"In the workroom," photograph shows occupational portrait of taxidermist Martha A. Maxwell with animal specimens, palette, and rifle. Oct. 27, 1876. Source: Library of Congress

Stuffed

Taxidermy in the History of America

12.27.19

The holidays are upon us and we’re more than a little obsessed with stuffing – just not the kind you eat. On this episode of BackStory, Ed, Brian and Nathan find out about the father of American natural history dioramas, talk to a man with a condor in his freezer, discover how a mischievous raven connects Edgar Allan Poe to Charles Dickens and unravel the extraordinary story of the man who proposed stuffing the Founding Fathers.

taxidermy

Open Episode Transcript as PDF

Segments

Stuffing the Founding Fathers

Charles Willson Peale was one of the most famous museum curators of his day, and proudly displayed his collections of stuffed birds and mammals. But in 1792 he came up with a modest proposal. He would stuff the Founding Fathers…. Robert McCracken Peck of Drexel University tells our incredulous hosts more.

Music:

Quirky Motion by Bruce Zimmerman

Charles Willson Peale; anmal entertainment; founders; museums; preservation

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

Speaker 1: Major funding for Back Story is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Speaker 2: From Virginia Humanities, this is Back Story.

Brian: We’re gonna start today with an unjustly forgotten American showman and museum owner. Charles Willson Peale is best remembered today if he’s remembered at all for a single painting called “The Artist in his Museum”.
It’s a self portrait and in it the aged artist gazes intently at us as he pulls back a faded velvet curtain to reveal shelves of stuffed birds. On the top shelf there’s a stuffed American eagle. On the floor, an American turkey awaits the same fate. But it turns out that Charles Wilson Peale’s ambitions went well beyond iconic American birds.

Robert Peck: We know Charles Willson Peale through his famous portraits of George Washington and others involved with the American Revolution. But actually in his day was known almost as much as a proprietor of a major museum in Philadelphia.
It was housed in what is now known as Independence Hall which was no longer being used for government purposes. And it contained thousands, literally hundreds of thousands of natural history specimens that he had collected and with the help of others collected from all over the world.

Brian: That’s Robert McCracken Peck. Curator of art and artifacts at the Academy of Natural Sciences at Drexel University.

Robert Peck: The natural history specimens were arranged in a kind of order of importance from the smallest things in sex and so on, up through birds and mammals and ended at the top of his gallery with portraits of the people he considered to be the most important affecting the United States and the rest of the world.
Great men and women were all preserved in his portraits, and I suppose it was not a far step for him to take since he was already preserving mammals as taxidermy specimens to think that maybe if he could preserve them in oil on canvas, it would be even better to preserve them in reality.

Nathan: Preserve them in reality, hold on a second. Is he saying?

Brian: I’m afraid so Nathan. Charles Willson Peale proposed stuffing the founding fathers.

Ed: I don’t think it’s so bad, it’s our Thanksgiving show.

Brian: And to kick it off he decided he would stuff Ben Franklin’s cat and a couple of golden pheasants that had belonged to George Washington.

Robert Peck: He made his money by selling portraits, but also through the admission of people at the gate, at the museum. And what better way to attract people in than to have a pheasant from George Washington or an angora cat from Benjamin Franklin. And so like P.T. Barnum who interestingly became the ultimate owner of Peale’s museum, Peale used the name of celebrities to help increase his attendance.

Brian: Well, in 1792 Peale wrote to a group of civic leaders that he invited to serve as a committee of visitors and directors for his museum. Now as boards go, it was pretty impressive. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton were there. But as many challenges as these men have faced, I bet the founding fathers had never seen a proposal like this one.

Robert Peck: There are other means than painting to preserve and hand down to succeeding generations, the relics of such great men who’s labors have been crowned with success in the most distinguished benefits to mankind. The mode I mean is the preserving their bodies from corruption and being the food of the worms. This is by the use of powerful antiseptics. Although perhaps it is not in the power of art to preserve these bodies in that high perfection of from, which the well executed painting in portrait and sculpture can produce.

Peale: “Yet the actual remains of such men, as I have just described must be highly regarded by those who reverence the memory of such luminaries. Sorry I am, that I did not propose the means of such preservation to that distinguished patriot, and worthy philosopher Doctor Benjamin Franklin. He could have been prevailed on to suffer the remains of his body to be now in our view.”

Robert Peck: I think he was serious, Peale was interested in preserving just about everything he could of the natural world. And he thought that by doing so he could not only help people better understand the world around them. But also could leave a lasting legacy going forward.
His portraits were all about recording American history, and so having human specimens preserved in the same way was probably just an extension of that same philosophy. I don’t think he was willing to pursue it to the very end, but he threw out the idea just hoping that somebody might accept. Now by the time he asked for Franklin’s body, Franklin had already been buried, it was too late. But he still had a number of important patriots and early signers of the declaration of independence among his advisory group.
He thought that if he bandied about the idea, perhaps one of them would step forward and say okay. You can have me.

Nathan: So do we know how they reacted to this proposal?

Brian: Good question Nathan, but the answer is probably not. Unfortunately there’s no written record of their reaction. We have to think there were a few raised eyebrows and maybe a few rolled eyes. I’d love to have been a fly on the wall for those conversations.

Ed: But you know Nathan and Brian? I think we might get this idea a little bit of serious consideration.

Brian: I’m, looking forward to this Ed.

Ed: Because lest we think this is completely outrageous. We don’t have to look so far to see political leaders embalmed and put on display. Think about the Tomb of Lenin? Where crowds queue up to view the preserved body of the Soviet leader. Or think about the preserved body of Ho Chi Minh or [inaudible 00:06:19].
But the real figure we should look to is a philosopher, Jeremy Bentham; the English utilitarian philosopher who had his own body preserved. Now he still gets wheeled out for committee meetings at University College London. And as a former university president who has sat on lots of committee meetings, let me tell you he is a sucker for posthumous punishment.

Brian: So Jeremy Bentham actually went so far as to have himself preserved. I think he was bidding for a certain amount of immortality, and succeeded in getting such. He had his body wrapped in clothing of his own choice, and his body is still wheeled out periodically for meetings and so on at the University where he resides in London.

Ed: All this raises a really interesting question in my mind I got to admit. Now I think we all instinctively feel that there’s something a little bit wrong with stuffing people. But is there really an ethical difference between stuffing a founding father and stuffing a silver back gorilla.

Brian: Technically it’s quite the same, the only difference is that with these figures as Peale had hoped, that they would give their own permission to have it happen. With a silver back gorilla, they really don’t have much choice, they’ve been killed for the purpose. Sad as that may be, they do serve some educational purpose I suppose in the long run.
Robert McCracken Peck, and for the record we ask him if he would like to be stuffed after his death, and he said no.

