Historical Animal Geographies

Description

Arguing that historical analysis is an important, yet heretofore largely underexplored dimension of scholarship in animal geographies, this book seeks to define historical animal geography as the exploration of how spatially situated human-animal relations have changed through time. This volume centers on the changing relationships among people, animals, and the landscapes they inhabit, taking a spatio-temporal approach to animal studies. Foregrounding the assertion that geography matters as much as history in terms of how humans relate to animals, this collection offers unique insight into the lives of animals past, how interrelationships were co-constructed amongst and between animals and humans, and how nonhuman actors came to make their own worlds. This collection of chapters explores the rich value of work at the contact points between three sub-disciplines, demonstrating how geographical analyses enrich work in historical animal studies, that historical work is important to animal geography, and that recognition of animals as actors can further enrich historical geographic research. Cover Title Copyright Contents List of illustrations List of contributors Acknowledgments Foreword 1 Introduction: a meeting place PART I The home – shared spaces of cohabitation 2 When did pets become animals? 3 The entwined socioecological histories of the Sawtelle, California war veterans and the animal “menagerie” at the Pacific Branch Soldier’s Home (1888–1918) 4 Shaking the ground: histories of earthworms from Darwin to niche construction PART II The city – historical animals in and out of sight 5 Zoöpolis 6 Kansas City: the morphology of an American zoöpolis through film 7 The strange case of the missing slaughterhouse geographies 8 The pigs are back again: urban pig keeping in wartime Britain, 1939–45 PART III The nation – historical animal bodies and human identities 9 Rebel elephants: resistance through human–elephant partnerships 10 Western horizons, animal becomings: race, species, and the troubled boundaries of the human in the era of American expansionism 11 For the love of life: coal mining and pit bull fighting in early 19th-century Britain PART IV The global – imperial networks and the movements of animals 12 Migration, assimilation, and invasion in the nineteenth century 13 Runaways and strays: rethinking (non)human agency in Caribbean slave societies Epilogue 14 Finding our way in the Anthropocene Index