Abstract  

Tracing the interconnected transformations of cattle, land, and labor from the 18th-century
colonial Caribbean to the early national period of the 19th century to the present day, this book
demonstrates cows’ impacts upon nearly every major aspect of development in the Americas. This
included colonization, slavery, our ability to objectify animals we consume, our current foodways,
environmental degradation, and, eventually, the climate emergency. Bringing together research
from many fields, but proceeding with archival and historical sensibilities sometimes
underrepresented in animal studies, this book ultimately restores cattle as subjects of their own
lives who in seeking to escape exploitation have deeply affected the legal, property, and
geographical frameworks that haunt us today.

Bio 

Andrew Kettler, PhD, is Assistant Professor of History at the University of South Carolina-Palmetto College. His research focuses on sensory studies and critical theory. He is the author of The Smell of Slavery: Olfactory Racism and the Atlantic World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020) and Disenchanting the Senses: Sulfuric Discourse and the World System (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2025), co-author of The Once and Future Cow: Agency, Appetite, and
the Anthropocene (London: Bloomsbury, 2026), and coeditor of The Routledge History of the Senses (London: Routledge, 2025).

Charlton Yingling, PhD, FRHistS, is Associate Professor of History at the University of Louisville. He publishes on slavery and abolition, revolutions and reactions, and interspecies interactions across the Americas. He is author of Siblings of Soil: Dominicans and Haitians in the Age of Revolutions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2022), which received Honorable Mention for the 2023 Duarte Prize from the Latin American Studies Association Dominican-Haitian Section.
He has co-authored The Once and Future Cow: Agency, Appetite, and the Anthropocene (London: Bloomsbury, 2026) and Canine Power: A Violent History of Race & Resilience (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2027). He coedited Free Communities of Color and the Revolutionary Caribbean (London: Routledge, 2018). His research appears in Past & Present, Historical Journal, History Workshop Journal, English Historical Review, Atlantic Studies, Modern American History, and Early American Studies, among others.

Click here to register