Taxidermy Today

Taxidermist and artist Paul Rhymer has a condor in his freezer. He gives us a tour of his studio and tells us what taxidermy means to him today and how it allows him to straddle the disparate worlds of hunting, preservation and the arts.

Music:

Park Bench by Podington Bear

art; hunting; preservation

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

Speaker 8: So today on Back Story, in honor of Thanksgiving. We’re looking at the strange history of stuffing things.

Brian: I’ll be finding out about the confederate horse that still looks as if he’s ready to go into battle a century and a half after his death.

Nathan: We’ll be taking a close look at the Raven, which inspired Charles Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe.

Ed: And discovering how Carl Akeley’s dioramas captured some of the mightiest animals in the world and froze them for posterity.

Paul Rhymer: So this is death mask of a [inaudible 00:09:30] zebra. And I made that mold for zebras that were down at the mammal hall at the Natural History Museum. So I got the; had the head and then I just made a mold. Did a [inaudible 00:09:44] then cast it and bought a body filler.

Brian: Meet Paul Rhymer. He served as a Smithsonian taxidermist for 25 years. And helped lead the renovation of their mammal hall in the early 2000s. We visited Rhymer to discuss the state of taxidermy today and got a tour of his studio to see how he works.

Paul Rhymer: So yes, that was an actual; an un skinned head of a zebra. And so I made the mold, just so when I was mounting it, I could get like that sort of shape and just sort of like some certain kinds of measurements. It was a little distorted cause all this is really soft tissue. But this mold gives me a ton of information.
Some really important measurements are you know like where the measurement of the nostril in relation to the mouth. How far back does the corner of the mouth, what is the corner of the eye to the nose measurements. And then you start figuring out like this is the zygomatic arch which is that bone that comes around like that on a skull, you’ve seen that. Like where is that shape?
You know where is the shape of the jaw, you know where the jaw comes down in that muscle and you can see the tendons that come through here. And you have the scope all that stuff into the form so that when you put the skin over it, it looks like a zebra.

Brian: We met Paul after he got back from his morning duck hunt. He explains that for him, hunting is more about the pursuit than the kill. And taxidermy is more about the memory than the trophy.

Paul Rhymer: You know like this, my friend who is a taxidermist right up the road here. Like five miles. He sent me a text of this deer that he’s been trying to get for three and a half years. And you know, he’s, “I missed it two years ago.” And he showed me all these photographs of like … as he’s been … cause they’ve got like trail cameras and stuff and you can see it every year getting bigger and bigger. And he got it yesterday with a bow, which is badass. And it’s a huge deer.
So for him, that’s what that’s gonna mean. He’s really happy that it’s big, and that’s you know first thing that he’s gonna say. Look how big it is. But back in his mind, he’s also realizing that took him three and a half years to get that deer. That’s a journey, and that’s what life is all about for me. You know it’s like, I love to get to the place. But the journey is the part that you remember.

Brian: Paul wears many hats in the taxidermy world. From working at the Smithsonian, to going out on a hunt. To meeting rogue artist taxidermist. Taxidermy allows him to straddle different worlds that are now starting to overlap and come together.

Paul Rhymer: A lot of my friends are traditional taxidermist that mount stuff for sportsmen, deer heads and stuff that people go and hunt. But then I also have this profession as a museum taxidermist where you know like I did stuff that none of those guys … I’ve mounted more than one gorilla. Most guys don’t [inaudible 00:12:30] well you can’t say that. So I mean it’s just … like that’s not something that comes into a taxidermy shop because no one goes to Africa to shoot a gorilla and have it brought for their trophy room.
But I’ve done these weird things as a museum taxidermist. So that’s another kind of foot in the world and then as an artist, seeing people who are using taxidermy in a completely different way. So taxidermist, like the good old boys that I know and love they do taxidermy and want it to be art. And then there are artists that are using taxidermy as part of their art.
And for a long time, those communities didn’t really meet. But they really are meeting now. If I put on my “good ol’ boy” hat I would say that the real taxidermists don’t really have the really refined skills. They don’t really pay attention to anatomy. Their not technically good taxidermists, so things look really rough. But they don’t really care because they’re trying to create this idea and using you know a stuffed squirrel is a metaphor for something else you know. And so a lot of traditional taxidermists kind of look down on that because they didn’t really know the trade.
Then the other artists are well you know, you care more about a nictitating membrane than an eye than you do about the life, or the idea, or the artistic idea of the piece. So now people, they’re starting to have more understanding and learning from each other, it’s really cool. Which means now there’s like women in taxidermy. And so you know it’s neat because some of them come in through the rogue community. Some of them doing it are just straight up really fine competition quality taxidermy. It’s neat.
It’s nice because it’s you know the world has got a lot of diversity in it. It’s nice to see the taxidermy community grow. Cause we can all learn from each other, it’s great.

Brian: Paul Rhymer has been an artist and a taxidermist since he was a kid. In fact, he learned the fact of taxidermy from his father.

Paul Rhymer: I remember the first duck that I got when I was eight and my dad mounted it, and I still have it up at the house. So that piece stands out for me, because I still have like two of the first pieces he ever did for me. But that duck especially. And then the first things that I did in the shop was and I don’t know if you’ve seen these in antique shops.
But back in the day, people would have like gun racks and they would be made out of deer feet or deer lamps? And they would be making that deer feet and so like I did that. I was doing that like when I was nine years old. And you never see that stuff around anymore, but you know it was like a thing you know? Like Rednecks had like deer foot gun racks.

Brian: Growing up Rhymer was most passionate about drawing and painting. He pursued a studio art degree in college. But when it came time to find a job, the Smithsonian was looking to hire a taxidermist. So he dusted off the skills he learned from his father, applied, got the gig and stayed there for the next 25 years.
At the Smithsonian, Rhymer found himself advocated for taxidermy’s utility and it’s relevance.

Paul Rhymer: But a lot of times I would be talking to a designer and they would say, “We’re gonna do a model of a seal and we’re gonna do this … ” well, why are you doing model? Let’s do taxidermy. “Well can we get a seal?” I’m like, pretty sure we can find a seal. You know they wash up dead all the time you know? Let’s talk to the guy over in the marine mammal section you know? And we can find one of those for you. It’s like, “Oh, so we can do taxidermy?”
Yeah, don’t you think that’ll look more real than like a plastic one that we would sculpt and cast in fiber glass? “Oh, yeah.” And so you had to educate designers and project managers you know? And writers that this was an actual option.

