Historical Animal Geographies

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.

Sharon Wilcox is the Associate Director for the Center for Culture, History, and Environment in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research explores the ways in which conceptions of place and value are constructed for terrestrial mammalian predator species in historical and contemporary contexts. She is the author of the forthcoming monograph, Jaguars of Empire: Natural History in the New World. Stephanie Rutherford is an Associate Professor in the School of the Environment at Trent University in Canada. Her research inhabits the intersections among the environmental humanities, animal geography, and posthumanism. She is currently writing a book on the history of wolves in Canada. She is also the author of Governing the Wild: Ecotours of Power and co-editor (with Jocelyn Thorpe and L. Anders Sandberg) of Methodological Challenges in Nature-Culture and Environmental History Research (Routledge, 2016).

1. Introduction: A Meeting Place (Stephanie Rutherford and Sharon Wilcox) Part I The Home - Shared Spaces of Cohabitation 2. When did Pets Become Animals? (Philip Howell) 3. The Entwined Socioecological Histories of the Sawtelle, California War Veterans and the Animal "Menagerie" at the Pacific Branch Soldier's Home (1888-1918) (Teresa Lloro-Bidart) 4. Shaking the Ground: Histories of Earthworms from Darwin to Niche Construction (Camilla Royle) Part II The City - Historical Animals In and Out of Sight 5. Zoöpolis (Jennifer Wolch) 6. Kansas City: The Morphology of an American Zoöpolis through Film (Julie Urbanik) 7. The Strange Case of the Missing Slaughterhouse Geographies (Chris Philo and Ian MacLachlan) 8. The Pigs are Back Again: Urban Pig Keeping in Wartime Britain, 1939-45 (Thomas Webb) Part III The Nation - Historical Animal Bodies and Human Identities 9. Rebel Elephants: Resistance through Human-Elephant Partnerships (Jennifer Mateer) 10. Western Horizons, Animal Becomings: Race, Species, and the Troubled Boundaries of the Human in the Era of American Expansionism (Dominik Ohrem) 11. For the Love of Life: Coal Mining and Pit Bull Fighting in Early 19th-Century Britain (Heidi J. Nast) Part IV The Global - Imperial Networks and the Movements of Animals 12. Migration, Assimilation, and Invasion in the Nineteenth Century (Harriet Ritvo) 13. Runaways and Strays: Rethinking (Non)Human Agency in Caribbean Slave Societies (David Lambert) Epilogue 14. Finding Our Way in the Anthropocene (Stephanie Rutherford)