Overview

Can corals build worlds? Do rattlesnakes enchant? What is a raccoon, and what might it know? Animals and the questions they raised thwarted human efforts to master nature during the so-called Enlightenment--a historical moment when rigid classification pervaded the study of natural history, people traded in people, and imperial avarice wrapped its tentacles around the globe. Whitney Barlow Robles makes animals the unruly protagonists of eighteenth-century science through journeys to four spaces and ecological zones: the ocean, the underground, the curiosity cabinet, and the field. Her forays reveal a forgotten lineage of empirical inquiry, one that forced researchers to embrace uncertainty. This tumultuous era in the history of human-animal encounters still haunts modern biologists and ecologists as they who struggle to fathom animals today. In an eclectic fusion of history and nature writing, Robles alternates between careful historical investigations and probing personal narratives. These excavations of the past and present of distinct nonhuman creatures reveal the animal foundations of human knowledge and show why tackling our current environmental crisis first requires looking back in time.

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Whitney Barlow Robles is an award-winning writer, historian, and curator based in Raleigh, North Carolina. She received her PhD in American studies from Harvard University. Her work has appeared in venues such as William and Mary Quarterly, New England Quarterly, and Commonplace. Daniela Acitelli is an American dual national and calls both California and London home. She spends her days narrating not only thrillers, but many time-travel books, edgy fiction and romance titles filled with quirky characters that break your heart. With her distinctive husky tone, she specializes in building suspense while bringing a gritty, edgy voice to thriller, horror, time-travel, and sci-fi novels. A classically trained actress, Daniela has a circus background and is a trained red nose clown.

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