UC Press is excited to announce the forthcoming publication of Animal History, a quarterly, online journal from the editorial team of historians Thomas Aiello (Valdosta State University), Susan Nance (University of Guelph), and Daniel Vandersommers (University of Dayton). Animal History will publish its first issue in early 2025, and is now accepting manuscript submissions.
The following is an excerpt from their introductory essay, Animal History: A Brief Introduction to Its Past and Future. For more about the journal, please visit Animal History’s journal home at online.ucpress.edu.
Why Animal History?
The first issue of a new scholarly journal is an important moment to mark out the state of the field, its past, and possible future goals. Animal History is dedicated to cultivating and featuring rigorous and innovative research on the histories of human-animal relationships and nonhuman pasts, acting as a “home base,” so to speak, for the field. It seeks to serve historians certainly, but also humanities, social science, and science researchers looking for empirical studies and animal-centered methodologies, as well as reviews of new publications in the field and allied disciplines.
As a field of research, animal history very generally consists of two main, intertwined branches. First there is “animal lens” history that employs animals and their representations as a vehicle for understanding sometimes overlooked realms of human activity, human-animal relationships and co-evolutionary processes, and/or people’s ideas about and uses of animals in a given context. Second, supported by that work, there is research documenting historical animals’ lives themselves, often employing environmental or animal science literature to interpret historical sources.
We recognize that historians working in the field bring with them a diverse range of personal ethics and politics. One may proceed from a desire to integrate ethical perspectives and philosophical questions about animals into one’s research, for instance, believing animals to be intrinsically valuable such that their history is too. Still others understand that historical animals matter to us because they mattered to historical people. In that vein, animal history offers an opportunity to produce accounts of the past that are more comprehensive, accurate, and ethical.
What follows is some context—a brief history of animal history, some thoughts on the unique interdisciplinarity of the field, and some words on the potential futures for historical animal studies.
“Some parts of animals are simple, and these can be divided into like parts.” Thus begins the first systematic Western attempt at what was nominally called an animal history. Aristotle’s Historia Animalium, however, laid the groundwork for what today we would call zoology, not “history.” Championing observation, he classified animals into different groups, described their physiognomy and physiology, and documented their habits and habitats. He analyzed various modes of reproduction, migration, and food acquisition. And he attempted to gauge the intelligence and sociability of different animals, using, of course, a decidedly human measuring stick. The vast differences between Aristotle’s “history” of animals and contemporary histories of animals are partly due to the disaggregating of academic disciplines—especially the so-called Sciences and Humanities—across the early modern centuries. But the divide between different definitions of “history” was surely detectable well before the common era. For example, less than a century prior to Historia Animalium, Thucydides published History of the Peloponnesian War. In no part of that narrative did the Athenian historian break down the “simple parts” of human soldiers. There are salacious passages, but never does the text engage in a comparative analysis of the modes of reproduction between its true subjects, the Spartans and the Athenians. Instead, Thucydides provided details about the conflicts between two city-states and contextualized them as an outgrowth of estranged political and social dynamics. These works of Aristotle and Thucydides were called histories, but they were doing two decidedly different things because they centered two decidedly different beings, humans and animals.
Animal History publishes cutting-edge historical research on the histories of animals and human-animal relationships, documenting the impacts animals have had on global histories, cultures, languages, technologies, and environments as well as the impacts that humans have had on animals and their pasts, cultures, and lives.
online.ucpress/edu/ah