| Book Review | Environmental History, 13.1

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 13.1 | The History Cooperative

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).	. . .

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