Cats: A History

Name: Cats: A History
Brand: Johns Hopkins University Press
SKU: 9781421454184
Price: 39.54 USD
Availability: InStock

$39.54

Product Variants

Commendation Quotes:
Paradoxically, the ubiquity of cats has restricted rather than compelled interrogations into the origins and characteristics of this specific human-animal relationship. Their everywhere-ness has somehow made us incurious. Phillips's book comprehensively corrects this major oversight in a fascinating and deeply satisfying manner. You love cats, and now you know why.
--Greger Larson, University of Oxford

Review Quotes:
Cats have gotten a bad rap through history: they've been persecuted, cursed, and thought to be cursed... But Phillips doesn't just bring that information along in his book: readers will see how felines have had their place in religion, politics, gender, and other facets of human life, and how the presence of a cat in your house can help understand how you feel about dogs, mice and rats, and about other humans.
-- The Bookworm Sez

Commendation Quotes:
This is a readable and clearsighted book that tracks the histories of cats-of all stripes-from their earliest origins to their ubiquitous presence in twenty-first-century social media. Engagingly written, the book tells the story of the ups and downs in cat-human relationships through a wealth of detailed evidence and fascinating first-hand accounts.
--Jane Hamlett, author of Pet Revolution: Animals and the Making of Modern British Life

Review Quotes:
[A]n exhaustive and engrossing survey of the millennia-long relationship between cats and people... traces the process of their rise with aplomb, from Ancient Greece to Grumpy Cat.
-- Foreword Reviews

Table of Contents:

Contents
Preface
Introduction
1. From Wildcats to Cats
2. Ancient Egypt: A Celebration of Cats
3. Ancient Greece and Rome: The Ambiguity of Cats
4. The Middle Ages: Cats in the Secular World
5. The Middle Ages: Cats and Religion
6. Early Modern Europe: Cats as Disruptors
7. The Enlightenment: Thinking About Cats
8. Cats Go Global, 1500-1900
9. The War on Cats in the Nineteenth Century
10. Defending Cats in the Nineteenth Century
11. Pet Cats on the Rise in the Twentieth Century
12. Cats in the Modern World: Here to Stay?
Acknowledgments
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Promotional Headline:

A sweeping and fascinating history of cat-human relationships.

Commendation Quotes:
A readable and clearsighted book that tracks the histories of cats of all stripes from their earliest origins to their ubiquitous presence in twenty-first-century social media. Engagingly written, the book tells the story of the ups and downs in cat-human relationships through a wealth of detailed evidence and fascinating first-hand accounts.
--Jane Hamlett, coauthor of Pet Revolution: Animals and the Making of Modern British Life

Commendation Quotes:
Cats tells the story of changing cat-human relations in an engaging and sophisticated manner, starting with domestication and ending in the present day. The chapters are like a series of learned lectures, where readers will enjoy both a grand narrative and entertaining illustrations.
--Michael Worboys, coauthor of The Invention of the Modern Dog: Breed and Blood in Victorian Britain

Commendation Quotes:
A readable and clear-sighted book that tracks the histories of cats of all stripes from their earliest origins to their ubiquitous presence in twenty-first-century social media. Engagingly written, the book tells the story of the ups and downs in cat-human relationships through a wealth of detailed evidence and fascinating first-hand accounts.
--Jane Hamlett, coauthor of Pet Revolution: Animals and the Making of Modern British Life

Biographical Note:

Rod Phillips is a professor of history at Carleton University. He is the author of Alcohol: A History and A New History of Divorce.

Review Quotes:
Whether family or foe, cats remain uniquely inscrutable. But though we cannot fully understand them, this fascinating book helps us better understand ourselves.
-- Literary Review of Canada

Publisher Marketing:

A sweeping and fascinating history of cat-human relationships.

For more than 10,000 years, cats have prowled at the edges of human life. But, starting only a few decades ago, hundreds of millions of them became pets. In Cats, Rod Phillips shares a sweeping cultural and social history of felines, tracing their shifting place across societies and centuries, from ancient Egypt's revered hunters to Europe's suspected familiars of witches and from shipboard rodent controllers to cherished internet icons.

Phillips illustrates how cats have always occupied spaces both familiar and mysterious and how their perceived independence and disruptive nature--and their associations with women, the supernatural, and outsiders--have shaped humans' attitudes toward these fascinating creatures. Cats have been lauded as companions and vermin-killers, reviled as threats to moral and ecological order, and cherished for the very qualities that make them hard to control. This richly textured portrait of cats explores their significance in religion, politics, gender, literature, warfare, and pop culture. It also provides profound insights into our relationships with other animals, especially dogs and rodents.

The many roles that cats have played throughout history illuminate a variety of contradictions in humans' perceptions of them: as affectionate yet aloof, adorable and evil, ordinary and exceptional. This book is the definitive story of the feline presence in human history--an elegant study of how we live with animals whom we see as living by their own rules.

Review Citations:

Library Journal 04/01/2026 pg. 85 (EAN 9781421454184, Hardcover)
Foreword 04/27/2026 (EAN 9781421454184, Hardcover)

Contributor Bio:Phillips, Rod
Rod Phillips is a professor of history at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. He is the author of Alcohol: A History and A New History of Divorce.