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Brett Mizelle

California State University Long Beach, History, Faculty Member

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I am Professor of History and Director of the American Studies Program at California State University Long Beach. I received my doctorate in American Studies from the University of Minnesota after completing an M.A. in History at Minnesota and a B.A. in American Studies at Georgetown University. I have been the recipient of research fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, Library Company of Philadelphia, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Haynes Foundation, and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. My publications include books, articles, book chapters, and reviews in the fields of nineteenth-century American history and the history of human-animal relationships. My book Pig (Reaktion Books, 2011) charts how humans have shaped the pig and how the pig has shaped us, focusing on the unresolved contradictions between the fiction and the reality of our relationships with pigs. Recent articles trace the contestation over the training and exhibition of horses and big cats in the history of the American circus and use the history of American food production and consumption to better develop the connections between environmental history and American Studies. Work in progress includes work on mass killings of pigs and the challenges of multispecies justice, a book-length animal studies project on the discursive and material making and taking of animal life in nineteenth-century America, and the Reaktion “Animal Series” book Squirrel.

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Violette Pouillard

Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique / French National Centre for Scientific Research

Michigan State University

Wessel Broekhuis

University of Amsterdam

University of Kassel

Heather J Sharkey

University of Pennsylvania

University of Edinburgh

University of Strathclyde, Glasgow

King's College London

New York University

Aaron Skabelund

Brigham Young University

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Books by Brett Mizelle

Pig (Reaktion Books "Animal" Series, 2011).

Journal Articles & Book Chapters by Brett Mizelle

“Unthinkable Visibility: Pigs, Pork and the Spectacle of Killing and Meat,” in Marguerite S. Shaffer and Phoebe S.K. Young, eds., Rendering Nature: Animals, Bodies, Places, Politics (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 263-286.

“Horses and Cat Acts in the Early American Circus,” in The American Circus, edited by Susan Weber, Kenneth L. Ames, and Matthew Wittmann (New York: Bard Graduate Center for Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture / New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012), 250-275.

“‘A man quite as much of a show as his beasts’: James Capen ‘Grizzly’ Adams and the Making of Grizzly Bears,” Werkstatt Geschichte 56: Animals (2010), 29-45.

"The Disappearance (and Slight Return) of Pigs in American Cities," Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture 12 (Winter 2010), 79-84.

"The QUE Project and History Learning and Teaching: The Case of Long Beach State," in Ronald J. Henry, ed., Faculty Development for Student Achievement: The QUE Project (Anker Publishing Company, 2006), 121-144. [co-written with Tim Keirn]

"Contested Exhibitions: The Debate Over Proper Animal Sights in Post-Revolutionary America," Worldviews: Environment, Culture, Religion 9.2 (2005), 219-235.

Animal exhibitions served as a crucial site in which Americans struggled to come to terms with th... more Animal exhibitions served as a crucial site in which Americans struggled to come to terms with their post-revolutionary society. This essay analyzes those debates over proper ways of seeing animals in the early republic that reveal an emerging distinction between legitimate and problematic displays of animals, between exhibitions of exotic creatures that provided "instructive amusement" and those animal acts that did not. While this distinction was, in actuality, seldom clear, this effort to define what types of animal exhibitions were acceptable both reflected and helped to produce the modern divide between humans as subjects and animals as objects. It also reveals other significant transformations in American culture, including the segmentation of American audiences, the division of culture into high and low, and the place of ideas about animals in defining the citizen and the nation.

“‘I Have Brought my Pig to a Fine Market’: Animals, Their Exhibitors, and Market Culture in the Early Republic,” in Scott C. Martin, ed., Cultural Change and the Market Revolution in America, 1789-1860 (Madison House, 2005), 181-216.

“Displaying the Expanding Nation to Itself: The Cultural Work of Public Exhibitions of Western Fauna in Lewis and Clark’s Philadelphia,” in Robert S. Cox, ed., The Shortest and Most Convenient Route: Lewis and Clark in Context (American Philosophical Society, 2004), 215-235.

