Bear With Me

“Bear With Me is a fascinating and deeply meditative two-hundred-year cultural history of America’s popular obsession with bears. Analyzing an impressive range of folklore, live entertainments, literature, film, toys, cartoons, television, posters, social movements, and social media, the distinguished historian Daniel Horowitz forcefully places bears—representational and real—at the center of the American experience.” - Janet M. Davis, author of The Gospel of Kindness: Animal Welfare and the Making of Modern America

“In this eye-popping survey of bears in American culture from the colonial period to the present, Daniel Horowitz tackles an enormous subject with a passion and a curiosity that prove contagious. Bears entered American culture in droves and under many guises. Horowitz has the audacity to embrace this complexity rather than explain it away.” - Jon T. Coleman, author of Here Lies Hugh Glass: A Mountain Man, a Bear, and the Rise of the American Nation

"This is a detailed, entertaining, and informative breakdown of bears in popular culture. . . . Bear With Me is a revealing cultural history that puts bears in popular culture, including Yogi Bear and Paddington, into greater context." - Ryan Prado, Foreword Review

"Permission granted to buy this book as a gag gift for a hirsute homosexual in your life, but Bear with Me is also well-worth delving into. ... This book’s inclusive recognition of gay culture alongside the likes of athletic fandom and children’s toys is much appreciated in today’s censorious academic environment." - Jim Gladstone, Passport

“In this witty and thought-provoking examination of America’s relationship with bears, historian Horowitz zeroes in on the ways that humans have feared, loved, and exploited these charismatic creatures.... Wide-ranging and entertaining, this is a clever work of cultural history.” - Publishers Weekly

"A world bereft of an academic appraisal of celebrity bears would somehow seem deficient, so a growl of appreciation is due Daniel Horowitz, whose Bear With Me tells us tons about Teddy, Smokey, Pooh, Paddington and even the dreadful Berenstains." - Dave Shiflett, Wall Street Journal

"Bear With Me makes a valuable contribution to the cultural history of animals. It reveals how bears have served as mirrors of American values, anxieties, and aspirations, and how their representations continue to shape our understanding of nature, identity, and emotion. This exploration of deeply seated cultural models built around the understanding, or at times miss-understanding, of an iconic animal provides much of value for the field of animal studies." - Owen Nevin, Animal Studies Journal

"An entertaining and enlightening examination of how humans — especially the American variant — perceive a creature we both fear and love." - David James, Anchorage Daily News

"Horowitz’s work offers a modern yet classic example of American studies: of the value of its interest in and interrogation of the culture, literature, history, and society of the United States at a time when that important interdisciplinary field faces, if not quite extinction, a critical threat due to decreasing institutional and financial support for the humanities on both sides of the Atlantic. What Horowitz achieves here is a serious, scholarly, and yet always accessible exploration of how bears, in a multitude of forms, lives, and representations, became and remain profoundly meaningful and often 'celebrity' animals, characters, and symbols in American culture and history." - Henry Knight Lozano, H-Environment, H-Net Reviews