Brian: Paul Rhymer helped oversee the renovation of the mammal hall in early 2000s. It was a project he says that worried some museum publicists initially. But received only rave reviews in the end. He thinks that’s partly because museum dioramas are a singular experience.

Paul Rhymer: It’s a real thing, it’s the real thing. You can see; I mean you’re right with the internet you can see the most amazing footage of animals. I mean every day I see something that just blows my mind. But it’s something that’s on a screen you know? And there’s something that still; still something that’s really attractive to the physical, tactile, real thing in front of you.
And I think that’s something that taxidermy can offer whatever the scenario is in a museum context; that’s what that offers. That a graphic can’t offer, that a video can’t offer, it’s the thing. And people dig that.

Brian: Paul opens up his large chest freezer, rummages past other animals, shows us an owl head that he was working on until he finds a subject of his next taxidermy piece. A rare condor vulture.

Paul Rhymer: This will stink, even though it’s frozen. This bird has I think the longest wingspan of any bird in North America. Like a 10 foot wingspan. Once again, this bird’s been necropsied. So after the bird died, they cut it from all the way down and they took out all the; they took most of the internal organs out.
So what I’ll do is, I’ll make molds of these feet so that I can do casts, and so then that material can go into the museum research collection. Same thing with the head.

Brian: As Rhymer tells us more about his next taxidermy project, he explains that he’s taking extra steps to make sure the bird’s skeleton can benefit science.

Paul Rhymer: I mean, when I was a kid there were like 50 left in the world. So I remember when that thing was almost extinct and they’ve done this breeding program, they’ve really come back. They’re doing really well, but they’re still highly endangered. So this one is a known animal that had been raised in captivity and released into the wild. So they know this animal really well, I mean it’s really old. And it died probably of old age, and so I’m gonna mount it.
So I said to him, to the guy at Fish and Wildlife. I said, what are you doing with the rest of the material that we don’t use? Like all the skeletal material? He goes, “Well, we’re not gonna use it.” Then I said, do you mind? Can we give it to the Smithsonian because I can use really very few bones. We can give that skeletal material, I can cast the feet, I can cast the head and then all that stuff can go into the research collection. He’s like, why would you throw that material away? And so they’re gonna have it. So like that’s really hard material to come by and it doesn’t benefit me, it’s actually a hassle because I gotta kind of do some extra stuff. But why would you do that?

Brian: He’s not totally surprised that people are skeptical of his conservationist impulse, but he insists that it is a core value of his.

Paul Rhymer: Well I mean hunters like to talk about how you know the first conservationists were hunters. And you know some people buy that argument, and some people don’t. I do obviously. And so sometimes it’s hard for people to understand that you could actually go out an shoot and kill and animal and still love and revere it.
And that is a paradox for sure. But for me and my buddies, that is not a paradox. That is how we are, you know like we respect the animal; even though we hunt that animal. And so to me, you know being able to use that resource in as big a way as you can it just seems natural to me.

Brian: Taxidermy’s full of contradictions, and Paul Rhymer; the artist, hunter and taxidermist knows it all too well.

Mane Attraction

Behind a glass panel at the VMI Museum in Lexington, VA is a mounted hide of Little Sorrel- the famed war horse of Confederate General Stonewall Jackson. Col. Keith Gibson, executive director of the VMI Museum, says Little Sorrel serves as a window into history and bolsters visitors’ ability to imagine the Civil War. But scholar Nicole Maurantonio argues the presence and preservation of Little Sorrel is problematic because of the horse’s connection to the Confederacy and Gen. Jackson.

Music:

Isn’t Another Post War Movie by Jahzzar

Civil War; Confederate States of America (confederacy); Stonewall Jackson; museums

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

Ed: Today there’s lots of debates about the presence of Confederate statues, but these granite monuments aren’t the only artifacts who ties the confederacy. If you go to the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia you’ll find one of the most unusual examples.

Keith Gibson: Frequently our visitors come and ask us is this the place with the stuffed horse?

Ed: That’s Colonel Keith Gibson. He’s executive director of the VMI museum. The facility is home to Little Sorrel, the famed war horse of Confederate General Stonewall Jackson.

Brian: The museum has a stuffed horse? There must be a lot of padding inside that steed.

Ed: Well Brian, he’s not actually stuffed.

Keith Gibson: We do indeed have stuffed horses available for sale in the museum store. But when it comes to Little Sorrel, he’s not stuffed at all. It’s just sort of a way that we tend to think of that from our childhood. But he’s quite hollow.

Ed: After Little Sorrel died in 1886, a noted taxidermist named Frederick Webster mounted to hide of Little Sorrel across a plaster mold of the horse’s body.

Keith Gibson: In fact, in Little Sorrel’s instance, Frederick Webster was given the skeleton of Little Sorrel as partial payment. Today, Little Sorrel’s skeleton is actually buried on the VMI parade route.

Nathan: Hold on, okay. Why did they mount Little Sorrel’s hide in the first place Ed?

Ed: That’s a good question Nathan. I think we might wanna remember that this was Stonewall Jackson’s horse. In fact, it was the horse he was riding the day he fatally shot on the battlefield at Chancellorsville. So Little Sorrel was very well known, and his popularity only grew after the Civil War.

Keith Gibson: He enjoyed his notoriety and celebrity status. He took notably a southern tour all the way to New Orleans. Was presented at fairs around through the south. Folks would pay an admission fee to see Little Sorrel. Now it took it’s toll on him, souvenir seekers pretty much devoid the horse of his tail and his mane as they would pluck a hair to keep as a souvenir. And in addition to the mounted hide of the horse we have something of a collection of pieces of tail and mane that have been returned to us from maybe conscientious families over the years when they discovered that great grandmother had visited Little Sorrel and took away a souvenir from his mane.
And they now felt obligated to return that to the museum.

Brian: So good ol’ Sorrel must have been pretty popular with southerners right?

Ed: Yeah that’s right Brian. After the war Little Sorrel lived part of his life at the old soldier’s home in Richmond where Confederate veterans tend to him. His mounted hide was first put on display there until it came to VMI in the late 1940s. Colonel Gibson says he’s been a main attraction ever since.

Keith Gibson: Today, he’s safely behind glass and is inaccessible physically to the public. But once upon a time in the museum, he was in a very much an open setting diorama. Very close to the public, and there was more than one occasion where a visitor intending no harm but wanting that ultimate vacation photograph would set their child on the back of Little Sorrel and take a picture.
And we didn’t necessarily encourage that relationship with the horse fearing that he or the child might be damaged, might be harmed in the process.

Charlie: His stance is striking to me, when I think of horses that are mounted, I think of more of a; where it’s in an upright position.

