deeply the connections that we’re always there from the start about. Comportment, Human agency, free moral agency, and notions of what does it mean to belong or to be excluded. Were always tied up in these bigger questions about animal advocacy and ideas about civilization, about. You know, America’s place in the world, they were always part of this, but they become even more important over time.

[00:40:25] Janet: And one of the earlier connections that I mentioned with temperance becomes a really strong one. Um, as the movement grows in the latter part of the teenth century and as, um, one of the. Big kind of leaders of the movement. A man named George Angel of Boston, he’s head of the Massachusetts S pca. He had direct experience in the abolitionist movement as a young attorney in the 1850s in Boston.

[00:41:02] Janet: His law partner, they ran a two person operation in Boston. Um, Samuel Seoul was his partner’s name, and he was. You know, very well known abolitionist who represented, um, a whole range of people who were deeply involved in the movement, including. People who had escaped enslavement and were trying to remain in Massachusetts.

[00:41:31] Janet: Despite the pernicious kind of reach of the fugitive slave law, he represented Harriet Beecher St. He represented John Brown, so he was a really prominent mover in Shaker, an abolitionist circles, and George Angel was right there by his side, so he always saw. Kind of the struggles of human liberation and, you know, the ways in which animals were being treated as being of a piece.

[00:42:00] Janet: And so he brought into his movement, he created a new organization, um, the American. Humane Education Society, and he created a system that in the American South in Jim Crow America, um, led by Black animal advocates and the women’s, um, the woman’s Christian Temperance Union actually had similar operations going on here in Texas, for example.

[00:42:30] Janet: Um, where black leaders were involved in. Education and in humane education and working with animals allowed people to work in spaces that otherwise were less accessible to them. So it’s been, you know, seeing that kind of, you know, one person, Frederick Rivers, Barnwell, for example, um, of Fort Worth. He traveled around the state of Texas.

[00:43:01] Janet: In a vehicle, you know, on a Model T and handed, you know, gave lectures at churches, at schools in segregated Texas, mostly to black audiences, but some of the audiences were integrated, handed out copies of George Angels publication for the Massachusetts s PCA called Our Dumb Animals. We speak for those who cannot speak for themselves, many.

[00:43:28] Janet: Issues of which contained very explicit articles denouncing Jim Crowism, denouncing racist violence, denouncing, you know, the, the pernicious nature of disenfranchisement and segregation, and handed these publications. Two white authorities in the communities where he spoke. It’s, you know, it’s just, to me, it’s a remarkable kind of world that he built in his work.

[00:43:59] Janet: Um, right here in Texas, in Fort Worth, and really a vital, wonderful kind of, um, community. And actually, I met one of. Grandchildren, , right as Covid was breaking. Um, she lived in Georgia and anyway, we corresponded during that time. So it’s like those long kind of arms of history are right with us. Um, I

[00:44:24] Frederick: remarkable.

[00:44:25] Frederick: Yeah. Yeah. Thanks. You know, I was thinking while you were talking that, um, you know, this seems, uh, certainly the 1866 moment Yeah. And everything that was going on, Gosh, I, I’m. I’m just waiting for the minute when you get tapped to do the Netflix TV series on this . Thanks, . Um, I’ll be, I know you have more, more to share with us.

[00:44:53] Frederick: I do. As we, as we start to wind down, I wanted to, Yeah. Um, um, Gosh, I mean, Little House in the Prairie, Henry B eighth, um, you know, um, animal and child activism movements, um, to, you know, the temp, you know, as combined with the abolitionist movements and. Wellness and vaccines, and then of course body building and jaws.

[00:45:19] Frederick: I I wanna make sure we get to those as well before we, we wind down here our, our incredible journey with you, Janet.

[00:45:32] Janet: You know, one thing I wanted to add just about the animal advocates is that, The United States became an overseas empire. These are people who brought their kind of ideas about animal advocacy to other parts of the world that the US was now active in both economically, militarily, and politically. And one of those realms was the cock fight.

[00:45:58] Janet: So I’ll, I won’t say more unless you know, I can speak more about that, but I did wanna mention that since you had mentioned that earlier. It became a real flashpoint for conflict .

[00:46:10] Frederick: I bet. I, I can only imagine. Yeah, I can only imagine. Um, so yeah, tell us about, uh, give us, you know, kind of this, We live in, we’ve been living through a big global pandemic and we see a lot.

[00:46:31] Frederick: The discourse, the kinds of conversations, the way that the media has been spinning it in terms of, well, gosh, um, almost everything that you’ve been talking about, um, you know, the body and wellness and the mind and, you know, vaccines and un, you know, the anti-vax is. How is, how is your work kind of following or enriching our understanding of what we’ve been living through?

[00:47:02] Frederick: And finally, I do wanna hear about your excitement and interest in both the book and the movie Jaws.

[00:47:12] Janet: Yeah. Well it’s really wild to be thinking about, you know, kind of where I sit as a historian and you know, in this current. Really unbelievable moment in so many ways. Um, and how, um, you know, thinking about pandemic life and, and the kind of isolation and fragmentation and anxiety that it is, you know, that swirl among us and I think back, you know, to the 1918.

