Understanding the relationships between humans and animals is essential to a full understanding of both our present and our shared past. Across the humanities and social sciences, researchers have embraced the ‘animal turn,’ a multispecies approach to scholarship, with historians at the forefront of new research in human-animal studies that blends traditional research methods with interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks that decenter humans in historical narratives. These exciting approaches come with core methodological challenges for scholars seeking to better understand the past from non-anthropocentric perspectives.
Whether in a large public archive, a small private collection, or the oral histories of living memories, stories of animals are mediated by the humans who have inscribed the records and organized archival collections. In oral histories, the place of animals in the past are further refracted by the frailty of human memory and recollection. Only traces remain for researchers to read and interpret.
Bringing together seventeen original essays by a leading group of international scholars, Traces of the Animal Past showcases the innovative methods historians use to unearth and explain how animals fit into our collective histories. Situating the historian within the narrative, bringing transparency to methodological processes, and reflecting on the processes and procedures of current research, this book presents new approaches and new directions for a maturing field of historical inquiry.
Authors
- Pages
- 284
- Published in
- Calgary, CA
Table of Contents
- Front Cover 1
- Half Title Page 2
- Series Page 3
- Full Title Page 4
- Copyright Page 1
- Contents 6
- Introduction: Traces of the Animal Past 10
- PART I: Embodied Histories 26
- 1 | Kicking over the Traces?Freeing the Animal from the Archive 28
- 2 | Occupational Hazards: Honeybee Labour as an Interpretive Device in Animal History 58
- 3 | Hearing History through Hoofbeats: Exploring Equine Volition and Voice in the Archive 82
- PART II:Traces 98
- 4 | Who is a Greyhound?Reflections on the Non-Human Digital Archive 100
- 5 | Accessing Animal Health Knowledge: Popular Educators and Veterinary Science in Rural Ontario 126
- 6 | Animal Cruelty, Metaphoric Narrative, and the Hudson’s Bay Company, 1919–1939 146
- PART III:The Unknowable Animal 164
- 7 | Vanishing Flies and the Lady Entomologist 166
- 8 | Guinea Pig Agnotology 184
- 9 | Tuffy’s Cold War: Science, Memory, and the US Navy’s Dolphin 208
- 10 | The Elephant in the Archive 226
- PART IV: Spatial Sources and Animal Movement 242
- 11 | Making Tracks: A Grizzly and Entangled History 244
- 12 | Spatial Analysis and Digital Urban Animal History 278
- 13 | Visualizing the Animal City: Digital Experiments in Animal History 300
- 14 | What’s a Guanaco? Tracing the Llama Diaspora through and beyond South America 324
- PART V: Looking at Animals 346
- 15 | Hidden in Plain Sight: How Art and Visual Culture Can Help Us Think about Animal Histories 348
- 16 | Creatures on Display: Making an Animal Exhibitat the Archives of Ontario 366
- 17 | Portraits of Extinction: Encountering Bluebuck Narratives in the Natural History Museum 380
- Epilogue: Combinations and Conjunction 398
- Contributors 412
- Index 418
- Back Cover 430