The Historical Animal ed. by Susan Nance (review)

"Animals are everywhere, and there has never been a purely human moment in world history" (5). So declares Susan Nance in The Historical Animal, a fascinating, timely anthology that highlights the burgeoning interest in animal history over the past few decades, as once seemingly solid boundaries between humans and animals have begun to erode. A growing appreciation of the sophisticated cognitive and emotional lives of nonhumans, the discovery that human bodies are colonized by an extensive microbiota on which we depend to remain healthy, the proliferation of recombinant DNA techniques that allow gene insertions across species boundaries, and the pervasive practice of pet keeping are just a few of the many developments that have offered challenges to the Cartesian dualism that has dominated Western ideas about the presumed gulf between humans and animals since the Scientific Revolution.

Reflecting this boundary effacement, the subfield of animal history seeks to "document the lives of historical animals as an intrinsically valuable history through which we can better understand humans and nonhumans" (3). Nance asserts that practitioners of this subfield pursue interdisciplinary methods, ask new questions, find novel sources, re-examine old ones, and move beyond the previous framing of history in which animals are typically seen as timeless, static, and passive objects of human ideas and actions, if they are considered at all. In short, animal historians emphasize that nonhumans have had agency in history and "recognize and document the degree to which all history is inherently inter-specific" (5). Drawing from a variety of methodological traditions, the contributors to The Historical Animal present the stories of numerous (though overwhelmingly mammalian) species that span across time and space.

The chapters in section 1, "Historicizing Animals," provide engaging accounts of animals as malleable, sentient beings embedded in specific historical and geographical contexts. Jason Colby begins by documenting the growing public concern about the plight of orcas in the Pacific Northwest, charismatic cetaceans whose bodies began showing increasing signs of injury at the hands of humans who sought to mark them for scientific study and capture them for exhibition in popular animal theme parks. Abraham H. Gibson shows how the burro population in the western United States exploded following the mining boom that began in the mid-19^th century. As miners exhausted local mineral deposits and mechanization took hold in the industry, however, many of these animals were turned loose to become feral populations whose fluctuating populations threatened to overgraze fragile desert lands, provoking fierce debates about whether to protect or exterminate them. Sandra Swart explores efforts to revive the extinct quagga, a subspecies of the plains zebra from South Africa, using selective breeding of closely related species. While that initiative created an animal that visually appears quite similar to the quagga, Swart questions whether we should privilege sight over other sensory experiences, like sound, especially when vocalizations seem so crucial for maintaining social organization among equids.

One of the challenges the subfield of animal history faces is that our institutional repositories have been constructed to document human rather than animal agency. "Archives and the Animal Trace," the second section of The Historical Animal, explores how to extract more about animal life from traditional sources while suggesting new kinds of evidence we might seek from animals themselves. Zeb Tortorici documents his efforts to mine Mexico's national archive for signs of nonhuman life, with a focus on the manuscript translation of an intriguing eighteenth French philosophical text on animal sentience. Lisa Cox, an archivist at the C.A.V. Barker Museum at the Ontario Veterinary Museum, demonstrates the potential of using her institution's veterinary medical collection to reconstruct the physicality and experiences of domesticated animals. Rounding out this section, Concepci on Cortés Zulueta explores how non-humans might understand the past through an examination of a captive primate's account, using modified American Sign Language, of his mother's death and his own capture.

While the assertion of animal agency runs throughout the anthology, the chapters in...