News from the John W. Kluge Center: This Wednesday: "The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals After 1492"

Join the John W. Kluge Center and Jay I. Kislak Chair Marcy Norton for an exploration of the historical roots of a contemporary paradox: Why do some animals become food and other animals become pets?

In her new book “The Tame and the Wild,” Norton shows that after 1492 Indigenous and European ways of relating to animals transformed societies on both sides of the Atlantic. In this event, she will discuss how Europeans’ treatment of livestock connected to their fears about demonic witches, and how Indigenous animal-taming practices bewildered and bewitched the colonizers.

This event will be available to watch live, virtually as well as in person in room LJ-119 of the Thomas Jefferson Building at the Library of Congress.

Marcy Norton is a historian of the early modern Atlantic World at the University of Pennsylvania, with a focus on Latin America and Spain. Much of her research is guided by two questions: How did colonialism shape the Americas? And how did Native America shape European modernity? Thematically she is most interested in writing history that explores the intersections of environment, embodiment, and thought, concerns that have guided her work on the history of food, drugs, science and inter-species relationships. Her publications include “Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic,” “Subaltern Technologies and Early Modernity in the Atlantic World,” “Tasting Empire: Chocolate and the Internalization of Mesoamerican Aesthetics,” and “The Chicken or the Iegue: Human-Animal Relationships and the Columbian Exchange.”