History
When settlers sailed from Europe to North America, they carried cats on board to protect the stores from mice. Many of these cats "settled" in the New World, interbred, and developed special characteristics to help them cope with their new life and climate. Early in the twentieth century, a selective breeding program was established to develop the best qualities of these cats. Both the American and the Domestic Shorthairs are called mousers because they caught mice on ships.
Read more about this topic: American Shorthair
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“America is the only nation in history which, miraculously, has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.”
—Attributed to Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929)
“There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)