Since the time of Columbus, explorers dreamed of a water passage across the North American continent. President Thomas Jefferson shared this dream. He conceived the Corps of Discovery to travel up the Missouri River to the Rocky Mountains and westward along possible river routes to the Pacific Ocean. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark led this expedition of 1804-6. Along the way they filled hundreds of notebook pages with observations of the geography, Indian tribes, and natural history of the trans-Mississippi West.

In April 1805 Lewis and Clark and their party set out from Fort Mandan following the Missouri River westward. This volume recounts their travels through country never before explored by white people. With new personnel, including the Shoshone Indian woman Sacagawea, her husband Toussaint Charbonneau, and their baby, nicknamed Pomp, the party spent the rest of the spring and early summer toiling up the Missouri. Along the way they portaged the difficult Great Falls, encountered grizzly bears, cataloged new species of plants and animals, and mapped rivers and streams.

Since the time of Columbus, explorers dreamed of a water passage across the North American continent. President Thomas Jefferson shared this dream. He conceived the Corps of Discovery to travel up the Missouri River to the Rocky Mountains and westward along possible river routes to the Pacific Ocean. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark led this expedition of 1804-6. Along the way they filled hundreds of notebook pages with observations of the geography, Indian tribes, and natural history of the trans-Mississippi West.

This volume consists of journals, primarily by Clark, that cover the expedition's route up the Missouri River to Fort Mandan in present-day North Dakota and its frigid winter encampment there. It describes the party's encounters with and observations of area Indian tribes. Lewis and Clark collected critical information about traveling westward from Native Americans during this winter. This volume also includes miscellaneous material from the Corps of Discovery's first year.

Since the time of Columbus, explorers dreamed of a water passage across the North American continent. President Thomas Jefferson shared this dream. He conceived the Corps of Discovery to travel up the Missouri River to the Rocky Mountains and westward along possible river routes to the Pacific Ocean. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark led this expedition of 1804-6. Along the way they filled hundreds of notebook pages with observations of the geography, Indian tribes, and natural history of the trans-Mississippi West.

This last volume recounts the expedition's experiences as they continued their journey homeward from present-day Idaho and the party divided for separate exploration. Lewis probed the northern extent of the Louisiana Purchase on the Marias River, while Clark traveled southeast toward the Yellowstone to explore the river and make contact with local Indians. Lewis's party suffered from bad luck: they encountered grizzlies, horse thieves, and the expedition's only violent encounter with Native inhabitants, the Piegan Blackfeet. Lewis was also wounded in a hunting accident. The two parties eventually reunited below the mouth of the Yellowstone and arrived back in St. Louis to a triumphal welcome in September 1806.

In the 1930s, the discourse of travel furthered widely divergent and conflicting ideologies--socialist, conservative, male chauvinist, and feminist--and the major travel writers of the time revealed as much in their texts. Evelyn Waugh was a declared conservative and fascist sympathizer; George Orwell was a dedicated socialist; Graham Greene wavered between his bourgeois instincts and his liberal left-wing sympathies; and Rebecca West maintained strong feminist and liberationist convictions.

Bernard Schweizer explores both the intentional political rhetoric and the more oblique, almost unconscious subtexts of Waugh, Orwell, Greene, and West in his groundbreaking study of travel writing's political dimension. Radicals on the Road demonstrates how historically and culturally conditioned forms of anxiety were compounded by the psychological dynamics of the uncanny, and how, in order to dispel such anxieties and to demarcate their ideological terrains, 1930s travelers resorted to dualistic discourses.

Yet any seemingly fixed dualism, particularly the opposition between the political left and the right, the dichotomy between home and abroad, or the rift between utopia and dystopia, was undermined by the rise of totalitarianism and by an increasing sense of global crisis--which was soon followed by political disillusionment. Therefore, argues Schweizer, traveling during the 1930s was more than just a means to engage the burning political questions of the day: traveling, and in turn travel writing, also registered the travelers' growing sense of futility and powerlessness in an especially turbulent world.

In the 1930s, the discourse of travel furthered widely divergent and conflicting ideologies--socialist, conservative, male chauvinist, and feminist--and the major travel writers of the time revealed as much in their texts. Evelyn Waugh was a declared conservative and fascist sympathizer; George Orwell was a dedicated socialist; Graham Greene wavered between his bourgeois instincts and his liberal left-wing sympathies; and Rebecca West maintained strong feminist and liberationist convictions.