“‘Man Cannot Behold it Without Contemplating Himself’: Monkeys, Apes and Human Identity in the Early American Republic,” in Explorations in Early American Culture: A Supplemental Issue of Pennsylvania History 66 (1999), 144-173.

Papers by Brett Mizelle

Handbook of Historical Animal Studies

Writing History after the Animal Turn? An Introduction to Historical Animal Studies

Handbook of Historical Animal Studies

The paper represents the introduction to the Handbook of Historical Animal Studies, outlining the... more

"Radical Hope: Rethinking Multispecies Work in the Anthropocene," a commentary on Jocelyne Porcher, Living With Animals: A Utopia for the 21st Century.

welcomed by English-language-speaking animal studies scholars for a number of reasons. Jocelyne P... more welcomed by English-language-speaking animal studies scholars for a number of reasons. Jocelyne Porcher, a French sociologist, provides a comparative perspective on the history of animal agriculture and brings a theoretical approach grounded in the largely French discipline of anthropozoologie to a new audience. 1 She calls for our attention-theoretically and practically-to historical and embodied farmer-livestock relationships in animal husbandry and suggestively applies that framework to the dominant contemporary relationship most people have with nonhuman animals: petkeeping. Finally, Porcher raises important questions about the nature of work-human, nonhuman, and in multispecies partnership-and the relationship of that work to a society where we might live differently and better with nonhuman animals. Her work urges us to imagine what that world would look like and to figure out how we all, humans and nonhumans alike, might get there. As a historian of human-animal relationships working at the intersection of animal studies and American Studies, I appreciated Porcher's discussion of the history and application of zootechnics, or "the science of exploiting animal machines." Her history of the decline of animal husbandry as capitalism facilitated a shift from animals as partners to animals as machines is, of course, a familiar one, but the details of this transition in France were quite welcome and make an important contribution to a comparative history of industrial animal

Book Reviews by Brett Mizelle

Review of Susan Nance, ed., The Historical Animal, Agricultural History 90.3 (Summer 2016), 429-430.

Review of Susan Nance, Entertaining Elephants: Animal Agency and the Business of the American Circus, Business History Review 98.2 (Summer 2015), 371-374.

Entertaining Elephants is a remarkable book, bringing together business history, the study of hum... more

Review of Randy Malamud, An Introduction to Animals and Visual Culture, Journal of Animal Ethics 4.2 (2014), 99-102.

Review of Mark Feige, The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States, Southern California Quarterly 95.2 (Spring 2013), 230-233.

Review of Andrew J. Lewis, A Democracy of Facts: Natural History in the Early Republic, in William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 69.3 (July 2012), 651-654.

In recent years, historians of science and culture have fruitfully explored the production and ci... more In recent years, historians of science and culture have fruitfully explored the production and circulation of natural history knowledge in the Atlantic world, highlighting the ways in which people constructed their identities through encounters with and representations of the natural world. Ideas about the natural order reflected and produced concerns about social and political order, especially as some Americans sought to link national identity to the environment, seeing themselves as citizens of "nature's nation." 1 Andrew J. Lewis chronicles the failure of naturalists to control public opinion as experts and ordinary Americans argued about natural history, "a constellation of unstable and contested practices that comprise a method of interrogating the natural world as well as a means of explaining that collected information about nature" (5). This thought-provoking study traces the shift from a contentious "democracy of facts" to the withdrawal of later generations of American naturalists from direct public engagement as they pursued increasingly expensive studies that required state support.

