When she couldn't find hiking boots that fit, Laura White Brunner explored Yosemite backcountry barefoot, and at times alone, in an era when grizzly bears still roamed the park. When told she couldn't hike in pants, she pinned up her skirt. Brunner showed admirable pluck, but, more remarkably, she did it as a teenager in the 1910s-and she wrote it all down. Her memoir, recovered from the Yosemite archives and published here for the first time, recounts two summers spent working and hiking in Yosemite Valley during a time of great change-in the park and in the world beyond. In captivating prose Brunner describes her unlikely adventures in the summers of 1915 and 1917, as well as what she calls "the interlude" between them. Sometimes funny, sometimes painful, always engaging, her account captures the "trails" and tribulations of a young woman coming of age in America's most beautiful national park. Lightly edited and put into biographical, geographical, and historical context by Jared N. Champion, the book is also illustrated with historic photographs, many taken by Brunner herself. It provides an indelible picture of a bygone time, of awakening young womanhood in a pristine natural world just opening to tourism on a grand scale. Late in life, Laura White Brunner (1899-1973) told a reporter that she had always wanted to be a national park ranger, but, sadly, was "born too soon." Nonetheless she made Yosemite her own-in her hiking, photographs, and memoir, but also in a practical sense, when her ascent of Half Dome by the "Clothes-Line Rope" inspired the park administration, who feared more women might summit the monolith, to install the iconic "Cables on Half Dome" route that remains in place today. Brunner went on to a career in journalism and though she tried for decades to publish her memoir, this is its first appearance in print.

The first edited volume of work by the legendary undercover journalist
Born Elizabeth Jane Cochran, Nellie Bly was one of the first and best female journalists in America and quickly became a national phenomenon in the late 1800s, with a board game based on her adventures and merchandise inspired by the clothes she wore. Bly gained fame for being the first "girl stunt reporter," writing stories that no one at the time thought a woman could or should write, including an expose of patient treatment at an insane asylum and a travelogue from her record-breaking race around the world without a chaperone. This volume, the only printed and edited collection of Bly's writings, includes her best known works--"Ten Days in a Mad-House," "Six Months in Mexico," and "Around the World in Seventy-Two Days"--as well as many lesser known pieces that capture the breadth of her career from her fierce opinion pieces to her remarkable World War I reporting. As 2014 marks the 150th anniversary of Bly's work, this collection celebrates her work, spirit, and vital place in history.

The early seventeenth-century traveler Thomas Coryate's five-month tour of Western Europe culminated in Coryats Crudities, one of the strangest travelogues published in early modern England. A charismatic raconteur, Coryate blends his detailed ""observations"" of churches, palaces, and local customs (including the firstaccount of forks in English) with lengthy historical digressions and lively accounts of personal misadventure. Coryate, who had strong connections to the political, legal, and literary circles of early modern England, became a figure well known for his eccentricity and odd style, though he was also respected for his antiquarian scholarship and facility with foreign languages. Now, he is remembered as one of the most unique travel-writing voices ever known in English letters. This edition abridges Crudities' more than 900 pages to a manageable size, focusing on episodes most likely to be of interest to students - such as Coryat's descriptions of Venetian mountebanks, courtesans, and Jews; his crossing of the Alps; and his attendance at a Corpus Christi celebration in Paris. An engaging introduction situates the book in the context of Coryat's fascinating life, and the text is helpfully annotated throughout. The selection of contextual materials includes illustrations from the first edition, along with a sampling from another eccentric feature of the Crudities: a collection of mock commendatory poems making fun of Coryate and his journey, contributed by dozens of noblemen and literati (including the poets Ben Jonson and John Donne). Coryate, who was in on the joke, carefully curated the comic persona emerging from these verses, making creative use of media culture to gain personal celebrity.

