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Daniel Horowitz, "Bear With Me: A Cultural History of Famous Bears in America" (Duke UP, 2025)

September 5, 2025·49 min·4 clips

During COVID lockdowns, Dan Horowitz and his wife invented a bear psychiatrist named Polar who practices in a supermarket freezer section.

The bear story starts with reputation. Dan reads famous American bears as cultural evidence, with animal stories carrying arguments about masculinity, publicity, and public memory. Roosevelt wanted a more manly image. The guest notes that Roosevelt hunted real grizzlies in the American West, even though his high pitched voice did not quite fit the persona he worked to project. Mississippi is the scene that matters. In November 1902, Roosevelt was helped by Holt Collier, a formerly enslaved African-American hunter who knew how to kill bears. The bear was not roaming free. Collier caught a relatively young bear, about 300 pounds, and tied it to a tree before Roosevelt was called over. Roosevelt refused to kill it. That refusal drew on a Boone and Crockett Club pledge that killing should happen only in something like a fair fight. The party still ate bear meat. That detail rubs against the cleaner public version, which quickly turned a failed hunt into proof of presidential kindness and manliness. Dan shows how a messy hunting episode became a tidier story attached to Theodore Roosevelt. Bear With Me keeps widening from there: a cultural history of famous bears in America, published by Duke University Press in 2025. The close is dry and reflective. Dan mentions a separate book on retirement, expected from NYU Press in March 2026 around his 88th birthday, with movies and AARP as places where later life gets portrayed, organized, and made public.

As heard by us

A calm cultural history that turns Roosevelt-era bear lore into a story about masculinity and myth.

Daniel Horowitz starts with bears, then opens the door to Roosevelt, masculinity, and the making of the Teddy bear legend. Theodore Roosevelt, Holt Collier, the Mississippi hunt, and the tied-up bear all matter here, but the real payoff comes from watching a quick embarrassment…

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Why you'd press play

If Roosevelt, teddy bears, and American myth interest you, start here.

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