Ed: That’s one of our producers, Charlie Shelton Ormond. He went to the VMI museum to talk with Colonel Gibson and see Little Sorrel.

Charlie: It’s not really a stance I would envision for a reputable war horse.

Keith Gibson: It was pointed out at the time that he would be mounted in a moment of something, some unknown movement or sound capturing his attention. So his head is up high, his ears are pointed forward, directed to that thing that his captured his attention.
Unlike statues, equestrian statues where you expect the horse to be in motion with a hoof perhaps raised, or maybe even two as in the celebrated statue of Andrew Jackson out in front of the White House. Or you think of celebrated cowboy star Roy Rogers, his horse Trigger rearing back on his hind legs.
Little Sorrel here is as if he has just been startled and disturbed from grazing in a pasture.

Charlie: Little Sorrel’s been here at VMI for a long time. And has also been in this form for a long time, so there has to have been some preservation along the way.

Keith Gibson: About 12 years ago, we went to the Smithsonian to have their staff come down, and in this instance Little Sorrel received a bath for the very first time in about 150 years. Which terrified me when I read in the proposed treatment plan that that was going to be a part of the process because I could see all of Little Sorrel’s hairs just floating off down the river and we’d have a bald horse at the exhibit.
But I was assured that no, that wouldn’t be the case. That that’s standard procedure these days. So he endured his bath very well and various other repairs were made to the hide at that point.

Charlie: It seems like he’s something of a main attraction here at the museum. Do most people come here to see Little Sorrel, and if they do; do you hear anything from them about why they come to see him?

Keith Gibson: You know for folks interested in the American Civil War there are only two mounted horse hides that one can visit today and have the experience of the reality of this animal being a participant, a witness of those events. Little Sorrel representing one might say the Confederacy with his ownership from Stonewall Jackson and the other representing the Union; a big black horse named Winchester who was Phil Sheridan’s horse.
However as real a connection that these mounts tend to make for us today for some folks, their mixed emotions when they come around the corner of the museum and see a horse standing there. For our younger visitors they do not necessarily realize immediately that the horse is not alive and parents will explain that. But even parents have mixed emotions about it. Some of them are just amazed that they can look into the eyes of this 160 year old animal and wonder about the experiences that the horse endured.

Stacy Palmer: I always thought that Little Sorrel was on display in an atrium?

Ed: This is Stacy Palmer, she’s from Alexandria, Virginia and decided to see Little Sorrel when she passed through VMI.

Stacy Palmer: So when I turned the corner and saw him I actually turned back around to the gentlemen working at the desk. I’m like is that really the Little Sorrel? He’s like, yup.
I think animals is something that crosses gender, race. It’s something that everyone can just relate to. So I think when you can teach history through an animal, I think you can reach more people. I’m a history teacher as well. And perspective is really important to me. I also think animals bring human qualities to generals. You know someone that you think is very rigid and firm and law abiding.
But then you hear you know their love for the animals. And it is like you can look into his eyes and just you know. It melts you.

Nathan: So Ed, you’ve done a lot of work in contextualizing Confederate statues. We’ve talked a lot about it on the show. How might Little Sorrel compare to Confederate monuments in general?

Ed: Well I talked with scholar Nicole Maurantonio about the mounted hide relationship to monuments, and she’s researched how artifacts like Little Sorrel have shaped the way we remember the Confederacy.

Nicole: In preserving Little Sorrel, what we have is a lasting artifact that preserves memory of the Confederacy connecting contemporary visitors to a past; that certainly while defunct, certainly has not disappeared.

Ed: Right.

Nicole: And looking at the contemporary landscape conversations debate surrounding Confederate monuments, Confederate memory today; we can see certainly the resonances of this history and Little Sorrel really stands as one object, artifact that crystallizes the ways in which that history is often neglected and forgotten.

Ed: And the Stonewall Jackson statue in Richmond is actually based on Little Sorrel right? The horse that he’s on is Little Sorrel and it’s based on this taxidermied model?

Nicole: Yes.

Ed: Yeah.

Nicole: The stance that Little Sorrel occupies in Richmond, standing at the corner of the Boulevard and Monument Avenue is modeled directly on the taxidermied Little Sorrel.

Ed: But it seems in some ways the taxidermied Little Sorrel is more powerful than the granite one that’s there right? There’s a human personal connection that seems to take some of the edge off what the Confederacy was fighting for?

Nicole: Because Little Sorrel was alive, and that’s one of the largest; the biggest difference between the monuments that stand on Monument Avenue and throughout the country and Little Sorrel himself is that the horse that stands at VMI was in fact at one point alive. And does stand there to engage as a lasting testament to what was.

Ed: Do you think Little Sorrel is a more powerful connection to the past than say Jackson’s uniform or something that was actually of human scale?

Nicole: I do, and in that the horse is significance isn’t only in that the horse lived when Jackson fell but that in fact he enables the possibility to imagine what could have been in terms of the Confederacy. Rather than when Jackson left, Little Sorrel lived on. So the horse becomes intimately connected with Jackson and then ultimately becomes really an extension of Jackson and Jackson’s life.

Ed: So yeah, Little Sorrel’s at the battlefield; that seems to be a pretty direct connection to history. That’s all Stonewall Jackson you know? We study him for as general. So doesn’t this actually reflect the history that the horse is most relevant to?

Nicole: To an extent what we see is Little Sorrel connecting to battles. But we don’t get a sense of the larger context or what the causes of what the American Civil War were or what the cause on behalf of which the horse and the Confederacy was fighting. So we don’t hear about the context of slavery and certainly what we don’t get when we see Little Sorrel is a greater sense of the world that Jackson was living in.
And certainly while we do see Little Sorrel on display, what is largely neglected are the stories of the enslaved people with whom Jackson interacted, like Jim Lewis.

Ed: Tell us about Jim Lewis, I mean I read something back in the day; older writings saying that Lewis was the perfect counterpart of Little Sorrel. Maybe tell us how people would think about that and then tell us what you think about that.

Nicole: The connection between Little Sorrel and Jim Lewis is one that’s often referenced when we think about the significance of Little Sorrel. Little Sorrel being connected to Lewis who had been Jackson’s body servant. Lewis was enslaved and Jackson, ultimately his master; but the connection between Little Sorrel and Jim Lewis is in one way I think really encapsulates the paternalism of the lost cause narratives.

Ed: So why did people think that Jim Lewis was such an important accompaniment to Little Sorrel?

Nicole: The language that was used to describe Jim Lewis in many ways mirrored the language that was used to describe Little Sorrel. Language of submissiveness, of faithfulness, or dedication, and loyalty to ones master. And that language that really paralleled one another really exemplified the paternalism of certainly lost cause narratives. But certainly the beliefs that Jackson held.