Review of Krista Comer, Surfer Girls in the New World Order, in Southern California Quarterly 94.1 (Spring 2012), 155-158.

s ra ed from behind with acr lic lac uer that, like Pash ian, ca tures an intense, et atmos heric... more s ra ed from behind with acr lic lac uer that, like Pash ian, ca tures an intense, et atmos heric, luminosit rarel seen in this material. A notable omission from the exhibition is Maria Nordman, thou h it is ex lained that she does not allow for the hoto ra hic re resentation of her work and declined an invitation to artici ate, referrin not to have her work shown in a rou context ( ). Her work is addressed in Michael Au in 's cha ter, "Stealth Architecture: The Rooms of Li ht and S ace," where a lar e ortion of text is dedicated to describin the ex erience of her installations. Additionall in this chater, Au in ex lores the Li ht and S ace artists' en a ement and mani ulation of architecture throu h his ersonal en a ement with man of the works from ast curatorial roles. For readers unable to visit the exhibition, it is throu h his oi nant descri tions of these encounters that one can vividl ima ine what man of these works would have been like. His discussion of the histor of Nauman's constrained, architectural environments saturated with intensel hued florescent li ht enhances the ex erience of Green Li ht Corridor ( ). Installed in the same lace as it was ori inall in the MCASD La Jolla, Green Li ht Corridor is a × foot hallwa that is onl one foot across and flooded with shar , neon reen li ht. Viewers walk sidewa s throu h the construction and ex erience the claustro hobic s ace as well as the shift in color around them as it chan es from reen to white. At the end of the corridor stands a room over lookin the Pacific Ocean (which now includes Irwin's site-s ecific work, ° ° ° °, made from a series of a ertures cut into the windows) and as one exits Nauman's iece, the world is bathed in ink and ur le lastin almost thirt seconds, an o tical effect from the reen li ht.

Review of The Cultural Turn in United States History: Past, Present, and Future, edited by James W. Cook, Lawrence B. Glickman, and Michael O'Malley, in The History Teacher 43.1 (November 2009), 142-144.

Pig (Reaktion Books "Animal" Series, 2011).

“Unthinkable Visibility: Pigs, Pork and the Spectacle of Killing and Meat,” in Marguerite S. Shaffer and Phoebe S.K. Young, eds., Rendering Nature: Animals, Bodies, Places, Politics (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 263-286.

“Horses and Cat Acts in the Early American Circus,” in The American Circus, edited by Susan Weber, Kenneth L. Ames, and Matthew Wittmann (New York: Bard Graduate Center for Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture / New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012), 250-275.

“‘A man quite as much of a show as his beasts’: James Capen ‘Grizzly’ Adams and the Making of Grizzly Bears,” Werkstatt Geschichte 56: Animals (2010), 29-45.

"The Disappearance (and Slight Return) of Pigs in American Cities," Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture 12 (Winter 2010), 79-84.

"The QUE Project and History Learning and Teaching: The Case of Long Beach State," in Ronald J. Henry, ed., Faculty Development for Student Achievement: The QUE Project (Anker Publishing Company, 2006), 121-144. [co-written with Tim Keirn]

"Contested Exhibitions: The Debate Over Proper Animal Sights in Post-Revolutionary America," Worldviews: Environment, Culture, Religion 9.2 (2005), 219-235.

Animal exhibitions served as a crucial site in which Americans struggled to come to terms with th... more Animal exhibitions served as a crucial site in which Americans struggled to come to terms with their post-revolutionary society. This essay analyzes those debates over proper ways of seeing animals in the early republic that reveal an emerging distinction between legitimate and problematic displays of animals, between exhibitions of exotic creatures that provided "instructive amusement" and those animal acts that did not. While this distinction was, in actuality, seldom clear, this effort to define what types of animal exhibitions were acceptable both reflected and helped to produce the modern divide between humans as subjects and animals as objects. It also reveals other significant transformations in American culture, including the segmentation of American audiences, the division of culture into high and low, and the place of ideas about animals in defining the citizen and the nation.

