Susan Nance – författare

The conventional history of animals could be more accurately described asthe history of human ideas about animals. Only in the last few decades havescholars from a wide variety of disciplines attempted to document the lives ofhistorical animals in ways that recognize their agency as sentient beings withcomplex intelligence. This collection advances the field further, inviting us toexamine our recorded history through an animal-centric lens to discover howanimals have altered the course of our collective past. The seventeen scholars gathered here present case studies from the PacificOcean, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, involving species ranging from gorillasand horses to salamanders and orcas. Together they seek out new methodologies,questions, and stories that challenge accepted historical assumptionsand structures. Drawing upon environmental, social, and political history, thecontributors employ research from such wide-ranging fields as philosophy andveterinary medicine, embracing a radical interdisciplinarity that is crucial tounderstanding our nonhuman past. Grounded in the knowledge that there has never been a purely human timein world history, this collection asks and answers an incredibly urgent questionfor historians and others interested in the nonhuman past: in an age of massextinctions, mass animal captivity, and climate change, when we know muchof what animals have done in the past, which of our activities will we want tochange in the future?

The transformation of the American West is one of the key topics in the study of both US history and global environmental history. The role of ranching in the West is also central to the growing field of animal history. This volume covers the periods between the early Indigenous acquisition of horses in the eighteenth century, to the introduction of Hispanic horsemanship techniques and market cattle in the “Old West,” and finally to the work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century ranching families sustaining their ways of life.

The documents in this volume reveal not simply the human past but also the distinct histories of cattle, horses, and the land. Readers will explore intersecting themes of capitalism and beef, environmental change, rural labor, and gender and racial politics as debated by westerners themselves, as well as the meaning and power of the cowboy myth in American life. The introduction incorporates recent scholarship and provides a fresh look at this key topic in American history, while informative headnotes and rich annotations help orient the reader within the historical sources.