The Historical Animal

The Historical Animal PDF Author: Susan Nance
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 0815653395
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 419

Book 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?

Historical Animal Geographies

Historical Animal Geographies PDF Author: Sharon Wilcox
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351790315
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Book 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.

Gorgeous Beasts

Gorgeous Beasts PDF Author: Joan B. Landes
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271061421
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 259

Book Description
Gorgeous Beasts takes a fresh look at the place of animals in history and art. Refusing the traditional subordination of animals to humans, the essays gathered here examine a rich variety of ways animals contribute to culture: as living things, as scientific specimens, as food, weapons, tropes, and occasions for thought and creativity. History and culture set the terms for this inquiry. As history changes, so do the ways animals participate in culture. Gorgeous Beasts offers a series of discontinuous but probing studies of the forms their participation takes. This collection presents the work of a wide range of scholars, critics, and thinkers from diverse disciplines: philosophy, literature, history, geography, economics, art history, cultural studies, and the visual arts. By approaching animals from such different perspectives, these essays broaden the scope of animal studies to include specialists and nonspecialists alike, inviting readers from all backgrounds to consider the place of animals in history and art. Combining provocative critical insights with arresting visual imagery, Gorgeous Beasts advances a challenging new appreciation of animals as co-inhabitants and co-creators of culture. Aside from the editors, the contributors are Dean Bavington, Ron Broglio, Mark Dion, Erica Fudge, Cecilia Novero, Harriet Ritvo, Nigel Rothfels, Sajay Samuel, and Pierre Serna.

Rodeo

Rodeo PDF Author: Susan Nance
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 080616705X
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 309

Book Description
"What would rodeo look like if we took it as a record, not of human triumph and resilience, but of human imperfection and stubbornness?” asks animal historian Susan Nance. Against the backdrop of the larger histories of ranching, cattle, horses, and the environment in the West, this book explores how the evolution of rodeo has reflected rural western beliefs and assumptions about the natural world that have led to environmental crises and served the beef empire. By unearthing behind-the-scenes stories of rodeo animals as diverse individuals, this book lays bare contradictions within rodeo and the rural West. For almost 150 years, westerners have used rodeo to symbolically reenact their struggles with animals and the land as uniformly progressive and triumphant. Nance upends that view with accounts of individual animals that reveal how diligently rodeo people have worked to make livestock into surrogates for the trials of rural life in the West and the violence in its history. Western horses and cattle were more than just props. Rodeo reclaims their lived history through compelling stories of anonymous roping steers and calves who inspired reform of the sport, such as the famed but abused bucker Steamboat, and the many broncs and bulls, famous or not, who unknowingly built an industry. Rodeo is a dangerous sport that reveals many westerners as people proudly tolerant of risk and violence, and ready to impose these values on livestock. In Rodeo: An Animal History, Nance pushes past standard histories and the sport’s publicity to show how rodeo was shot through with stubbornness and human failing as much as fortitude and community spirit.

Beastly Natures

Beastly Natures PDF Author: Dorothee Brantz
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813929474
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
Jacket.

Animal City

Animal City PDF Author: Andrew A. Robichaud
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 067491936X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Book Description
Why do America’s cities look the way they do? If we want to know the answer, we should start by looking at our relationship with animals. Americans once lived alongside animals. They raised them, worked them, ate them, and lived off their products. This was true not just in rural areas but also in cities, which were crowded with livestock and beasts of burden. But as urban areas grew in the nineteenth century, these relationships changed. Slaughterhouses, dairies, and hog ranches receded into suburbs and hinterlands. Milk and meat increasingly came from stores, while the family cow and pig gave way to the household pet. This great shift, Andrew Robichaud reveals, transformed people’s relationships with animals and nature and radically altered ideas about what it means to be human. As Animal City illustrates, these transformations in human and animal lives were not inevitable results of population growth but rather followed decades of social and political struggles. City officials sought to control urban animal populations and developed sweeping regulatory powers that ushered in new forms of urban life. Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals worked to enhance certain animals’ moral standing in law and culture, in turn inspiring new child welfare laws and spurring other wide-ranging reforms. The animal city is still with us today. The urban landscapes we inhabit are products of the transformations of the nineteenth century. From urban development to environmental inequality, our cities still bear the scars of the domestication of urban America.

The Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies

The Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies PDF Author: Linda Kalof
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199927146
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 641

Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies tackles the infamous "animal question" how can humans rethink and reconfigure their relationships with other animals? Over the course of five sections and thirty chapters, the contributors investigate issues and concepts central to understanding our current relationship with other animals and the potential for coexistence in an ecological community of living beings.

The City Is More Than Human

The City Is More Than Human PDF Author: Frederick L. Brown
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295999357
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Book Description
Winner of the 2017 Virginia Marie Folkins Award, Association of King County Historical Organizations (AKCHO) Winner of the 2017 Hal K. Rothman Book Prize, Western History Association Seattle would not exist without animals. Animals have played a vital role in shaping the city from its founding amid existing indigenous towns in the mid-nineteenth century to the livestock-friendly town of the late nineteenth century to the pet-friendly, livestock-averse modern city. When newcomers first arrived in the 1850s, they hastened to assemble the familiar cohort of cattle, horses, pigs, chickens, and other animals that defined European agriculture. This, in turn, contributed to the dispossession of the Native residents of the area. However, just as various animals were used to create a Euro-American city, the elimination of these same animals from Seattle was key to the creation of the new middle-class neighborhoods of the twentieth century. As dogs and cats came to symbolize home and family, Seattleites’ relationship with livestock became distant and exploitative, demonstrating the deep social contradictions that characterize the modern American metropolis. Throughout Seattle’s history, people have sorted animals into categories and into places as a way of asserting power over animals, other people, and property. In The City Is More Than Human, Frederick Brown explores the dynamic, troubled relationship humans have with animals. In so doing he challenges us to acknowledge the role of animals of all sorts in the making and remaking of cities.

Pets in America

Pets in America PDF Author: Katherine C. Grier
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 080787714X
Category : Pets
Languages : en
Pages : 390

Book Description
Entertaining and informative, Pets in America is a portrait of Americans' relationships with the cats, dogs, birds, fishes, rodents, and other animals we call our own. More than 60 percent of U.S. households have pets, and America grows more pet-friendly every day. But as Katherine C. Grier demonstrates, the ways we talk about and treat our pets--as companions, as children, and as objects of beauty, status, or pleasure--have their origins long ago. Grier begins with a natural history of animals as pets, then discusses the changing role of pets in family life, new standards of animal welfare, the problems presented by borderline cases such as livestock pets, and the marketing of both animals and pet products. She focuses particularly on the period between 1840 and 1940, when the emotional, behavioral, and commercial characteristics of contemporary pet keeping were established. The story is filled with the warmth and humor of anecdotes from period diaries, letters, catalogs, and newspapers. Filled with illustrations reflecting the whimsy, the devotion, and the commerce that have shaped centuries of American pet keeping, Pets in America ultimately shows how the history of pets has evolved alongside changing ideas about human nature, child development, and community life. This book accompanies a museum exhibit, "Pets in America," which opens at the McKissick Museum in Columbia, South Carolina, in December 2005 and will travel to five other cities from May 2006 through May 2008.
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