“‘I Have Brought my Pig to a Fine Market’: Animals, Their Exhibitors, and Market Culture in the Early Republic,” in Scott C. Martin, ed., Cultural Change and the Market Revolution in America, 1789-1860 (Madison House, 2005), 181-216.

“Displaying the Expanding Nation to Itself: The Cultural Work of Public Exhibitions of Western Fauna in Lewis and Clark’s Philadelphia,” in Robert S. Cox, ed., The Shortest and Most Convenient Route: Lewis and Clark in Context (American Philosophical Society, 2004), 215-235.

“‘Man Cannot Behold it Without Contemplating Himself’: Monkeys, Apes and Human Identity in the Early American Republic,” in Explorations in Early American Culture: A Supplemental Issue of Pennsylvania History 66 (1999), 144-173.

Handbook of Historical Animal Studies

Writing History after the Animal Turn? An Introduction to Historical Animal Studies

Handbook of Historical Animal Studies

The paper represents the introduction to the Handbook of Historical Animal Studies, outlining the... more

"Radical Hope: Rethinking Multispecies Work in the Anthropocene," a commentary on Jocelyne Porcher, Living With Animals: A Utopia for the 21st Century.

welcomed by English-language-speaking animal studies scholars for a number of reasons. Jocelyne P... more welcomed by English-language-speaking animal studies scholars for a number of reasons. Jocelyne Porcher, a French sociologist, provides a comparative perspective on the history of animal agriculture and brings a theoretical approach grounded in the largely French discipline of anthropozoologie to a new audience. 1 She calls for our attention-theoretically and practically-to historical and embodied farmer-livestock relationships in animal husbandry and suggestively applies that framework to the dominant contemporary relationship most people have with nonhuman animals: petkeeping. Finally, Porcher raises important questions about the nature of work-human, nonhuman, and in multispecies partnership-and the relationship of that work to a society where we might live differently and better with nonhuman animals. Her work urges us to imagine what that world would look like and to figure out how we all, humans and nonhumans alike, might get there. As a historian of human-animal relationships working at the intersection of animal studies and American Studies, I appreciated Porcher's discussion of the history and application of zootechnics, or "the science of exploiting animal machines." Her history of the decline of animal husbandry as capitalism facilitated a shift from animals as partners to animals as machines is, of course, a familiar one, but the details of this transition in France were quite welcome and make an important contribution to a comparative history of industrial animal

Review of Susan Nance, ed., The Historical Animal, Agricultural History 90.3 (Summer 2016), 429-430.

Review of Susan Nance, Entertaining Elephants: Animal Agency and the Business of the American Circus, Business History Review 98.2 (Summer 2015), 371-374.

Entertaining Elephants is a remarkable book, bringing together business history, the study of hum... more

Review of Randy Malamud, An Introduction to Animals and Visual Culture, Journal of Animal Ethics 4.2 (2014), 99-102.

Review of Mark Feige, The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States, Southern California Quarterly 95.2 (Spring 2013), 230-233.

Review of Andrew J. Lewis, A Democracy of Facts: Natural History in the Early Republic, in William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 69.3 (July 2012), 651-654.

In recent years, historians of science and culture have fruitfully explored the production and ci... more In recent years, historians of science and culture have fruitfully explored the production and circulation of natural history knowledge in the Atlantic world, highlighting the ways in which people constructed their identities through encounters with and representations of the natural world. Ideas about the natural order reflected and produced concerns about social and political order, especially as some Americans sought to link national identity to the environment, seeing themselves as citizens of "nature's nation." 1 Andrew J. Lewis chronicles the failure of naturalists to control public opinion as experts and ordinary Americans argued about natural history, "a constellation of unstable and contested practices that comprise a method of interrogating the natural world as well as a means of explaining that collected information about nature" (5). This thought-provoking study traces the shift from a contentious "democracy of facts" to the withdrawal of later generations of American naturalists from direct public engagement as they pursued increasingly expensive studies that required state support.

