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A TRAITOR TO HIS SPECIES

Ernest Freeberg

Henry Blergh and the Birth of the Animal Rights Movement

The story of a remarkable man who gave voice to the voiceless and shaped our modern relationship with animals.
From the prize winning author who brought you such novels as The Education of Laura Bridgman (winner of the Dunning Prize from the American Historical Association) and Democracy's Prisoner (winner of the David Langum Award for Legal History and the Eli Oboler Award from the American Library Association's Intellectual Freedom Roundtable), comes a new work that explores one of the pioneers of the animal rights movement.

In Gilded Age America, people and animals lived cheek-by-jowl in environments that were dirty and dangerous to man and beast alike. The industrial city brought suffering, but it also inspired a compassion for animals that fueled a controversial anti-cruelty movement.

Ernest Freeberg, the award-winning historian, tells the story of Henry Bergh and his campaign for animal rights. Cheered on by thousands of men and women who joined his cause, Bergh fought with robber barons, Five Points gangs, and legendary impresario P.T. Barnum, as they pushed for new laws to protect trolley horses, livestock, stray dogs, and other animals.

Ernest Freeberg is a distinguished professor of humanities and head of the history department at the University of Tennessee. He has authored three award-winning books, including The Age of Edison, which was named best book of the year by the American Library Association. He lives in Knoxville, Tennessee.
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Published 2020-09-22 by Basic Books

Comments

New York Post ran a story on A TRAITOR TO HIS SPECIES and Henry Bergh's animal activism Read more...

Freeberg marshals a wealth of detail in tracking Bergh's campaigns and paints a vivid picture of Gilded Age America. Animal lovers and history buffs will savor this immersive account.

A successful effort to make a splendid American crusader better known. Read more...

In his lively treatment, Freeberg offers a thorough and human portrait of the ASPCA's founder, Henry Bergh, presenting the strongest possible case for his courage, resilience and tenacity. In bringing back to life Bergh's fabled battles, Freeberg provides both context and evidence for Bergh's prominence as a leader of the nascent animal protection movement, one of America's most significant post-Civil War reforms.

Vivid and often wrenching... A Traitor to His Species is not a conventional biography, intriguing as its central figure is. The book is above all a compassionate, highly readable account of the 19th-century plight of animals, especially urban animals - and of those who tried to come to their rescue. Read more...

Ernest Freeberg's interview with the New York Times Book Review podcast Read more...

Ernest Freeberg was on the Australian Radio Show Late Night Live with Phillip Adams Read more...

author's essay: Henry Bergh and the Birth of the Animal Rights Movement Read more...

Vivid... The narrative's pace never slackens. Expansive yet carefully documented, Mr. Freeberg's book is less the biography of a man than of a noble effort that eventually spanned the nation. A Traitor to His Species isn't primarily about animals or their rights. Instead, as articulated in Mr. Freeberg's clear-eyed conclusion, this is a book about us, about the searing truth that how we choose to treat animals reveals what kinds of humans we are. Read more...

Freeberg's well-written biography benefits from detailed descriptions of the situations and conditions that inspired Henry Bergh to act. A Traitor to his Species is a good read, making a fresh case for Bergh's genius at using the media of the day to advance public awareness and debate over animal welfare in a world that lived close to animals and relied on their bodies for labor and raw materials as well as food.