Botler: “For they were equally obedient, patient, easy going and reliable. Not given to devious courses nor designing tricks. More serviceable than showy, and all together as sober sided a pair of subordinates as any Presbyterian elder with plain tastes and a practical turn need desire to have about him. Both man and horse seem to understand their master thoroughly and rarely fail to come up fully to all his requirements.” Alexander Botler, 1881.

Ed: So what happened to Lewis after Jackson’s death?

Nicole: It’s really unclear in many ways. Little is known really about Lewis himself. And certainly while there’s a sense that Lewis had been buried in Lexington at what had been Evergreen cemetery the precise location of his burial ground isn’t really known today.

Ed: So Lewis really mattered to people as long as Little Sorrel was around for him to take care of.

Nicole: Certainly.

Ed: Yeah.

Nicole: And while there is such little known about Lewis, there is in sharp contrast much known about Little Sorrel. If we were to take a look at say the horse’s obituary, it occupies two columns itself in the Richmond dispatch for instance in 1886 after the horse died.

Ed: Old Sorrel, Stonewall Jackson’s war horse died at the Confederate Soldier’s Home near the city at 6:00 yesterday morning. He was Jackson’s favorite steed and often had he carried his master on forced marches. Often had he born him to battle. Often had he been in the midst of whizzing bullets. Often heard the crash of cannon and the roar of musketry. Often he had felt his main stroked by the great chieftain.

Nicole: And I think that’s a significant point of contrast. Is how much documentation there exists surrounding Little Sorrel’s not only life and how little exists surrounding Jim Lewis.

Ed: What should somebody keep in mind if they go to VMI today to see Little Sorrel as many people do.

Nicole: To be critical of this particular artifact and it’s place within this museum. On the one hand walking through the VMI museum, one can leave and actually purchase commemorative objects that remember Little Sorrel like stuffed animals, and other objects that are intended I think in some ways to do that distancing work.
And as visitors, as tourists to historical sites; we need to be more critical of not only the stories that are told within the museum but the ways in which we choose to commemorate those experiences.

Brian: So to what extent does the museum see Little Sorrel as a really important symbol for the confederacy?

Ed: Well Colonel Gibson says that Little Sorrel simply did the job that was expected of a war horse and he shouldn’t be regarded as taking a side.

Keith Gibson: It may be too much to think that Little Sorrel had some nefarious preconceived intentions that led him to become a quote, unquote Confederate horse. We easily understand that this animal lived. So that in a very real way, Little Sorrel stands today as a participant of those times, silent but in his presence is bringing something alive as it were in an ironical sort of way in a moment of irony this dead horse helps us bring that period of time alive.

Ed: Colonel Keith Gibson is the executive director of the Virginia Military Institute Museum. We also heard from Nicole Mauroantonio she’s associate professor of Rhetoric and Communication studies, and American studies at the University of Richmond.
We’re gonna come back to his topic in a discussion later in the show.

The Harmony of Nature

Natural history dioramas were pioneered by American conservationist, Carl Akeley, in the late 19th century – and they quickly became a museum staple. Scholar Bryan Rasmussen sits down with Brian to discuss what these dioramas tell us about our idealized conceptions of nature.

Music:

Transparent by Ketsa

conservationism; museums; natural history; nature

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

Brian: Now, I want us to think back to our childhoods, we’re in elementary school and the homeroom teacher assigns a project that requires you to craft a diorama. So using nothing but an old shoebox, a stick of glue and a handful of foliage you set off to assemble something that looks like a window into the natural environment.
For many of us the shoebox diorama was our first exposure to the wilderness. The diorama was invented in 1822 by a Frenchman named Louis Daguerre. Later known as the creator of the Daguerrotype. These early dioramas were typically large scale, housed in darkened theaters. They were three dimensional exhibits comprised of a landscape painting in the background and plants and rocks in the foreground.
A precursor to the cinema, this immersive experience was intended to give the illusion that the viewer had been transported to some far off natural scene. And by the late 19th century, American conservationist Carl Akeley borrowed from this technology of illusion and incorporated his expertise in taxidermy to pioneer a new diorama called the natural history diorama. Turning a popular form of entertainment into an awareness tool for the conservation movement.

Brian R: So imagine walking into a darkened theater-

Brian: That’s scholar Brian Rasmussen.

Brian R: And at the far end of this theater is an illuminated landscape. A landscape that looks like it’s illuminated from within. And what you’ve got is a mountain scene in the far distance enshrouded in clouds, a large panorama. And this is huge, so imagine 30 or 40 or even 50 feet long, and maybe 20 or 30 feet high.
In the background you’ve got these volcanic mountains shrouded in clouds and snow. Imagine in the foreground you’ve got a jungle scene for example. And framing the jungle scene, we have vines and trees and in the very foreground you have gorillas. So what I’m describing is one of the exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History. The silver back gorilla exhibit which is the exhibit is Carl Akeley is best known for.

Brian: What are we supposed to understand about nature and the relationship between man and nature from what you just described?

Brian R: Very often, these dioramas weren’t accompanied by lots of didactic text for example.

Brian: That’s what I gather, right. As your supposed to experience it but somehow come away with something.

Brian R: Right you were supposed to experience on an emotional and psychological level the harmony of nature. That was the explicit-

Brian: I see, [uh-huh 00:41:09].

Brian R: Design of a diorama. And so this is why sometimes scientists felt like dioramas were sort of devoid of intellectual content. But there was a kind of let’s call it natural pleasure in the design of a diorama. The idea being that you were led to some kind of higher understanding of your place in nature through this emotive experience in this darkened chamber. Which was kind of a temple of nature I mean right?
There was a sort of transcendental philosophy behind the whole idea of the diorama. That nature supplied trues that once supplied by religion, that this was a distinctively American religion because of America’s distinctive geography and fauna and flora. That there was something special about that, and so dioramas were designed not necessarily to instruct so much as sort of show you your place in an American landscape.

Brian: I understand that the American mister diorama was a guy named Carl Akeley. Can you tell me something about him?

