The Historical Animal

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?