HUNTING DEMOCRACY

Daniel Herman
Clements Center Fellow for the Study of Southwestern America, 2008

Theodore Roosevelt delivering a speech in New Castle, WY, ca. 1903

In his talk, Daniel Herman will investigate the historic relationship between hunting rights and broader political rights in the U.S. By the time of the American Revolution, argues Herman, plebeian Americans had come to associate political rights with hunting rights and saw any restriction on the latter as an attack on the former. In the late nineteenth century, however, gentlemen hunters attempted to restrict hunting rights to themselves as part of a larger effort to buttress their social authority. What emerged in sporting magazines of the time was a discourse about the meaning of hunting that broke down old ideas about gentility and sportsmanship and led to the new, democratic cult of hunting in the twentieth century. The tension in sport hunting between aristocracy and democracy, however, continues in the twenty-first century.

Daniel Herman is Associate Professor of History, Central Washington University and received his Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley in 1995.  He will spend the spring 2008 semester with the Clements Center for Southwest Studies as a Clements Center Research Fellow for the Study of Southwestern America completing his manuscript “Under the Tonto Rim: Honor, Conscience, and Culture in the West, 1880-1930” for publication.