Brian R: Carl Akeley was born in Upstate New York in 1864 and he eventually came to work for the American Museum of Natural History. Who regarded him as the biographer of the American wilderness. He was what we could call a certain type in the late 19th century, early 20th century. The hunter naturalist type, I think the most famous example of this hunter naturalist type is probably Teddy Roosevelt in that he was an ardent admirer of Roosevelt and they went on expeditions together into Africa.
And he was I guess, he pioneered a lot of the techniques that we now to come to understand as sort of synonymous with the natural history diorama. But he was also a sculpturer. He was one of the first, he wasn’t the first but he was one of the first to kind of marry sculptural aesthetics to taxidermy. So in the middle of the 19th century and taxidermy was mostly a decorative art? It’s commitment to a naturalist, what we might call a naturalist aesthetics was not evident until guys like Akeley came along and sort of raised the bar in terms of thinking about like what you needed to produce an animal that looked real?
So guys like Akeley were interested in going out into the field and doing field observations on animals so that they would produce taxidermied animals that actually looked like real animals as oppose to most taxidermy in the 19th century was done by people who had no field knowledge. So Akeley was at the forefront of that hunter naturalist tradition of naturalists going into the field, collecting specimens, making observation sketches with photographs of whatever. Coming back and trying to produce very naturalist, very realistic animals.

Brian: I wanna stop you right here, and have you drill down into a term that you used, hunter naturalist. Or we’re also talking about conservation at the same time, we’re talking about Teddy Roosevelt shooting animals. What’s the deal here? I mean how can conservation be about killing animals, stuffing them and putting them in museums?

Brian R: So museums didn’t see this as a contradiction in the 19th century. They didn’t see it as a contradiction because they thought that collecting animals was a form of conservation. Many of them were driven by the fear that the landscapes of North America were disappearing.
Around the middle of the 19th century we get a lot of documentation on people registering their dismay and their concern that North American landscapes were disappearing. And the railroad industry cities, the collecting en masse of birds and other animals by commercial enterprises for like the hat trade for example, which reduced the population of all kinds of birds. Maybe even led to the extinction of some.
So there’s this real cognizance in the 19th century, late 19th century that we’re losing these landscapes. That these animals are disappearing to extinction. And so museums saw their mandate as conserving, preserving these landscapes in permanent form in museums. And then to bring those disappearing landscapes to people.

Brian: I wanna ask you about naturalism and nature. You’ve talked about people like Akeley was much better at presenting for instance stuffed animals as natural. But when I think back to the dioramas that I’ve been to, it’s almost too perfect. I think of you know the tigers look like perfect tigers, and they you know … the birds look like … you know they don’t … I live out in the country now. Like animals don’t actually look like that really.

Brian R: Right, what you’re referring to is the idealization of diorama wilderness scenes.

Brian: Yes. Perfect, that’s just the word. They must’ve been idealized.

Brian R: Right, so this is where dioramas were the naturalistic slash scientific slash zoological impulse behind diorama creation runs up against the other big impulse that fed dioramas in the 19th century which is sort of the aristocratic trophy hunting tradition.
So without hunter naturalists like Teddy Roosevelt who belonged to kind of an aristocratic masculine tradition of hunting. Who were hunting game in large numbers, without those guys; who also happened to be the donors and benefactors of these major museums. Who wanted in some sense a place to put their trophies. So we can think of diorama halls at the American Museum of Natural History and elsewhere as essentially extensions of the hunting lodges of these hunter naturalists who were wilderness enthusiasts. And who were going out on expeditions and they needed a way to turn those expeditions into something socially useful and so they saw an opportunity in museums to give their collecting a kind of scientific and educational backing or justification.

Brian: And was there an ideological bend there as well? Was there any sense of hierarchy in these displays?

Brian R: There’s definitely hierarchies evident in these displays. The most evident I think is the order of charismatic nature right? So most of the animals that we see represented in dioramas are large mammals, large mega fauna for example. Birds. There’s this definite sort of preference for a certain kind of nature. It’s a very selective attention to nature evident.

Brian: I have never seen a mosquito in a diorama.

Brian R: Right. Exactly. So by any stretch of the imagination, these are not actual nature. These are idealized depictions of landscapes. And their idealized on a number of levels. They’re idealized because the animals that were collected are the best specimens for example. Hunters want the best specimens. They want the largest specimens. They want the ones with the most beautiful plumage or the richest, fullest coats. So in that regard, they’re picking and choosing the animals that they do include.
They’re idealized also to reinforce the notion of pristine, untouched landscapes. That’s the landscapes sensibility inherent in a natural history diorama, that they’re un peopled landscapes.

Brian: I’m just gonna blurt it out, I mean isn’t this about demonstrated man’s control of nature?

Brian R: Yes, it’s man’s control of nature. Well, this is interesting because man’s control of nature, the consciousness of man’s control of nature in the 19th century is what drove people like Akeley to wanna collect because they understood that once upon a time, the wilderness was a terrifying prospect. The wilderness was you know, it was Jews in the wilderness. It was exile, it was darkness, it was dangerous animals.

Brian: It’s where the term, “howling wilderness” comes from.

Brian R: Exactly. Exactly. And in the 19th century wilderness stops being a howling wilderness starts being something that we understand, we are directly causing the disappearance of.

Brian: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Brian R: So conservation emerges out of this consciousness. This consciousness that we are, that our domination of nature is directly resulting in the eradication of nature. So we’re not really interested in conserving nature until we see it slipping away.

Brian: And where is the place of the diorama today in an age of film and video, 3D photography, not to mention the whole digital world. Has it gone the way of let’s say silent films? Is it a oddity?

Brian R: In terms of their continued place, we talked a little bit about. They are bound up in all kinds of interesting political issues. Environmental historians will say that this is actually one of the problems of the wilderness myth is that we tend to selectively preserve and attend to nature. We don’t necessarily think about ourselves in nature for example. We tend to think about nature in these pristine, beautiful places. And that’s really great, and a national park is in some ways like a giant diorama.
Right? It’s this attempt to preserve for all time against change a landscape. And that is a way of preserving landscapes and it was instrumental in the creation of national parks, this same idea for example. That went into the national parks, went into the creation of these dioramas. But what happens outside of those places? What happens outside of the preserve landscapes? Do we express the same kind of ethical care to our local, I live in Los Angeles for example. We don’t exert the same kind of care along for example the LA river where I live as we do to say Yosemite or something like that. And so it shows.
So that kind of uneven distribution of our care, may be a legacy of this old wilderness idea.

Brian: Brian Rasmussen is associate professor of English and department chair at California Lutheran University. He’s the author of technologies of nature, the natural history diorama and the preserve of nature.

Twin Beaks

Robert McCracken Peck, curator of art and artifacts and senior fellow of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, tells us how he helped preserve Charles Dickens’ pet raven Grip for the Free Library of Philadelphia. And Matthew Redmond, English doctoral student at Stanford University, discusses how Edgar Allan Poe sought to preserve a raven that was never really his in the first place.

Music:

Dread by Podington Bear

Edgar Allen Poe; literature; museums; writing

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

Nathan: You may remember the image of Edgar Allan Poe’s raven. Haunting the poem’s narrator, refusing to leave him in peace. Well it turns out that raven might still be with us.