[00:47:46] Janet: Flu epidemic pandemic worldwide. And I think about the, you know, circuses were traveling at that time, and they had to, they had to, they had to stop and, and go straight back to winter quarters, um, because of the, you know, just devastating kind of impact of being in big crowds. And there were the same kinds of, um, fears.

[00:48:15] Janet: There was misinformation about masking, um, a lot of, you know, the same kinds of social tensions that we are reckoning with now. Of course, the very big, big difference now, of course is the, you know, the kind of. Social media and internet worlds that, you know, compound the kind of flow of communications in ways that did not exist back in that period.

[00:48:45] Janet: But, um, you know, definitely that kind of same fear of something apocalyptic was very much there in that time as well. Um, and I think that, um, You know, the other thing too that’s really, that struck me as I was researching, um, for the Gospel of kindness. Was the many of the people I, you know, that I felt like I got to know in my research were folks who, um, you know, especially the, the women in the, um, W CTU or the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.

[00:49:28] Janet: Many of those folks became very active in the anti vivs section movement. So this is a movement against experimentation on animals for scientific purposes. and these were people who really pushed hard, really pushed hard. Um, they were pro, they were the most radical of these activists. They were of course, like all social movements.

[00:49:56] Janet: This is a movement that had myriad strands of advocacy and kind of agendas. And so these were people who. Believed that the kind of, um, you know, they were the most kind of wedded to fighting what they saw as a medical establishment that was harming people’s bodies, harming animals’, bodies, you know, the kind of grave robbing of the indigent.

[00:50:27] Janet: Of people of color. All of these issues were very much on the minds of these activists. And they also were people who were very suspicious of vaccines in part because of the. Experimentation on animals that led to the creation of so many different vaccines. So that aspect of it, you know, the kind of cruelty of harming a body, but then also the uses of vaccine on people in an experimental settings.

[00:51:04] Janet: They were very, very, very worried. And so, It’s a, you know, it’s something that was, for me as a researcher, really fascinating to see the kind of the, you know, the ideological universe that they lived in and the way it resonates in so many ways with our current moment in thinking about expertise.

[00:51:31] Janet: Authority, the potential abuses of knowledge, um, the flow of information and disinformation. And so, you know, I think that it’s important to see that these elements of disorder and fear. Have long roots, you know, And then it’s important to study how and why things happen and how and why things can be transformed

[00:52:04] Janet: Um, so that’s, you know, it brings it all back to like the, the richness of studying the past and as a way to understand and to, you know, guide, um, potential solutions to contemporary problems.

[00:52:21] Frederick: So, Wow. Yeah, I couldn’t, uh, you said it so beautifully. I think you’ve encapsulated the. The impulse, the aim, the goal of us in the classroom and in our scholarship.

[00:52:35] Frederick: Um, a last word though, Jim. Cause I just wanna know about Jaws. Yeah. .

[00:52:41] Janet: Well, so Jaws, oh my gosh. I’ve been writing about Jaws all day to day, so this is, So fresh on my mind. So Jaws, you know, I was 11 when the movie came out, and of course I saw it in the theater in Madison, Wisconsin, and was just riveted by it and loved it.

[00:52:58] Janet: I’d always, again, as part of my love of. All kind of looking at animals and understanding them. I’d been reading about sharks for years, but seeing this movie, of course, terrified me. But I was also really taken by the kind of panic that was happening across the country. You know, there were, Jaws was on the cover of magazines that were people who were racing out of the sea because.

[00:53:24] Janet: Seen what they thought was afin that turned out to be a flock of pelicans in the water or whatever. But there was this kind of panic, and so that’s what got me thinking, like what was going on, what was going on in 1975 when this movie came out. And of course, later on, as I, you know, digested that question from.

[00:53:45] Janet: Perspective of a researcher. I started reading in the archives, Peter Besley’s papers at Boston University. Peter Benchley was the author of the novel Jaws that came out the year before the movie. And in reading his papers, I had come with the expectation. I’m gonna just really dismantle this cultural phenomenon and make sense of it.

[00:54:12] Janet: What was going on? Why was it such a cultural force, such a sensation, part of our language. We’re gonna need a bigger boat. You know, everything. There’s so much jaws and our shark obsession, but in reading the archival papers eventually saved all his letters from his fans. Many of whom were World War II veterans, people who had witnessed the pandemonium that occurred when there were a series of shark attacks from July 1st to July 12th, 1916 on the New Jersey Shore, and a whole host of other shark experiences.

[00:54:54] Janet: That’s when I realized, oh my gosh, I have to go farther back in time. That Jaws mania. Cerca 1975 is a manifestation of something that is much, much older, much deeper, and that’s where this project has gone.

[00:55:18] Frederick: Wow. Ja Jas mania. Yeah, I, I think I was maybe right around your age as well. Yeah. Um, um, well, Janet, this has been a remarkable journey you’ve shared with us.

[00:55:34] Frederick: Taking us on your travels. Travels as. A child as a teenager, as a flight attendant, as an archivist, as a historian of artifacts of ordinary life that bring to light our contemporary world and how we can understand it as a guide to the future. Thank

[00:55:54] Janet: you, Janet. Oh, thank you so much. This has been such a pleasure.

[00:56:01] Outro: Into The Colaverse is produced by the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Liberal Arts Sound Engineering by the Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services. You can find Into the Colaverse Podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. Thanks for listening and see you next time.