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Andrews wins NEH award to explore American history from ‘an animals’-eye view’

Thomas G. Andrews, associate professor of history at the University of Colorado Boulder, is writing a whole book exploring humanity’s relationships with the non-human animal world, but he can sum up his thoughts on the matter in a single word: messy.

Consider, as Andrews does in his essay, “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” how the child slave Charles Ball viewed the horse that bore him away from his mother to the plantation of his new owner: “Charles Ball rode into an uncertain future perched atop a trotting horse in his new master’s clutch,” writes Andrews of a passage in Ball’s famous 1836 slave narrative, The Life and Adventures of Charles Ball.

“The animal was hardly the agent of Ball’s suffering. Yet it populated Ball’s narrative nonetheless. The horse mattered, not just because it was present but also because it lent the Maryland slaveholder the power he needed to rip Charles Ball away from his mother.”

And in his 2008 Bancroft Prize-winning bookKilling for Coal: Energy, Work, and Power in the Colorado Coalfield Wars of 1913-1914, Andrews examines both how mules were used and abused by miners, and how the men kept mice not just as mammalian stand-ins for the proverbial canary, but also pets.

The “messiness” is readily apparent on a glance at social media today, where some users both fawn over images of cute kittens and puppies and celebrate their abiding love of bacon, a product of the confinement and slaughter of animals more intelligent than cats and dogs.

Next year, supported by a $50,400 Public Scholar Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities, he’ll delve even deeper into the “range, complexity and richness of human-animal relationships in the last 600 years of American history.” He’s signed a contract to publish the resulting book with Harvard University Press, which also will publish his latest work, Coyote Valley: Deep History in the High Rockies, in October.

"The root of the word ‘education’ means ‘to lead outward.’ The goal should not simply be to figure out how one can be a cog in this sort of bigger system and punch out a role to provide a livelihood.”

Andrews is a specialist in the social and environmental history of the American West. He first grew interested in the subject of human-animal relationships while researching Killing for Coal. He later created a senior seminar on the topic at California State University, Northridge.

“I think I’m as confused as a lot of people. I wouldn’t say I have a totally clear ethical perspective on human-animal relationships,” he says. “As a historian, I’m interested in complexity, and what I’m really interested in is how messy our relationships with animals really are.”

Such complexity—for example, contrast American Indians’ use of dogs as hunting companions, beasts of burden and a source of food to the view of many Americans that they are members of the family—is ripe for deeper examination.

“The way I’m imagining it, I’ll probably start out by really focusing on pets and livestock to get at that contradiction, that whole set of weirdnesses,” says the Boulder native, whose father is an emeritus faculty member at ����������-Boulder, and whose mother was a long-serving staff member at the university.

Andrews is one of 36 scholars, journalists and writers to receive the first Public Scholar awards, which are part of a new NEH initiative to “bring humanities into the public square” and promote publication of deeply researched nonfiction work that is “accessible to general readers.”

At a time when many politicians, parents and even some educators view higher education as primarily an avenue to getting a high-paying job, the humanities are experiencing a steep decline in the number of students majoring in those fields of studies. Andrews is alarmed at this trend.

“The root of the word ‘education’ means ‘to lead outward.’ The goal should not simply be to figure out how one can be a cog in this sort of bigger system and punch out a role to provide a livelihood,” he says.

“Instrumental education is necessary, but it’s woefully insufficient. … I just haven’t met that many business or thought leaders who earned their undergraduate degrees in business. The real guiding lights in the contemporary world learned to think in ways that extend far beyond the narrow instrumentalist conception of education so ascendant today.”

Clay Evans is a free-lance writer in Boulder.