Brian: Nathan if you’re trying to scare us, I’ll remind you that we’ve already done our Halloween show.

Nathan: No Brian, you could actually go see The Raven today in Philadelphia. And I promise it’s as real as a cheese steak or the Liberty Bell. As real, but maybe a bit creepier.

Brian: And that’s why I will go see this raven nevermore. Well, let me take a wild guess, I’m guessing that it’s a taxidermied raven Nathan?

Nathan: It absolutely is.

Brian: What makes it Poe’s Raven? There are a lot of Raven’s out there. If it’s just some dead bird replica, I’m gonna lose interest pretty quickly.

Nathan: That’s a fair question. And being from Baltimore, I have to be sensitive to it as well. But I can assure you, that this is not just some dead bird. Before inspiring Poe, it was actually another celebrated author’s pet.

Robert Peck: Dickens was quite interested in ravens. And actually during his lifetime he had at least three live ravens. Grip was the first one, and Grip served as a character in his mystery novel, Barnaby Rudge.

Nathan: That’s Robert McCracken Peck from the Academy of Natural Sciences at Drexel University joining us again. And he helped bring Grip back to life.

Robert Peck: In 1991, the bird had some signs of domes ted beetle damage. This is a very insect pest that will get into a mounted specimen and eat away at the base of a feather for example in a bird. Fortunately the people who have mounted Grip originally, the taxidermist who worked for Charles Dickens to do this work had applied a lot of arsenic and this was common in the 19th century and so the domes ted beetles, as soon as they hit the arsenic they died.
Nevertheless there were some skins of the insects around the base of the bird and I think the library was quite right in having us double check it’s health and safety.

Brian: Lemme get this right, the raven that’s now in Philadelphia was once Charles Dickens’ pet raven?

Nathan: It was. And apparently, the fact that Dickens loved his raven Grip so much motivated him to taxidermy his raven after he died. Listen to how Dickens describes his attachment to his pet raven in the preface of Barnaby Rudge.

Dickens: It may have been that he was too bright a genius to live long. Or it may have been that he took some pernicious substance into his bill and vents into his maw, which is not improbable. Seeing that he tore up and swallowed in splinters, the greater part of a wooden staircase of six steps and a landing. But after some three years he too was taken ill and died before the kitchen fire. He kept his eye to the last upon the meat as it roasted. And suddenly turned over on his back with a sepulchral cry of cuckoo! Since then I have been raven less.

Nathan: In Barnaby Rudge revives Grip by turning him into a character in the novel, and making him Barnaby’s mischievous companion.

Matthew: Well it’s a funny thing in fact he is the sort of figure with whom we are left at the very end of the novel, we have sort of the penultimate paragraph of the whole book describing how the bird advanced with fantastic steps to the very door of the bar and there cried I’m a devil, I’m a devil, I’m a devil with extraordinary rapture. And then, in the very last paragraph and indeed the last line of the last paragraph we’re told that quote, from that period he constantly practiced and improved himself in the vulgar tongue.
And as he was a mere infant for a raven, when Barnaby was gray; he has very probably gone on talking to the present time.

Nathan: That’s Matthew Redmond, he’s a doctoral student in English at Stanford University, and he recently wrote an article about Dickens, Poe, and the raven.

Matthew: I think it’s a quite an interesting thing in that Dickens appears to be doing on a literary level with this final paragraph what he also then does in his own life he’s sort of preserving the raven in a permanent state that will enable him to survive decades into the futures. The sense that Dickens wants this raven preserved, he has him stuffed first, and the raven’s presence, indeed the figure of the raven sort of broods over him in his study, in it’s taxidermied state while he writes.
And I think Dickens perhaps looks upon Grip as a kind of representative figure for himself.

Nathan: So it was in the works he created and could carefully control from his books, to his bird, that he associated most closely with himself and how he wanted to be remembered.

Matthew: Indeed he was so conscious of his own image all through his life and with sort of distilling his character into this sort of ideal form, and I think he sees his works as sort of maintaining that form and sort of preserving it perhaps in almost in a taxidermied state into the future. And that this becomes a great focus of his life, sort of curating his works in just the right way and preparing them for that after life that he intends for them.

Brian: Okay I understand why this raven meant so much to Charles Dickens now, but I don’t understand where Poe fits into all of this.

Nathan: Ah-ha, see Poe was intrigued and influenced by the character Grip in Barnaby Rudge. But ultimately as he wrote in a review at the time, he found Grip wanting.

Speaker 19: The Raven too, intensely amusing as it is, might have been made more than we now see it, a portion of the conception of the fantastic Barnaby, it’s croakings have might have been prophetically heard in the coarse of the drama. It’s character might have performed in regard to that of the idiot, much the same part as does in music the accompaniment in respect to the air. Each might have been distinct, each might have differed remarkably from the other.
Yet between them, there might have been wrought an analogical resemblance. And although each might have existed apart, they might have formed together a whole which would have been in perfect in the absence of either.

Nathan: For Poe, Dickens is carefully constructed, neatly put together Raven seemed to miss the mark and so Poe becomes convinced that he can create a better Raven and sets out to write his now famous poem.

Robert Peck: The Raven, by Edgar Allan Poe.
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore. While I nodded, nearly napping. Suddenly there came a tapping, as if someone gently rapping. Rapping at my chamber door.
Tis some visitor I muttered, tapping at my chamber door. Only this, and nothing more.

Matthew: I think that the Raven in some ways is a kind of allegory of poetic process. In that Poe is sort of taking Dickens raven and writing a poem in which he sort of mediates on the very act of taking someone else’s literary device. And what it means to do that and the speaker of that poem is sort of perhaps buried underneath all of the books and the vast volumes of forgotten lore in his study.
I mean [inaudible 01:00:07] famously observed that the poem begins among books and papers and letters. And thus does not begin at all. I think he would’ve been keenly aware in the ways in which literature and taxidermy have a number of things in common. This desire to sort of reanimate the past and make it sort of present in some way and sort of bring about some resurrection that in some ways is quite fearful and confusing perhaps.

Nathan: Dickens loved his Raven so much, that he did all this work to keep him alive through his writing and by having him taxidermied. But most people know the Raven, thanks to the poetic version Poe imagines from the other side of the Atlantic.
Never even having set his eyes on the real bird. But ultimately, whether it’s through Dickens or Poe. Whether it’s in physical or literary form, the raven seems determined to last. To persevere through time to maintain it’s grip on us. And so years later, long after they both had died, the Raven followed Poe. His deceased popularizer home to Philadelphia where he remains today.