This book features a young explorer caught in the torments of civil war. This volume is the first-ever English translation of the memoirs of Karl Heller, a twenty-year-old aspiring Austrian botanist who traveled to Mexico in 1845 to collect specimens. He passed through the Caribbean, lived for a time in the mountains of Veracruz, and journeyed to Mexico City through the cities of Puebla and Cholula. After a brief residence in the capital, Heller moved westward to examine the volcanoes and silver mines near Toluca. When the United States invaded Mexico in 1846-47 conditions became chaotic, and the enterprising botanist was forced to flee to Yucatan. Heller lived in the port city of Campeche, but visited Merida, the ruins of Uxmal, and the remote southern area of the Champoton River. From there Heller, traveling by canoe, journeyed through southern Tabasco and northern Chiapas and finally returned to Vienna through Cuba and the United States bringing back thousands of samples of Mexican plants and animals. Heller's account is one of the few documents we have from travelers who visited Mexico in this period, and it is particularly useful in describing conditions outside the capital of Mexico City. In 1853, Heller published his German-language account as ""Reisen in Mexiko"", but the work has remained virtually unknown to English or Spanish readers. This edition now provides a complete, annotated, and highly readable translation.

Johann Georg von Hahn - a nineteenth-century Austrian diplomat and explorer - is generally considered to be the founder of Albanian Studies as a scholarly discipline. It was he who first studied the Balkan country and its people, and who brought them to the attention of the academic world. Despite this acclaim, his work has not been widely available in English until now. In this volume, Robert Elsie has translated Hahn's most important works relating to his travels and studies in Albania during the mid-nineteenth century. Hahn's interests were broad, but he was especially interested in the tribes of Albania and Kosovo and made several ethnographic studies of the cultures and traditions of the tribes he encountered on his travels - including the Kelmendi, Hoti and Kastrati tribes. This volume will be invaluable readers for scholars of Balkan history and anthropology.

In the spring of 1869, John Muir was looking for means of support to fund his explorations of California’s Central Valley region. A ranch owner offered him a job herding sheep in the Sierra Nevada. As he explored the region, he jotted down his keen observations of the scenic countryside, and he eventually became a guide for some of Yosemite’s most famous visitors, including Ralph Waldo Emerson. Muir documented these experiences in The Yosemite, first published in 1912. It is at once a vivid, accurate description of the land and a passionate homage to nature.

This Modern Library Paperback Classic is a facsimile of the 1912 edition and includes the original illustrations.

Between the end of the nineteenth century and the Second World War Macmillan published a much-loved and extremely successful series of books under the title of 'Highways and Byways'. In them, the authors took readers on a delightful guided tour of the country, county by county, pointing out places of interest, key historical events and local lore and legend. Now, Macmillan is reissuing - in one beautifully designed volume - a selection of those highways and byways, which affords contemporary readers both a charming period piece and a wonderful glimpse of the very best of Britain.

This collection of Alaskan adventures begins with a newspaper article written by John Muir during his first visit to Alaska in 1879, when the sole U.S. government representative in all the territory's 586,412 square miles was a lone customs official in Sitka. It closes with accounts of the gold rush and the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle. Jean Meaux has gathered a superb collection of articles and stories that captivated American readers when they were first published and that will continue to entertain us today. The authors range from Charles Hallock (the founder of Forest and Stream, a precursor of Field and Stream) to New York society woman Mary Hitchcock, who traveled with china, silver, and a 2,800 square foot tent. After explorer Henry Allen wore out his boots, he marched barefoot as he continued mapping the Tanana River, and Episcopal Archdeacon Hudson Stuck mushed by dog sled in Arctic winters across a territory encompassing 250,000 miles of the northern interior.

Although the United States acquired Alaska in 1867, it took more than a decade for American writers and explorers to focus attention on a territory so removed from their ordinary lives. These writers-adventurers, tourists, and gold seekers-would help define the nation's perception of Alaska and would contribute to an image of the state that persists today. This collection unearths early writings that offer a broad view of American encounters with Alaska accompanied by Meaux's lively and concise introductions. The present-day adventurer will find much to inspire exploration, while students of the American West can gain new access to this valuable trove of pre-Gold Rush Alaska archives.

