Bear With Me by Daniel Horowitz
In Bear With Me | A Cultural History of Famous Bears by Daniel Horowitz, cultural historian Horowitz explores America’s centuries-long fascination with bears, from cuddly icons like Winnie the Pooh to fearsome reminders of nature’s power, revealing how these creatures embody both comfort and terror.
From teddy bears and Winnie-the-Pooh to Smokey Bear, Yogi Bear, and Cocaine Bear, American popular culture has been fascinated with real and fictional bears for more than two centuries. Bears are ubiquitous, appearing in advertisements, as logos for sports teams, and as central characters in children’s books, cartoons, movies, and video games. In Bear With Me, Horowitz presents a vibrant history of the pedestrian and celebrity bears who have captured our imaginations and infiltrated our everyday lives. He shows that bears’ ability to represent and evoke both terror and comfort makes them well-suited for their omnipresence. Today, cultural depictions of bears largely encompass examples of human-bear relationships, reciprocity, and emotional engagement. Reminders that climate change threatens the lives of polar bears engender feelings of empathy, while news of bear attacks drives us to fascinated fear. Whether examining the subculture of gay bears or the deadly consequences of anthropomorphizing animals, Horowitz charts the complexities and depth of American culture’s unique and enduring relationship with bears.
Daniel Horowitz is Mary Huggins Gamble Professor of American Studies, Emeritus, at Smith College and the author of many books, most recently, American Dreams, American Nightmares: Culture and Crisis in Residential Real Estate from the Great Recession to the COVID-19 Pandemic.
- ISBN-13: 9781478032373
- ISBN: 1478032375
- 288 pages
- 43 illustrations
- August 19, 2025
Published by: Duke University Press
Reviews
Bear with Me | A Cultural History of Famous Bears in America by Daniel Horowitz
By Publishers Weekly
7/29/2025
In this witty and thought-provoking examination of America’s relationship with bears, historian Horowitz (American Dreams, American Nightmares) zeroes in on the ways that humans have feared, loved, and exploited these charismatic creatures. He begins with famed frontiersmen Grizzly Adams, who teamed up with P.T. Barnum to capture and train performing bears, and Hugh Glass, whose saga, which involved being left for dead after a bear attack, inspired the 2015 film The Revenant. Horowitz then traces how bears’ position as the ultimate terror in the American wilderness gave way to a cuddly, child-friendly demeanor in the era of conservation.
‘Bear With Me’ Review: An Omnibus of the Ursine
John ‘Grizzly’ Adams—a relative of two U.S. presidents—entered the wilderness rather than politics. Bears were his closest companions.
By Dave Shiflett, Wall Street Journal
Aug. 19, 2025 at 2:13 pm ET
A world bereft of an academic appraisal of celebrity bears would somehow seem deficient, so a growl of appreciation is due Daniel Horowitz, whose “Bear With Me” tells us tons about Teddy, Smokey, Pooh, Paddington and even the dreadful Berenstains. Mr. Horowitz, a professor emeritus of American studies at Smith College and a prolific author, tells us early on that bears appear in the Bible maybe 14 times while lions, sheep and goats get hundreds of mentions. But as the years passed bears came on strong, inspiring Michael Bond’s Paddington Bear, A.A. Milne’s Pooh and William Faulkner’s Old Ben. Bears also caught the eye of guys who knew how to make the truly big bucks, including stuffed-animal entrepreneurs, P.T. Barnum and Walt Disney.
