Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Lion's Historian: Africa's Animal Past

The Lion's Historian: Africa's Animal Past

Swart, Sandra

Paperback

Environmental StudiesGeneral Racism & Ethnic StudiesOther Animals

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0821426257
ISBN13: 9780821426258
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: May 6 2025
Pages: 392
Weight: 1.30
Height: 1.00 Width: 6.10 Depth: 9.20
Language: English

Until the lion has a historian of his own, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. Sandra Swart takes up the challenge of that African proverb and, with this book, becomes the lion's historian. As a species, humans are not alone; but our history has been written as though we were. Swart insists on a multispecies retelling of our more-than-human past as she reconstructs a shifting series of significant interspecies relationships, from quirky, idiosyncratic connections to others that triggered major changes. Embracing a radical interdisciplinarity informed by a background in history and environmental studies, Swart combines the natural sciences with the social sciences, oral history, indigenous knowledge, and archival research. She blends current thinking about animal sentience, agency, cognition, and emotion to offer a new way to understand animals' role in our shared history. The animals in this book--baboons, cows, elephants, hippos, horses, jackals, lions, Nazi cattle, okapi, police dogs, quagga, sheep, and white ants--exemplify different facets of our shared past. With this animal-centric lens, decades of research are brought together in a collection that takes animals seriously. It is a book with claws and fangs, tearing through conventional narratives to ask, Are we prepared to move beyond the convention that history is the story of only our own species? The entanglements between humans and other animals have shaped our past, but they suggest something more. The possibility of our shared future pivots on a reckoning with our shared pasts. Swart shows what human-animal history can do, not only to understand our place in the world better but to make our world--however slightly--a better place.

Also from

Swart, Sandra

View All

Also in

Environmental Studies

View All