Tara Kathleen Kelly. The Hunter Elite

Tara Kathleen Kelly’s The Hunter Elite: Manly Sport, Hunting Narratives, and American Conservation, 1880–1925 is the latest addition to an ongoing scholarly conversation about big game hunting, masculinity, and wildlife conservation that began with work in the 1970s by John Reiger and James Trefethen and was continued by Thomas Dunlap, Louis Warren, and Karl Jacoby. Together, these studies have demonstrated the crucial role played by sport hunters and anglers in the development of conservation. Limited hunting seasons, licensing, limits on game bags, reserves, and other measures to protect wildlife and bird populations all drew substantial support from individual sportsmen as well as organizations whose members were largely drawn from hunting and fishing enthusiasts. Such initiatives, however, often were framed in explicitly nativist, classist, and racial terms that designated one type of hunter as the “right” sort and marginalized others, often hunting for subsistence or wages, as criminals. Anyone interested in this topic should read Kelly’s lively, well-researched, and thoughtful book, which argues that the publishing industry played a key role in the emergence of hunting narratives that celebrated middle-class values of manly self-control, repudiated earlier associations of hunting with aristocratic luxury and wastefulness, and created a reading public that could be mobilized to advocate for conservation.

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