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"Most people assume that climate change is recent news. A Temperate Empire: Making Climate Change in Early America shows that we have been debating the science and politics of climate change for a long time, since before the age of industrialization. Focusing on attempts to transform New Englands and Nova Scotias environments from the seventeenth through early nineteenth centuries, this book explores the ways that early Americans studied and tried to remake local climates according to their plans for colonial settlement and economic development. For officials, landowners, naturalists, and other local elites, the Northeasts frigid, long winters and short, muggy summers were persistent sources of anxiety. They became intensely interested in understanding the regions natural history and, ultimately, in reducing their vulnerability to it. In the short term, European migrants from other northern countries would welcome the cold or, as one Loyalist from New Hampshire argued, the cold would moderate the supposedly fiery temperaments of Jamaicans deported to colonial Nova Scotia. Over the long term, however, the expansion of colonial farms was increasingly tempering the climate itself. A naturalist in Vermont agreed with Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson when he insisted that every cultivated part of America was already more temperate, uniform, and equal than before colonization, an eighteenth-century forecast of permanent, global warming they wholeheartedly welcomed. By pointing to such ironies, A Temperate Empire emphasizes the necessarily historical nature of the climate and our knowledge about it."

"This book investigates the historical significance of the American animal welfare movement at home and overseas from the second great awakening to the second world war, a time span encompassing the nations shift from muscle power to motorization. Dedicated primarily to laboring animals at its inception, the humane movement grew to include virtually all areas of human/animal interaction. Embracing animals as brethren through biblical concepts of stewardship, humane activists worked with temperance groups, educators, missionaries, religious leaders, civil rights activists, policy makers, and anti-imperialists to create an expansive transnational gospel of kindness in hopes of building a more merciful nation and world. Ultimately, animal protectionists defined kindness to animals as an American humanitarian ideal. Their interpretation of this gospel extended beyond the New Testament to preach kindness as a secular and spiritual truth. As an ideological and tactical product of antebellum evangelical revivalism and reform, as well as the rights revolution of the civil war era, animal kindness became a barometer of free moral agency, higher civilization, and Americanization. Yet given the enormous intersectional diversity of the United States, its empire, and other countries of contact, standards of kindness and cruelty were culturally contingent and therefore controversial: those accused of cruelty invoked their own culturally specific ideas regarding their rights of self-determination to defend culturally specific animal practices, such as cockfighting, bullfighting, songbird consumption, and kosher slaughter that animal protectionists judged repugnant. Animal welfare, therefore, wa-and remains-in the crosshairs of cultural and political contestation in a pluralistic society."