This dissertation argues that the significance and extent of American animal “acclimatization”—the nineteenth-century term for the purposeful introduction of non-native wild animals—has been drastically underestimated in previous historiography. Far from a negligible “fad” that only briefly interested a small number of hunters and wildlife enthusiasts, American acclimatization was in fact a large-scale and enduring exercise in bioengineering that introduced dozens of new species to the nation over the course of more than a century. At first led by private individuals and organizations, American acclimatizers introduced several new birds and fish into the country from the mid-nineteenth century, including modern-day mainstays like the English sparrow, ring-necked pheasant, and German carp. While private organizations devoted to animal acclimatization mostly dissipated by the late nineteenth century, the federal government’s biologist-bureaucrats made the acclimatization of new animals a central component of vast efforts to supply America’s hunters and fishers deep into the twentieth century, a persistence that has been heretofore overlooked. In composing the first dedicated study of American animal acclimatization, I visited a dozen different archives and have brought hundreds of previously unexamined sources to bear. These revealed the enduring popularity of animal acclimatization and its persistence as a wildlife rejuvenation tool. These sources also laid bare the ideological motivations for animal acclimatization. Far from salving a nostalgic yearning for the fauna of Europe, Euro-Americans often saw animal acclimatization projects as progressive techniques of environmental management instead. Animal acclimatization projects, moreover, were intertwined with the Euro-American colonization of the American West. Settler-colonial ideology, that fusion of Euro-American racial supremacy with grandiose notions of national identity and expansion, runs through the rhetoric of many acclimatizers. More concretely, the United States Fish Commission effected the violent dispossession and subordination of the Winnemem Wintu People on California’s McCloud River in order to set up the nation’s first chinook salmon hatchery. The USFC used the hatchery to artificially spawn tens of millions of salmon to replenish American waters as well as establish chinook salmon in American and international watersheds where the fish had never existed before. Finally, I argue that the story of American acclimatization—what I call the American “acclimatization exchange”—offers important nuance and modification to the two most famous paradigms in environmental history: the conservation movement and Alfred Crosby’s “Columbian Exchange.” Massive parallel efforts in animal acclimatization indicate that the conservation era featured far more interventionist environmental management than usually appreciated. The early adoption of “fish culture” in 1860s American also suggests that the conservation era’s periodization should be significantly backdated. Furthermore, the sheer popularity and endurance of foreign species acclimatization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, plus the fact that Americans often obtained and exchanged species from Asia, India, and the broader Pacific World, temporally and geographically expands on Crosby’s notion of an Atlantic World “Columbian Exchange” in the wake of initial European discovery and colonization.

“Unhappy Endings” explores dynamics of novelistic closure by examining Victorian texts that come to a halt in a way that invites subsequent continuation. Each chapter of this dissertation confronts a different fact pattern: a different kind of incompletion and subsequent continuation. “Unhappy Endings” investigates texts left explicitly unfinished, texts left ambiguously unfinished, the impact of the Victorian serial form on the concept of “finishedness,” and the perceived kinds of finishedness, of a text. These Victorian texts that question the concept of finishedness are taken up and continued in several different ways: continued by the original author, by an author’s family member, by an editor or publisher, by some other author or writer, or even by the reader-public. Thus, as the factual circumstances that create the “unfinished” and “continued” status of my exemplar texts vary from chapter to chapter, the working standard for what qualifies as “unfinished” and “continued” necessarily alters accordingly. The following questions are inherent in my focus here on continuation and completion: What is an ending? What is “whole”? What makes a whole complete? Must a novel have a discernible ending to be complete? To be a whole? What can we learn when a novel, abandoned for whatever reason by one author, is “continued” and completed by another author? I use close reading, digital humanities, and biographical criticism to identify the ways that literature of the Victorian era was, and still is, particularly susceptible to continuation. This continued susceptibility paves the way, perhaps, for Victorian literature’s sustained impact on modern literature and media.

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