Review of Krista Comer, Surfer Girls in the New World Order, in Southern California Quarterly 94.1 (Spring 2012), 155-158.

s ra ed from behind with acr lic lac uer that, like Pash ian, ca tures an intense, et atmos heric... more s ra ed from behind with acr lic lac uer that, like Pash ian, ca tures an intense, et atmos heric, luminosit rarel seen in this material. A notable omission from the exhibition is Maria Nordman, thou h it is ex lained that she does not allow for the hoto ra hic re resentation of her work and declined an invitation to artici ate, referrin not to have her work shown in a rou context ( ). Her work is addressed in Michael Au in 's cha ter, "Stealth Architecture: The Rooms of Li ht and S ace," where a lar e ortion of text is dedicated to describin the ex erience of her installations. Additionall in this chater, Au in ex lores the Li ht and S ace artists' en a ement and mani ulation of architecture throu h his ersonal en a ement with man of the works from ast curatorial roles. For readers unable to visit the exhibition, it is throu h his oi nant descri tions of these encounters that one can vividl ima ine what man of these works would have been like. His discussion of the histor of Nauman's constrained, architectural environments saturated with intensel hued florescent li ht enhances the ex erience of Green Li ht Corridor ( ). Installed in the same lace as it was ori inall in the MCASD La Jolla, Green Li ht Corridor is a × foot hallwa that is onl one foot across and flooded with shar , neon reen li ht. Viewers walk sidewa s throu h the construction and ex erience the claustro hobic s ace as well as the shift in color around them as it chan es from reen to white. At the end of the corridor stands a room over lookin the Pacific Ocean (which now includes Irwin's site-s ecific work, ° ° ° °, made from a series of a ertures cut into the windows) and as one exits Nauman's iece, the world is bathed in ink and ur le lastin almost thirt seconds, an o tical effect from the reen li ht.

Review of The Cultural Turn in United States History: Past, Present, and Future, edited by James W. Cook, Lawrence B. Glickman, and Michael O'Malley, in The History Teacher 43.1 (November 2009), 142-144.

Review of Looking at Los Angeles, edited by Marla Hamburg Kennedy and Ben Stiller, with the collaboration of Jane Brown and Craig Krull. Essay by David L. Ulin, in Southern California Quarterly 88.4 (Winter 2006-2007), 487-489.

Review of Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America, by Virginia DeJohn Anderson, in The Journal of Social History 40.2 (Winter 2006), 510-513.

ing quantitative data. Additionally, qualitative evidence is also asked to support unjustifiably ... more ing quantitative data. Additionally, qualitative evidence is also asked to support unjustifiably broad conclusions. For example, for the author to assume that the lack of serious differences in the language used to describe male and female offences in recognizances proves that a large proportion of petty violence was "ungendered" (66-68) underestimates the impact of formulaic legalistic wording and too readily takes official texts as proof of broader social views. Moreover, the credibility of her challenge to assumptions about gender and "violence" would have been strengthened by more attention to how her analysis of "ungendered" petty violence can be squared with solid evidence of significant gendered differences in more serious violence. The author ultimately seeks to prove that "neither the perpetration nor the prosecution of petty violence was entirely subject to gender limitations" (128). This could be seen as a modest goal, since no historian of any time period has, to my knowledge, ever claimed the complete subjection of violence to gender codes.

Review of Body and Soul: A Sympathetic History of American Spiritualism, by Robert S. Cox, Journal of the Early Republic 25.1 (Spring 2005), 150-153.

Review of The Antebellum Era: Primary Documents on Events from 1820 to 1860, by David A. Copeland, The History Teacher 38.3 (May 2005), 403-404.

Review Essay, "Cultural Production in the Early American Republic," Eighteenth-Century Studies 37.2 (Winter 2004), 301-304.

These recent studies explore the artists' and artisans' contributions to nation building in the n... more

Review of Charles Willson Peale: Art and Selfhood in the Early Republic, by David C. Ward, Archives of American Art Journal 44.3-4 (2004), 32-37.