Before returning to New Orleans to practice family law, Jean Morgan Meaux lived in Alaska from 1971 to 1985, where she earned a master's degree from the University of Alaska Anchorage and did freelance writing for the Anchorage Daily News.

Alec Waugh first saw the West Indies on a trip round the world in 1926 when his ship called in at Guadeloupe. Fifteen months later he returned for a long stay at Martinique; it was the beginning of a lifelong interest in these fascinating islands that were to provide him with the material for many books and articles. In "The Sugar Islands," a book to be dipped into at leisure, Mr. Waugh has selected pieces from his writings, with the intention of compiling both a travelogue (there is a wealth of interesting information for the would-be traveller about the ways of life and customs of each island) and a chronological commentary on the development of the islands during the last thirty years.The book is divided into four parts. In the first, the author gives an idea of the background of the West Indies by drawing a detailed picture of the colourful life of Martinique. He tells the story of a 17th-century Frenchman who joined the famous pirates of Tortugja and the history of the long bloodbath that preceeded the declaration of independence of Haiti, the Black Republic. The second part of the book comprises four character sketches, including three stories of black magic, and two sections deal with the individual charm and interest of each of the islands: Montserrat, Barbados, Anguilla, Trinidad, St. Vincent, Tortola, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Saba, Antigua, Dominica and Puerto Rico.

A detailed journal/daily log of a 1634 expedition of three individuals into Fort Orange (now Albany New York) that serves as a detailed account of the Mohawk and the Oneida tribes, their settlements, modes of subsistence and healing rituals. This revised edition, includes a new preface, the original Dutch transcription, updated endnotes and bibliography.

'The charm of certain vacant grassy spaces, in Italy, overfrowned by masses of brickwork that are honeycombed by the suns of centuries, is something that I hereby renounce once for all the attempt to express; but you may be sure that whenever I mention such a spot enchantment lurks in it.' - Henry James In these essays on travels in Italy written from 1872 to 1909, Henry James explores art and religion, political shifts and cultural revolutions, and the nature of travel itself. James's enthusiastic appreciation of the unparalleled aesthetic allure of Venice, the vitality of Rome, and the noisy, sensuous appeal of Naples is everywhere marked by pervasive regret for the disappearance of the past and by ambivalence concerning the transformation of nineteenth-century Europe. John Auchard's lively introduction and extensive notes illuminate the surprising differences between the historical, political, and artistic Italy of James's travels and the metaphoric Italy that became the setting of some of his best-known works of fiction. This edition includes an appendix of James's book reviews on Italian travel-writing.

A reissue of a truly classic title on the Batsford backlist. First published in 1935, it is a wonderful snapshot of our capital before the Second World War, and a charming insight into our attitudes to urban life back in the Thirties. Our posh guide Cohen-Portheim offers us his interpretation of life in London through her people, her buildings and her history.The chapters include:Towns withinTown Streets and their LifeGreen LondonLondon and the ArtsLondon Amusements and Night LifeHotels and RestaurantsTraditional LondonLondon and the BritishLondon and the Foreigner (surprisingly liberal!)It includes the iconic Brian Cook cover illustration of Ludgate Circus and St Pauls, and should be sought after for that alone. Add in the charm of the authentic voice of a 1930s Londoner, it should be enjoyed by all Londoners.

One of the most revealing things about national character is the way that citizens react to and report on their travels abroad. Oftentimes a tourist's experience with a foreign place says as much about their country of origin as it does about their destination. A Happy Holiday examines the travels of English-speaking Canadian men and women to Britain and Europe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It describes the experiences of tourists, detailing where they went and their reactions to tourist sites, and draws attention to the centrality of culture and the sensory dimensions of overseas tourism. Among the specific topics explored are travellers' class relationships with people in the tourism industry, impressions of historic landscapes in Britain and Europe, descriptions of imperial spectacles and cultural sights, the use of public spaces, and encounters with fellow tourists and how such encounters either solidified or unsettled national subjectivities. Cecilia Morgan draws our attention to the important ambiguities between empire and nation, and how this relationship was dealt with by tourists in foreign lands. Based on personal letters, diaries, newspapers, and periodicals from across Canada, A Happy Holiday argues that overseas tourism offered people the chance to explore questions of identity during this period, a time in which issues such as gender, nation, and empire were the subject of much public debate and discussion.

