American Nineteenth Century History 111 supplement brief references to important historical figures with whom Gallman presumes familiarity. Men like Whitelaw Reid and Benjamin Butler were critical to Dickinson’s life, but their significant public roles remain largely unexplained. In the end, however, Gallman presents a compelling portrait of Anna Dickinson as Joan of Arc, a diminutive and youthful character who became a towering figure, seen by herself and others as one called to the service of the nation in a time of war, but who, unlike the Maid of Orleans, may have simply lived too long. CAROL LASSER Oberlin College © 2009, Carol Lasser The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century CLAY McSHANE AND JOEL A. TARR Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007 Pp. xi + 242, $50.00 (hbk), ISBN 0 8018 8600 712 Horses usually emerge in historical memory as either symbols of a pre-industrial past or as affectations of rural life. Accounts of frontier cavalry or Native Americans shape a common narrative of admirable, but perhaps quaint, creatures doomed to be replaced by machines. In The Horse in the City, Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr combine their efforts to write a considerably less romantic history of horses as “living machines,” that is, as unequivocally industrial animals critical to nineteenth-century urban life. Horses served as both industrial machines and all too biological organisms. They toiled, ate, excreted, and died in the streets as drovers and breeders strove for maximum efficiency from their equine engines. As machines, horses increased the spatial scope, tempo, and hazards of daily urban life. Yet, as animals, horses and humans shared needs for food, shelter, and water, and succumbed to crowd diseases. Paralleling other urban histories, the authors explore health, nutrition, reproduction, housing, labor conditions, and social regulation with specific focus on the equine world. Though McShane and Tarr explicitly compare the equine victims of a stable fire and those of human tragedies, this is not a work of animal advocacy, nor do the authors equate human and horse. Acknowledging that horses played many functions in society, they argue that these aesthetic and symbolic roles “pale in significance compared to the dependence of cities upon horses for vital operations” (p. x). Indeed, the horse-as-tool is the central figure connecting industrializing urban infrastructure and the surrounding countryside. This is not urban history in isolation, but a study explicitly linking human and animal, city and countryside, and industrialization and regulation. The authors make several intriguing arguments. Answering one outstanding ques- tion about the longevity of horses despite other competing technologies, McShane and Tarr argue that while horses had long proven suitable for urban transportation, steam engines simply demanded higher costs for small-scale applications. Rather than