Review of Animal Attractions: Nature on Display in American Zoos, by Elizabeth Hanson, Journal of American History 90.3 (December 2003), 1048-1049.

“Where is Home for Non-Natives? Violence and Care in Human-Squirrel Relationships in the Anthropocene,” American Studies Association, Denver, Colorado, November 18, 2016

"Pigs, the Pork Industry, and Environmental Misery," on the panel "Environmental Misery: Confronting the Future of the Anthropocene," American Studies Association, Toronto, Canada, October 10, 2015.

"Ecologies of Human-Porcine Labor," Pig Out: Hogs and Humans in Global and Historical Context, Yale University, 16 October 2015.

"The Cultural Work of 'Bacon Mania' and Transformations in the Making of Pigs and Pork in America," British Animal Studies Network: Tasting, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, May 16, 2015.

"'They go upon the assumption that everything in life is clean and nice': Transformations in Agriculture and the Human-Animal Relationship in Nineteenth-Century Brighton, Massachusetts," Agricultural History Society, Lexington, Kentucky, June 4, 2015.

“Mary Griffith’s Odd Future: Real and Imagined Human-Animal Relationships in Antebellum America,” Living With Animals, Eastern Kentucky University, March 2015.

“Recalling ‘The Great Friend of Man’: The Material and Cultural Contributions of the Mule in Atlanta and Georgia History,” Southern American Studies Association, February 20, 2015.

“Contesting and Transforming the Making of Meat in Antebellum America,” Minding Animals 3, New Delhi, January 16, 2015

“Speculation, Violence and Multispecies Communities: Pigs as Invasive Species and Biosecurity Threats,” All Things Great and Small: Interdisciplinary Interspecies Community, a UC Davis Interdisciplinary Animal Studies Research Group conference, November 2014.

"'Our Strongest Trait is Your Success': Reading Divergent Genomes in Pigs and Horses," Reading Animals, University of Sheffield UK, 18 July 2014

Moines, Iowa, where we were struck by the myriad swine-related reproductive technologies on displ... more Moines, Iowa, where we were struck by the myriad swine-related reproductive technologies on display. The title of our talk derives from one of the advertising slogans used by PIC [Pig Improvement Company], a swine gene bank, that first made us laugh and then made us think harder about the admixture of technology, genes, and "success" in the context of animal production. Both of us study the intersection of science and animals, which often leads us down the path of technologized reproduction techniques, so we were in somewhat familiar territory. But what struck us as we moved through the trade show, weaving between booths touting products from cutting-edge artificial insemination straws to semen carrying patented genetic codes, was our immersion in a narrative of purposeful breeding --and how, at every booth we visited, this narrative was reinforced by data, statistics, and an assumption that this swine techno-universe was good and necessary.

"The Visibility and Invisibility of Pigs, Part Two: The Disappearing Slaughterhouse," Humane Research Council, 11 September 2012

"The Visibility and Invisibility of Pigs, Part One: Pigs in the City," Humane Research Council, 6 March 2012

"The Pig Apple," interview segment in "Another Man's Treasure: A History of Trash," BackStory with the American History Guys, a program of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, produced by Kelly Jones

"Everything You Didn't Know About Animals: Pigs, Wolves, and Crows," National Geographic Wild, first aired April 27, 2015.

"Evolution of the Pork Industry in America," BeachTV CSULB, October 21, 2015.

Freedom of Species interview with 3CR Radio in Melbourne, Australia

"Our Porcine Friends," interview with Phillip Adams, Late Night Live, ABC Radio Australia

Writing History after the Animal Turn? An Introduction to Historical Animal Studies

by André Krebber, Brett Mizelle, and Mieke Roscher

Handbook of Historical Animal Studies, 2021

The paper represents the introduction to the Handbook of Historical Animal Studies, outlining the... more