Today’s guest post arrives courtesy of Susan J. Pearson, associate professor of history at Northwestern University. In the context of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, she studies the cultural politics of reform, rights discourse, the development of American liberalism, the history of childhood, and the history of human-animal relations. Pearson’s first book, The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America (University of Chicago Press, 2011), examined the institutional and cultural linkages between animal and child protection organizations. It earned Pearson the OAH’s 2012 Merle Curti Award in Intellectual History. —————————————————— In 1900, approximately only Read more