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 cour...

Grounded in critical theory, southern studies, archival methodologies, and anticolonial thought, Record, Document, Archive illuminates how the U.S. South is made knowable through the acts, objects, and systems that produce records, documents, and archives. Rather than treating “the South” as a fixed geography or predetermined object of study, this innovative, forward-thinking collection reframes region as an ontological and epistemological project shaped by—and resistant to—Euroce...

Leisure, Plantations, and the Making of New South investigates the social, architectural, and environmental history of sporting plantations in the South Carolina lowcountry and the Red Hills region of southeast Georgia and northern Florida. Although plantations figure prominently in histories of the post-emancipation South, historians have paid little attention to the redevelopment of plantations for non-agricultural use. By examining the two largest concentrations of sporting plantations ...

Films possess virtually unlimited power for crafting broad interpretations of American history. Nineteenth-century America has proven especially conducive to Hollywood imaginations, producing indelible images like the plight of Davy Crockett and the defenders of the Alamo, Pickett’s doomed charge at Gettysburg, the proliferation and destruction of plantation slavery in the American South, Custer’s fateful decision to divide his forces at Little Big Horn, and the onset of immigration and in...

This national bestseller exploring the complex emotional lives of animals was hailed as "a masterpiece" by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas and as "marvelous" by Jane Goodall.The popularity of When Elephants Weep has swept the nation, as author Jeffrey Masson appeared on Dateline NBC, Good Morning America, and was profiled in People for his ground-breaking and fascinating study. Not since Darwin's The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals

“Compulsively readable—a masterpiece, maybe the masterpiece of science journalism.” —Bill McKibben, AudubonA brilliant, stirring work, breathtaking in its scope and far-reaching in its message, The Song of the Dodo is a crucial book in precarious times. Through personal observation, scientific theory, and history, David Quammen examines the mysteries of evolution and extinction and radically alters our understanding of the natural world a...

"An eloquent polemic against human abuse of animals, culminating with a devastating description of factory farming." —Peter Singer, The New York Review of BooksIn Dominion, we witness the annual convention of Safari Club International, an organization whose wealthier members will pay up to $20,000 to hunt an elephant, a lion or another animal, either abroad or in American "safari ranches," where the animals are fenced in pens. We...

J. M. Adovasio has spent the last thirty years at the center of one of our most fiery scientific debates: Who were the first humans in the Americas, and how and when did they get there?At its heart, The First Americans is the story of the revolution in thinking that Adovasio and his fellow archaeologists have brought about, and the firestorm it has ignited. As he writes, “The work of lifetimes has been put at risk, reputations have been damaged, an astounding amount of sil...

“Surprising. Impressive. Cannibalism restores my faith in humanity.” —Sy Montgomery, The New York Times Book ReviewFor centuries scientists have written off cannibalism as a bizarre phenomenon with little biological significance. Its presence in nature was dismissed as a desperate response to starvation or other life-threatening circumstances, and few spent time studying it. A taboo subject in our culture, the behavior was portray...

Wild elephants walking along a trail stop and spontaneously try toprotect and assist a weak and dying fellow elephant. Laboratory rats,finding other rats caged nearby in distressing circumstances, proceed torescue them. A chimpanzee in a zoo loses his own life trying to save anunrelated infant who has fallen into a watery moat.Theexamples above and many others, argues Dale Peterson, show that ourfellow creatures have powerful impulses towar...

T****he monumental statues of Easter Island, both so magisterial and so forlorn, gazing out in their imposing rows over the island’s barren landscape, have been the source of great mystery ever since the island was first discovered by Europeans on Easter Sunday 1722. How could the ancient people who inhabited this tiny speck of land, the most remote in the vast expanse of the Pacific islands, have built such monumental works? No such astonishing numbers of massive statues ...

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s groundbreaking bestseller, When Elephants Weep, was the first book since Darwin’s time to explore emotions in the animal kingdom, particularly from animals in the wild. Now, he focuses exclusively on the contained world of the farm animal, revealing startling, irrefutable evidence that barnyard creatures have feelings too, even consciousness.Weaving history, literature, anecdotes, scientific studies, and Masson’s own vivid experiences observing ...