This volume includes William Penn's firsthand account of his 1677 travels in Holland and Germany while visiting Quaker congregations and preaching his message of religious toleration. It includes daily entries, in which Penn recounts his visits and meetings with various parties. Penn details numerous interactions with Quakers and those of other faiths, and the persecution he faced on the journey. Daily recollections are interspersed with texts of numerous letters, addresses, and epistles on Penn's religious philosophy, along with notes on his own religious awakening and the religious climate of Europe at the time.

This document serves to help readers understand Penn's early years, before he obtained the charter for Pennsylvania in 1681, and his background as a member of the Religious Society of Friends alongside its founder, George Fox.

The American Diaries of Count de Berlaymont is the first-ever English translation of a nineteenth-century French travel narrative, outlaying the adventurous travels of Count Guy de Berlaymont throughout the United States and Cuba. Perhaps most interesting are de Berlaymont's descriptions and observations on travel, culture, and politics, which serve as firsthand historical accounting of the two countries. Young de Berlaymont was a frequent traveler and his American adventure remained important to him throughout his life. Publication of travel accounts-particularly popular in Europe and America in the mid- to late nineteenth century-helped fulfill two needs: (1) They served as surrogates for participation for those unable to travel; and (2) They acted as authoritative descriptions of places and historical events. The value of de Berlaymont's travel diary lies in its important source material as well as the Count's commentaries on the distinct flavor of American life.

Long after the Aztecs and the Incas had become a fading memory, a Maya civilization still thrived in the interior of Central America. "Lost Shores, Forgotten Peoples" is the first collection and translation of important seventeenth-century narratives about Europeans travelling across the great "Ocean Sea" and encountering a people who had maintained an independent existence in the lowlands of Guatemala and Belize.
In these narratives--primary documents written by missionaries and conquistadors--vivid details of these little known Mayan cultures are revealed, answering how and why lowlanders were able to evade Spanish conquest while similar civilizations could not. Fascinating tales of the journey from Europe are included, involving unknown islands, lost pilots, life aboard a galleon fleet, political intrigue, cannibals, and breathtaking natural beauty. In short, these forgotten manuscripts--translations of the papers of the past--provide an unforgettable look at an understudied chapter in the age of exploration.
"Lost Shores, Forgotten Peoples" will appeal to archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians interested in Central America, the Maya, and the Spanish Conquest."
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While French sea captain Auguste Duhaut-Cilly may not have become wealthy from his around-the-world travels between 1826 and 1829, his trip has enriched historians interested in early nineteenth-century California. Because of a poor choice in goods to trade he found it necessary to spend nearly two years on the Alta and Baja California coasts before disposing of his cargo and returning to France. What was bad luck for Duhaut-Cilly was good luck for us, however, because he recorded his impressions of the region's natural history and human populations in a diary. This translation of Duhaut-Cilly's writing offers today's readers a rare eyewitness account of the pastoral society that was Mexican California, including the missions at the height of their power.
A veteran of the Napoleonic wars, Duhaut-Cilly was an educated man conversant in Spanish and English. He was also Catholic, which gave him special access to the California missions. Thus his diary allows the reader an insider's view of the padres' lives, including their dealings with the military. Through his eyes we see the region's indigenous people and how they were treated, and we're privy to his commentary on the behavior of the Californios.
This translation also contains Duhaut-Cilly's account of the Sandwich Islands portion of his voyage and provides an authentic rendering of life at sea during the early nineteenth century. In the spirit of Richard Henry Dana's "Two Years before the Mast," Duhaut-Cilly's reflections are a historical gem for anyone with a love of personal narratives and original accounts of the past.

