The Historical Animal

Description

The conventional history of animals could be more accurately described as the history of human ideas about animals. Only in the last few decades have scholars from a wide variety of disciplines attempted to document the lives of historical animals in ways that recognize their agency as sentient beings with complex intelligence. This collection advances the field further, inviting us to examine our recorded history through an animal-centric lens to discover how animals have altered the course of our collective past. The seventeen scholars gathered here present case studies from the Pacific Ocean, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, involving species ranging from gorillas and horses to salamanders and orcas. Together they seek out new methodologies, questions, and stories that challenge accepted historical assumptions and structures. Drawing upon environmental, social, and political history, the contributors employ research from such wide-ranging fields as philosophy and veterinary medicine, embracing a radical interdisciplinarity that is crucial to understanding our nonhuman past. Grounded in the knowledge that there has never been a purely human time in world history, this collection asks and answers an incredibly urgent question for historians and others interested in the nonhuman past: in an age of mass extinctions, mass animal captivity, and climate change, when we know much of what animals have done in the past, which of our activities will we want to change in the future? Cover THE HISTORICAL ANIMAL Contents Illustrations Introduction PART ONE Historicizing Nonhumans Change in Black and White Beasts of Burden Zombie Zoology PART TWO Archives and the Animal Trace Animal Archive Stories Finding Animals in History Nonhuman Animal Testimonies PART THREE The Animal Factorof Historical Causation Horses and Actor-Networks Species Agency Too Sullen for Survival Migrant Muskoxen and the Naturalization of National Identity in Scandinavia PART FOUR Animals Coping with/Adapting to Us Exploring Early Human–Animal Encounters in the Galapagos Islands Using a Historical Zoology Approach Of Leopards and Lesser Animals Mountain Meeting Ground PART FIVE Documenting Interspecifi c Partnerships Viewing the Anthrozootic City “He Took Care of Me” Tony the Wonder Horse Notes Works Cited Contributors Index BackCover