This highly illustrated history of zoos in America and Europe from the Renaissance aristocrat's menagerie through the 20th-century public zoological garden charts the changing relationship between human viewers and wild beasts in a range of urban settings, including London, Berlin, Moscow and various European cities. The authors show how the collecting of wild animals, with its roots in the study of Nature in order to classify and dominate it, led to our contemporary concern with the preservation of endangered species and a nostalgia for untamed wilderness.

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