Why do America’s cities look the way they do? If we want to know the answer, we should start by looking at our relationship with animals. Americans once lived alongside animals. They raised them, worked them, ate them, and lived off their products. This was true not just in rural areas but also in cities, which were crowded with livestock and beasts of burden. But as urban areas grew in the nineteenth century, these relationships changed. Slaughterhouses, dairies, and hog ranches receded into suburbs and hinterlands. Milk and meat increasingly came from stores, while the family cow and pig gave way to the household pet. This great shift, Andrew Robichaud reveals, transformed people’s relationships with animals and nature and radically altered ideas about what it means to be human. As Animal City illustrates, these transformations in human and animal lives were not inevitable results of population growth but rather followed decades of social and political struggles. City officials sought to control urban animal populations and developed sweeping regulatory powers that ushered in new forms of urban life. Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals worked to enhance certain animals’ moral standing in law and culture, in turn inspiring new child welfare laws and spurring other wide-ranging reforms. The animal city is still with us today. The urban landscapes we inhabit are products of the transformations of the nineteenth century. From urban development to environmental inequality, our cities still bear the scars of the domestication of urban America.

Animal Cities builds upon a recent surge of interest about animals in the urban context. Considering animals in urban settings is now a firmly established area of study and this book presents a number of valuable case studies that illustrate some of the perspectives that may be adopted. Having an ’urban history’ flavour, the book follows a fourfold agenda. First, the opening chapters look at working and productive animals that lived and died in nineteenth-century cities such as London, Edinburgh and Paris. The argument here is that their presence yields insights into evolving understandings of the category ’urban’ and what made a good city. Second, there is a consideration of nineteenth-century animal spectacles, which influenced contemporary interpretations of the urban experience. Third, the theme of contested animal spaces in the city is explored further with regard to backyard chickens in suburban Australia. Finally, there is discussion of the problem of the public companion animal and its role in changing attitudes to public space, illustrated with a chapter on dog-walking in Victorian and Edwardian London. Animal Cities makes a significant contribution to animal studies and is of interest to historical geographers, urban, cultural, social and economic historians and historians of policy and planning.

This book offers a comprehensive treatment of the city image in the Hebrew Bible, with specific attention to stylistics. By engaging with spatial theory (Lefebvre 1974, Soja 1996), the author develops a new framework to analyse the concept of ‘city’, arguing that a set of conceptual images defines the Biblical Hebrew city, each of them constructed using the same linguistic toolkit. Contrary to previous studies, the book shows that biblical cities are not necessarily evil or female. In addition, there is no substantial difference between the metaphorical images used for Jerusalem and those used for other cities. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of stylistics, urban studies, critical-spatial theory and biblical studies (especially Biblical Hebrew).

Man has not seen peace for centuries, man has found a way to wage war on himself for the sake of good, peace and prosperity. This has only lead to temporary peace between civilisations and results in more war as the world goes on. This was greatly beneficial to the Gods of old until a war in the Heavens or Dieu has caused their worlds’ to crumble. They now seek revenge and seek to change the world of man in an attempt to change their reality within their civilization. They sent a massager to the earth to speak to a man telling him of the humans’ history, telling him of the sins of men and how they came about. Man has become egocentric and self-absorbed turning their backs on the scriptures of old, leading a life of violence and hatred that transcends into the heavens.