Sometimes male ostriches emit a low guttural sound that sounds strangely like a lion. On the plains in South Africa, these sounds aimed at female ostriches might confuse an unknowing listener. But on a ship bound from South Africa to Galveston, Texas in February 1887, these lion-esque sounds would not have been heard. Instead, as these dozens of ostriches crossed the Atlantic, their vocalizations were probably a quiet chirp, despite each bird weighing well over 100 pounds. Each ostrich had a more solitary existence on the ship than they had experienced in the wild or on a South African farm. On the Atlantic, they lived in single padded stalls near the middle of the hold, with paddocks between the stalls to offer some exercise and perhaps some interaction among the birds.1

On October 7, 1888, approximately 176 Chinese passengers arrived in San Francisco aboard the S.S. Belgic. They carried laborer return certificates—documents that, until just days earlier, had guaranteed their right to reenter. But on October 1, President Grover Cleveland had signed the Scott Act into law, abruptly voiding those certificates. Officially, the act barred only Chinese laborers from returning. In practice, however, Chinese merchants and U.S.-born children of Chinese parents also traveled with laborer return certificates. They, too, would now be denied readmission.

In winter of 1900, the famed nature writer Ernest Thompson Seton lived briefly in a log cabin built in the middle of the National Zoological Park, located just north of the White House. The small lodging was placed between the muddied bison paddocks and the denuded deer and antelope yards.

The extinction of the passenger pigeon is one of the best-known cautionary tales in American environmental history. At one time, between three and five billion passenger pigeons blanketed the skies over central and eastern North America. Passenger pigeons were swift (they could fly as fast as sixty miles per hour) and gregarious (in the winter, thousands would roost together on a single tree, occasionally causing limbs to break beneath their weight). They survived primarily on the beechnuts, acorns, and chestnuts found in the mixed hardwood forests of the eastern United States. Between 1810 and 1867, Americans destroyed much of that habitat, clearing 200,000 square miles of woodlands (an area equal to the size of Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin combined). The passenger pigeon was also tasty, which is why between about 1870 and 1900, market hunters reduced what remained of the population to only a few dozen. The last of the species, named Martha by its keepers, died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. Even more than the North American bison, a few hundred of whom survived the hide hunters who slaughtered millions of them in the Great Plains in the late nineteenth century, the passenger pigeon’s story exemplifies the wastefulness and shortsightedness of Americans’ exploitation of animals in the early years of industrial capitalism.

Following the Wong Kim Ark decision in 1898, ethnic Chinese, other Asians, and almost all individuals born on U.S. soil secured the right to jus soli birthright citizenship. They could not, however, secure recognition of their citizenship without documentation, the key that linked birth to birthright. At a time when birth registration was not common, ethnic Chinese were able to establish U.S. citizenship in two main ways: through an order by a U.S. District Court or certification by U.S. immigration authorities.1 However, this documentation did not settle questions of the holder’s identity, immigration or citizenship status. Immigration inspectors generally doubted testimony given in these cases and believed that it was used to obtain fraudulent documentation of lawful immigration or citizenship status.

Two of the world’s greatest boxers—Muhammad Ali of Louisville, KY and George Foreman of Houston, TX—met for the legendary “Rumble in the Jungle” in Kinshasa, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) in 1974. With concerts by the African American “Godfather of Soul” James Brown and South African singer-songwriter Miriam Makeba, nicknamed “Mama Africa,” the entwining tones of the U.S. civil rights era and anti-Apartheid movement augmented a cultural moment that displayed Pan-African, Black nationalist, and anti-imperial connections. However, the appearance of an insidious symbol from each aforementioned era is what decidedly swayed the local population against Foreman and for Ali.1

On July 11, 1924, the Lincoln reached Angel Island, the desolate and remote location of the infamous immigration station in California. Aboard the ship were nine Chinese wives, hopeful that they would soon reunite with their spouses who had preceded them to the United States. Until then, despite harsh immigration laws, many Chinese women had been admitted to the country because they were married to noncitizen merchants or to American citizens. Building on coverture principles that a man’s care and comfort were so important that his wife’s status should follow his, Chinese husbands had often argued successfully that their right to reunite with their families took precedence over existing immigration laws, which excluded Chinese immigrants because of their race. It was these laws, they contended, that had forced many Chinese migrants into transnational marriages in the first place. Despite these precedents, the immigration officers who inspected the women on the Lincoln rejected them all, regardless of their age, education, and class.

In a private 1972 report to the Director of the National Park Service, Jack Anderson, Superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, confessed that “we are apprehensive that their proposal would ultimately end up with the complete slaughter of all bison, as occurred on the Crow Indian Reservation.”1 For decades, livestock producers at the local and national level pressured park officials to eliminate a specific disease—brucellosis caused by Brucella abortus—from Yellowstone’s buffalo herds. Following World War II, governments targeted this bacterial contagion in American domestic and wild animal populations to improve public health and livestock producers’ profits. Symptoms of brucellosis, which humans can catch from other mammalian hosts, vary across species. For domestic cattle, it can cause spontaneous abortions and, in rare cases, death. Buffalo seem largely unaffected by brucellosis but for humans, the bacterial infection can cause a plethora of chronic and debilitating symptoms.2

Current trends in suburban history incorporate questions about racial violence and exploitation formerly reserved for cities. They emphasize inequality but attribute its persistence to unequal terms of accessing suburbia rather than exclusion. Scholars should build on this insight to better historicize suburbs that do not fit existing frameworks. Specifically, they should bridge histories of climate change, capitalism, and gentrification. Doing so will ensure suburban history remains at the forefront for understanding present-day crises.