| Book Review | Environmental History, 13.1

Book Review

The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century. By Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Animals, History, Culture Series. xi +242 pp. Illustrations, notes, tables, index. $50.00.
Few environmental historians can read the term "living machine" attached to horses and not get excited about the evocative possibilities of teaching our students about the animal's critical role in the human past. In The Horse in the City, Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr blaze a fresh path for environmental historians to consider the natural elements of our urban life. This is a story of animal centrality. It should be required reading for anyone interested in the environmental history of urban life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.	1
McShane and Tarr wrap the horse's story in that of urban change. There is neither prehistory of the species' origins nor posthistory of nostalgic activities. As the authors put it, their story is a symbiotic one: the life-cycle of the horse was mirrored in the city. For all the other aspects of the organic city that Tarr and others have explored in other works, The Horse in the City narrows its view of the nineteenth century city as a "climax of human exploitation of horse power" (p. 1). Thanks to this new living and working environment, while human life in North America squeezed out other large grazing mammals, "the European horse survived because it found an ecological niche as a partner for humans. In a sense this was a coevolution, not domination" (p. 1).	2
The horse's life cycle became entirely anthropomorphized during this period, with its meaning defined by humans. McShane and Tarr write: "As one thinks about the horse not as an animal but rather as a living machine in an urbanizing society, its role in the process of commodification becomes clearer. Horses had value assigned to them from their very birth. In the nineteenth century city this value related primarily to their usefulness for work. ... Even their manure was of value as fertilizer, while at death their hides and hair were transformed into useful products" (p. 35).	3
But what kind of life was it for a horse? This is not fodder for The Horse in the City. Instead of a story about ethics and exploitation, McShane and Tarr matter-of-factly provide a history of technology that illuminates the details of life with the living machine. The book is fascinating in its detailed discussion of topics including breeding, genetics, trading and selling; regulation of horse use and management; the horse's role in transport and in leisure; stables and the built environment of the horse age; nutrition and health of the horse; and the transition from horses in the urban environment. McShane and Tarr fulfill their primary goal to introduce the concept of the various implications of a living transportation system without judging a human society that seeks to develop itself on the backs of other species.	4
While each of the chapters/essays contains interesting facts of a bygone era, The Horse in the City lacks a narrative to engage nonspecialist readers. For scholars and students, its use of sources is a primer on how to find information on nineteenth century urban life, including local health reports, state agricultural reports, trade reports, insurance assessments, sales information about horse-related items, trade information for teamster organizations, ASPCA reports on cruel treatment, census results, veterinary publications, and other more traditional sources.	5
As a biography of a limited technology, The Horse in the City also tells the tale of the transition away from the living machine. In a fascinating final chapter and epilogue, the authors explain the influence on urban areas of the decline of the horse (and visa versa). In this rapid but uneven decline in the early 1900s, the authors emphasize that despite "the horse's critical role as a flexible and evolving technology in the nineteenth-century city, it could not accommodate the requirements of the modern city" (p. 179).	6
Brian Black is the author of Petrolia: The Landscape of America's First Oil Boom (Johns Hopkins, 2000) and Contesting Gettysburg: Preserving an American Shrine (forthcoming, Chicago). Currently he is writing about twentieth-century America's culture of petroleum consumption. He teaches history and environmental studies at Penn State Altoona.

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