Robert Peck: Grip is standing in a very sort of Regal raven like pose and is mounted in a rustic shadow box that apparently Charles Dickens embellished himself with branches from his own estate. It gives it a very kind of a natural appearance. But the bird shows no signs of activity. His wings are not extended or anything. He simply standing the way he would have in life.
I think Grip is in very stable condition right now. We opened up the shadow box he was housed in, cleaned all of that out. The dust is removed, any other particulate matter, the insects are all gone. And it’s all been carefully sealed up.
The free library keeps it under wonderful conditions with temperature and humidity control. And we’re fairly confident that given the arsenic load in the skin, it’s unlikely to get any infestation of cigarette beetles or domes ted beetles any time soon.

Speaker 20: The sort of feathery figure of this taxidermied raven still sort of expresses an essential tension in Poe’s writing. This tension that’s expressed with the question, who is controlling whom? On the one hand we have these very ingenious and meticulous efforts to preserve the raven, it seems that we are keeping him under glass and controlling it in a manner of speaking.
And yet ultimately is not the raven sort of controlling us and compelling us to preserve him. There’s this kind of ambiguity that I think Poe would thoroughly enjoy. I think he would be delighted by the whole thing, precisely fascinated by this strangeness of it all and the [inaudible 01:02:43] quality in the way that it sort of beggars easy answers.

Robert Peck: And to the raven, never flitting still is sitting, still is sitting on the palide bust of Palace just above my chamber door. And his eyes have all the seeming of a demons that is dreaming. And the lamplight or him streaming throws his shadow on the floor. And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor shall be lifted nevermore.

Nathan: Robert McCraken Peck is a senior fellow at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University and a curator of art and artifacts. He’s also the author of the upcoming book Specimens of Hair. The Curious Collection of Peter A. Brown.
Matthew Redmon is a doctoral student at Stanford University. His article if bird or devil was recently published in the Edgar Allan Poe review.

Brian: Nathan, Ed, I don’t know if you saw the email just came in but they’ve proposed stuffing the co hosts at Back Story. I don’t know how you feel about that, but I’m not up for it.
We can laugh about this, but I gotta admit as we did the show I recognize there are actual some pretty serious historical questions entailed to stuff or not.

Ed: Yeah, you know and for me who is a little bit squeamish about such things. The idea of stuffing animals was alluring on its surface but there’s also historical issues for us to think a little bit about. You know when Charlie and Keith Gibson at VMI were talking about the horse and then when I was talking with Nicole Maurantonio you hear sort of different perspectives on what this might means.
You know Colonel Gibson sees it as basically an introduction to letting people think about the Civil War who might not otherwise. Nicole wonders if the whole idea of having attractive horse there doesn’t kind of domesticate the confederacy a little bit and obscure the issues over which the war was fought.
So it’s interesting that problems that you would never think of as being associated with taxidermy are there when you look a little bit closer.

Nathan: Well I think too, it’s also about conjuring peoples imagination. You know if you imagine the 18th century cabinets of curiosities with all these objects taken from the new world or the world Columbian exposition in the 1890s and you know living exhibits with you know stuffed animals effectively.
So much of this is meant to help people who can’t may be get to a place. Imagine what that place might be like on the other side of the world. And I wonder even when we’re talking about stuffing the founding fathers some of that is about imagining what the founders would really think in the hear and now if he can just look them in the eye and kind of pose a question.
So it’s different obviously in many respects from what we do as historians but there’s also an element there of trying to help people connect with something they might not necessarily experience first hand at a past place or distant place.

Ed: Yeah, people seem very interested today in going to Madame Tussaud’s wax figure museum. There’s something about somebody being there in three dimensions of human scale that makes them more approachable. I think the other thing Brian that reminds us that in the 18th and 19th centuries people were a lot closer to death and a lot less squeamish about remains than we are today.
Where the goal seems to be-

Brian: Make it disappear as quickly as possible. You know there’s a tendency toward cremation and not having sort of people displayed in their caskets nearly as much and so forth.

Ed: But you know it was common in the 19th century for loved ones, children, spouses to basically be put on display in the home. People preserve hair and things like that that seem to us inappropriate. Since maybe the stuffing of animals is not unrelated to that is that people think about the body in a different way whether its humans or animals.

Brian: So answer me this Nathan, if Ed is right and he makes a compelling case. Why is taxidermy coming back? I understand their hipster taxidermist, that its cool among young people.

Nathan: Well, there are ways in which I think people are still looking to these old forms. Some hipsters wanna make horse shoes or blacksmiths. There’s something about old style craftsmanship of one kind or another and so if you think about 19th century creativity right? I mean taxidermy and the making of barrels and craft beer?
I mean all this stuff is part of a certain kind of [crosstalk 01:07:46]

Brian: It’s real.

Nathan: Yeah, it’s real. No exactly. [crosstalk 01:07:48]

Brian: It’s tangible, it’s not digital.

Nathan: Exactly, it’s more authentic. But I think there’s also a question here that gets raised even from the point that Ed had made about you know the deeply historical nature of our relationship to the real right? And particularly now, thinking about like zoos for instance. We take it as totally acceptable to have animals that are confined in spaces that we can then observe. And we imagine, we hope that they’re being handled in a somewhat humane way. Even if sometimes we know that they’re not.
And I wonder if 50 or 100 years from now folks will look back on our generation and wonder about that zoo thing that we seem so committed to observing animals who are locked up in these different pens and cages and such. So in a way it’s very humbling to think that we have the luxury of looking at you know living animals in places now that you know formerly would just simply be these dioramas effectively.

Ed: And to just underscore your point Nathan, those hipster taxidermist, at least some of them insist that no animals were harmed during the process. They actually stuff animals that either died by natural causes or died in one way or another, they didn’t kill ’em in order to mount them over their roaring fire.

Brian: Yeah, I think there’s a quest for honesty as well as authenticity in this you know? We eat animals in the forms of filets and patties and that sort of thing. But don’t think very much of the animal for which it came. You could argue that sort of having sort of look your dinner in the eye even if it’s a glass eye is a good reminder of our connections to the world.
That’s gonna do it for us today, do get in touch. You’ll find us at Backstory Radio dot org. Or send us an email, at Backstory at Virginia dot edu. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter. At Backstory Radio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

Nathan: Back story’s produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation and the Johns Hopkins University. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

Speaker 21: Brian Ballow is professor of history at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is professor of the Humanities and president emeritus at the University of Richmond. Joann Freeman is professor of history and American studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams associate professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University.
Backstory was created by Andrew Windom for Virginia Humanities.

Speaker 22: Panably.