"This is not a work just for woud-be specialists. By emphasizing contingency and the role of livestock as actors in specific historical events, Anderson has demonstrated that animals should concern all historians of early America."--Geoffrey Plank, The William and Mary Quarterly "This fine book delivers on all counts. Anderson deftly moves beyond standard environmental histories into new and richer territory. This book is a well-researched, well-written, and powerfully synthetic study of an intriguing facet of early American history."--The Journal of Southern History "Anderson's book is necessary reading for anyone who wants to understand colonial history. She has, in my estimation, read all the relevant original sources, assessed them wisely and written her opinions in clear and sometimes eloquent prose."--American Historical Review "Anderson's book is necessary reading for anyone who wants to understand colonial history. She has, in my estimation, read all the relevant original sources, assessed them wisely and written her opinions in clear and sometimes eloquent prose."--American Historical Review "A most original, gracefully written, and thoroughly fascinating exploration of Colonial history."--Michael Kenney, The Boston Globe "Not since Keith Thomas's... Man and the Natural World has a work so skilfully explored what attitudes towards nature and its creatures reveal about a culture.... A rare instance of a book that can make us look again at aspects of the historical landscape which have long been taken for granted."--The Times Literary Supplement "An engaging study of relations among livestock, English colonists, and Algonquian-speaking peoples in two 17th-century settings: New England and the eastern Chesapeake Bay."--The Chronicle of Higher Education "Long before Mrs. O'Leary's fabled cow, European domestic animals were shaping American history; the introduction of Spanish horses is only the start of an intriguing story. Creatures of Empire--wonderfully researched and gracefully written--explores the complex interactions between Native Americans, English settlers, and domestic animals. Virginia Andersons fine new book is especially provocative in explaining the impact of foreign livestock on Indian lands and lives. She helps us to understand wandering cattle and rooting swine not as bit players, but as major actors in the colonial American drama."--Peter H. Wood, Duke University "Beautifully written, with great wit as well as great insight, Creatures of Empire opens a genuinely fresh perspective on the ecological and cultural development of North America. Thanks to Virginia Anderson, we will never again think about the historical role of domestic animals in quite the same way."--Daniel K. Richter, University of Pennsylvania "With this provocative thesis, Anderson argues that livestock were pivotal historical actors that continually altered Native American-English settler relationships in 17th-century southern New England and tidewater Virginia. Drawing extensively from historical sources to illuminate English beliefs that livestock husbandry epitomized civilization, Anderson richly details Native Americans' and colonists' competing conceptions of nature, land use, and property rights and settlers' domesticated and feral livestock, which provided the pretext for lethal conflicts between the English and Native Americans. Though the thesis is debatable, scholars and interested lay readers will enjoy Anderson's lively, readable narrative. Recommended for academic and public libraries."--Library Journal "As Anderson notes in the prologue to this unique book, based on thorough mining of historical writings, the idea for it came from trying to understand why references to livestock appear so often in documents from the early history of the English colonies. Could an understanding of the interactions between humans and livestock, and of the changes wrought on the landscape by the keeping of that livestock, help explain the pattern of colonization? Indians possessed no domestic animals save dogs, and had no understanding of animals as property. The colonists, pressed for time in creating their new way of life, left their livestock to roam and care for themselves. The inevitable clash between the Indians and the colonists' livestock, coupled with the fact that this style of free-range husbandry required more and more land as the animals reproduced, early on established a pattern of appropriation of Indian land for the care of the colonists' beasts."--Booklist "As Virginia DeJohn Anderson convincingly shows, livestock 'incapable of making plans' repeatedly forced both English settlers and native peoples to change their plans and their behavior. This book will change the way historians understand the quotidian dynamics of English colonization in North America." --Mary Beth Norton, author of In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 "Creatures of Empire offers a compelling account of the impact of domesticated livestock on native/settler relations in colonial New England and the Chesapeake during the seventeenth century. Anderson addresses a broad range of cultural issues that place human relationships with animals, and not just the animals themselves, at the core of her story. Creatures of Empire is highly recommended to anyone interested in colonial or environmental history. Anderson has produced a very readable, elucidating, and incisive piece of work."--H-Environment, Philip Jacques Dreyfus, San Francisco State University "[A] smart and fascinating study of the role of farm animals in seventeenth-century American society. With a clear sense of where she's going and how to get there, Virginia DeJohn Anderson skillfully shepherds us through a familiar time and territory that we thought had already been grazed over far too many times, leading us into greener intellectual pastures that give us plenty of fresh ideas to chew on. [Anderson] offers one of the most sustained studies of the ways Native Americans and English colonizers thought about animals and, by extension, about each other. A clear, compelling, and sometimes surprising case that the barnyard can no longer be mere background in the study of early America."--Gregory Nobles, CommonPlace "This fine book delivers on all counts. Anderson deftly moves beyond standard environmental histories into new and richer territory. This book is a well-researched, well-written, and powerfully synthetic study of an intriguing facet of early American history."--The Journal of Southern History "An excellent historical study that illuminates the role of domestic animals in colonial times and provides sometimes surprising insights into the village-level tensions between English settlers and Native Americans."--Richard Bulliet, Columbia University, Environmental History

Virginia DeJohn Anderson is Associate Professor of History at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is the author of New England's Generation and co-author (with David Goldfield, et al.) of The American Journey: A History of the United States.