Animal Histories of the Civil War Era

Earl J. Hess is the former Stewart W. McClelland Chair in History at Lincoln Memorial University. He is the author of nearly two dozen books on the American Civil War, including Civil War Logistics: A Study of Military Transportation.

"Animal Histories of the Civil War Era is a much-anticipated volume on a crucial period in American animal history. The collection's contributors offer thought-provoking analyses of the war and its aftermath to expose how the nation's greatest political crisis was equally transformational for, and because of, nonhuman life. From work horses to bees, hogs to alligators, dogs to the captives of the nascent zoo industry, the essays reveal historical animals in vivid detail as living beings shaped by their times, with all the contradictions and ethical dilemmas that entailed. These innovative and compelling historical studies will be invaluable for scholars and students alike." --Susan Nance, professor of history at the University of Guelph and author of Rodeo: An Animal History "By foregrounding animals, this volume signposts one of the most significant developments in contemporary historiography. Its striking perspective on the Civil War era demonstrates that we cannot fully understand our past without reference to the animals that have lived and died around us. Camels, enslavers dreamed, would carry their institution westward. Horses and mules were essential to battlefield mobility. Ferocious bloodhounds policed a slave society at war. Southern hogs filled the bellies of Yankee foragers. Mascots and pets comforted and inspired, earning 'veteran' status. The bee brought sweetness, the lice disease. These are remarkable and revelatory essays." --Gervase Phillips, principal lecturer in history at Manchester Metropolitan University "It is not often that a group of historians make a wholly original contribution to the vast literature on the American Civil War era. Earl J. Hess and his team have earned this coveted distinction. This volume is sure to spark a vibrant new scholarship on a well-trod historiographical landscape." --Andrew F. Lang, associate professor of history at Mississippi State University and author of In the Wake of War: Military Occupation, Emancipation, and Civil War America "This is a timely addition to both the growing body of scholarship in animal studies and the recent florescence of work on the environmental aspects of the Civil War era. The innovative essays fill out the broader context of how nineteenth-century Americans lived their lives. Twenty-first-century Americans rarely have contact with animals, except as pets, and so these authors enrich our knowledge of the past by highlighting the roles of non-human actors in events both momentous and ordinary, in humans' views of the world and of themselves." --Erin Stewart Mauldin, author of Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South