This fully-annotated edition of Anna Maria Falconbridge's Two Voyages to Sierra Leone (1794) and Mary Ann Parker's A Voyage Round the World (1795) brings together the first published accounts by women of these new sites of British colonization. Laying the texts alongside one another brings into conjunction Britain's concurrent, late-18th-century systems of transportation and resettlement, convictism and slavery.

The nineteenth century was a period of peak popularity for travel to Latin America, where a new political independence was accompanied by loosened travel restrictions. Such expeditions resulted in numerous travel accounts, most by men. However, because this period was a time of significant change and exploration, a small but growing minority of female voyagers also portrayed the people and places that they encountered. Women through Women's Eyes draws from ten insightful accounts by female visitors to Latin America in the nineteenth century. These firsthand tales bring a number of Latin American women into focus: nuns, market women, plantation workers, the wives and daughters of landowners and politicians, and even a heroine of the independence movement. Questions of family life, religion, women's labor, and education are addressed, in addition to the interrelationships of men and women within the structure of Latin American societies. Women through Women's Eyes is a perceptive look at Latin American women from various walks of life during this period. Within these pages, the reader catches lengthy glimpses of the women on both sides of the travel accounts-author and subject-and thereby may examine them all and their societies close-up.

John Muir first saw Alaska in 1879, only twelve years after it was purchased from Russia by the United States. Four more times, in 1880, 1881, 1890, and 1899, he was drawn back to this land of rivers and glaciers, sunsets and northern lights, campfires and Arctic stars. Few people have lived so many adventures, yet Muir was not a mere collector of adventure; the hazards he encountered - and many were spine-tingling - came as a result of his intense desire to examine new aspects of the natural world.

Joseph J. Dimock's descriptions of Cuba in his travel diary provide a remarkable firsthand view of a fascinating period in the island's history. In the mid-nineteenth century, the United States was pursuing manifest destiny. The war with Mexico had resulted in a vast increase of national territory, and many north Americans wanted Cuba as the next acquisition. In addition to annexationist plots, Cuban life was marked by slave conspiracies, colonial insurrections, economic expansion, and political intrigue. Impressions of Cuba in the Nineteenth Century describes the social, economic and political conditions in the 1850s. Dimock's entries of his travels and observations as an American reveal details of Cuban agriculture, plant life, and natural resources. The diary also provides elaborate accounts of the sugar industry, extensive commentary on the daily live of slaves, Spaniards, and Cubans. Dimock's curiosity led him around the island, into prisons, salons, and other unusual places, resulting in a wide-ranging account of Cuban life. Impressions of Cuba in the Nineteenth Century provides a highly accessible, entertaining, and insightful look at Cuba.

Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) is best known for designing parks in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Chicago, Boston, and the grounds of the Capitol in Washington. But before he embarked upon his career as the nation's foremost landscape architect, he was a correspondent for the New York Times , and it was under its auspices that he journeyed through the slave states in the 1850s. His day-by-day observations,including intimate accounts of the daily lives of masters and slaves, the operation of the plantation system, and the pernicious effects of slavery on all classes of society, black and white,were largely collected in The Cotton Kingdom . Published in 1861, just as the Southern states were storming out of the Union, it has been hailed ever since as singularly fair and authentic, an unparalleled account of America's "peculiar institution."

The republication of the memoirs of Colonel John McDonell of Scottas (1728-1810) will be welcomed by Highlanders the world over. Neither romantic novel nor learned history can conjure up for us so vividly as this unashamedly prejudiced eyewitness account of the atmosphere of the aftermath of "the '45," the fierce loyalties and bitter hatreds, the high principles and barefaced villainy. We meet the ineffectual Stuart King, the saintly Duke of York, the unspeakable Captain Fergusson and many a minor character, each playing his part in the long drawn out British War of Succession and the death throes of Celtic society. The monograph traces John McDonell's story from his adventurous journey from Scotland to Rome at the age of 12 to his emigration to North America thirty-three years later.