Pets in America: A History is the first interpretive history of pet keeping in the United States. The book traces this special relationship between people and nonhuman animals from the late eighteenth century to the present. It gives particular emphasis to the era between 1820 and 1930, when the emotional, behavioral, and commercial characteristics of modern pet keeping developed.

In 1999, an estimated 61 per cent of American households contained at least one pet animal. Everyone has an opinion on pet keeping, yet we don't really know why the practice became so widespread in America. Pets in America sets pet keeping in the context of changing ideas about the characteristics of a good society, in new patterns of family life, and in the development of the United States as a consumer society.

How does a historian do research on the history of pet keeping in the past? I have made use of a wide range of written sources. Diaries, letters, and memoirs sometimes contain accounts of pet animals. Sometimes old city records survive for dog licensing. Popular magazines in the nineteenth century and early twentieth, especially those directed to children, are full of fiction, poetry, advice, and pictures about pets. After 1890, a sizable literature offering advice on how to take care of pet animals developed, including scores of free booklets by the new companies that made food, medicine, and other products for pet animals.

Artifacts are also an important way to reconstruct the everyday routines and feelings of pet keepers; think of them as fossils of past behavior. Painted and photographic portraits of animals, popular prints and advertising trade cards, cages and aquaria, collars, dog clothing, special dishes, pet toys, surviving containers for patent medicines or commercial foods, and pet cemeteries all contain information about the everyday experience of having and caring for pet animals.