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?

Product Description: Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2008A Cultural History of Animals is a multi-volume project on the history of human-animal relations from ancient times to the present. The set of six volumes covers 4500 years of human-animal interaction...read more

Product Description: Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2008. The period of the Enlightenment saw great changes in the way animals were seen. The codifying and categorizing impulse of the age of reason saw sharp lines drawn between different animal species and between animals and humans...read more

Product Description: Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2008. A Cultural History of Animals in the Medieval Age investigates the changing roles of animals in medieval culture, economy and society in the period 1000 to 1400. The period saw significant changes in scientific and philosophical approaches to animals as well as their representation in art...read more

This volume explores the cultural position of animals in the period from 1800 to 1920. This was a time of extraordinary social, political and economic change as the Western world rapidly industrialized and modernized. The Enlightenment had attempted to define the human self; the Age of Empire pulled animals and humans further apart.As with all the volumes in the illustrated Cultural History of Animals, this volume presents an overview of the period and continues with essays on the position of animals in contemporary Symbolism, Hunting, Domestication, Sports and Entertainment, Science, Philosophy, and Art.Volume 5 in the Cultural History of Animals edited by Linda Kalof and Brigitte Resl

Product Description: Although the animal may be, as Nietzsche argued, ahistorical, living completely in the present, it nonetheless plays a crucial role in human history. The fascination with animals that leads not only to a desire to observe and even live alongside them, but to capture or kill them, is found in all civilizations...read more