Bernard Schweizer explores both the intentional political rhetoric and the more oblique, almost unconscious subtexts of Waugh, Orwell, Greene, and West in his groundbreaking study of travel writing's political dimension. Radicals on the Road demonstrates how historically and culturally conditioned forms of anxiety were compounded by the psychological dynamics of the uncanny, and how, in order to dispel such anxieties and to demarcate their ideological terrains, 1930s travelers resorted to dualistic discourses.

Yet any seemingly fixed dualism, particularly the opposition between the political left and the right, the dichotomy between home and abroad, or the rift between utopia and dystopia, was undermined by the rise of totalitarianism and by an increasing sense of global crisis--which was soon followed by political disillusionment. Therefore, argues Schweizer, traveling during the 1930s was more than just a means to engage the burning political questions of the day: traveling, and in turn travel writing, also registered the travelers' growing sense of futility and powerlessness in an especially turbulent world.

In 1966, Edward Hoagland made a three-month excursion into the wild country of British Columbia and encountered a way of life that was disappearing even as he chronicled it. Showcasing Hoagland’s extraordinary gifts for portraiture—his cast runs from salty prospector to trader, explorer, missionary, and indigenous guide—Notes from the Century Before is a breathtaking mix of anecdote, derring-do, and unparalleled elegy from one of the finest writers of our time.

Provence through the eyes of its writers - those who wrote of it in Provencal or French and also those visitors who were moved by its beauty - that is the inspiration behind A Literary Guide to Provence. In this compact travel guide, Marseilles native Daniel Vitaglione presents a literary panorama of the region of southern France from the Avignon of Mistral to Colette's St. Tropez. Including such sites as the birthplace of Nostradamus and the ruins of the Marquis de Sade's castle, A Literary Guide to Provence presents a thousand years of history entwined with maps and photos that provide readers on tour with a sense of the historical import of this most beautiful of regions even as they experience it firsthand. Both authors of Provencal ancestry and those who came to love and live in Provence are featured in this comprehensive and enchanting picture of the garden place of France. The Riviera enticed Virginia Woolf. Toulon inspired two novels by Georges Sand. Robert Louis Stevenson resided in Hyeres, as did Edith Wharton. Le Lavandou was Willa Cather's favorite place. F. Scott Fitzgerald lived in St. Raphael and Juan-les-Pins, where he wrote Tender is the Night. This illustrated guide follows in these writers' footsteps, and the practical information on hotels and restaurants (phones, web sites, email, etc.) make it the ideal traveling companion for armchair tourists and those who cannot resist seeing Provence for themselves.

"One has to applaud the stylish confidence of the Blue Guide to Albania by Balkans expert James Pettifer. The guide provides a comprehensive account of the country's splendid archaeological sites and Ottoman heritage as well as less obvious points of interest" The Independent. NOTE that this is a print-on-demand edition, delivery may take approx. 3 weeks depending on the shipping address.

Mungo Park's "Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa" has long been regarded as a classic of African travel literature. In fulfilling his mission to find the Niger River and in documenting its potential as an inland waterway for trade, Park was significant in opening Africa to European economic interests. His modest, low-key heroism made it possible for the British public to imagine themselves as a welcomed force in Africa. As a tale of adventure and survival, it has inspired the imaginations of readers since its first publication in 1799 and writers from Wordsworth and Melville to Conrad, Hemingway, and T. Coreghessan Boyle have acknowledged the influence of Park's narrative on their work.
Unlike the large expeditions that followed him, Park traveled only with native guides or alone. Without much of an idea of where he was going, he relied entirely on local people for food, shelter, and directions throughout his eventful eighteen month journey. While his warm reaction to the people he met made him famous as a sentimental traveler, his chronicle also provides a rare written record of the lives of ordinary people in West Africa before European intervention. His accounts of war, politics, and the spread of Islam, as well as his constant confrontations with slavery as practiced in eighteenth-century West Africa, are as valuable today as they were in 1799. In preparing this new edition, editor Kate Ferguson Marsters presents the complete text and includes reproductions of all the original maps and illustrations.
Park's narrative serves as a crucial text in relation to scholarship on the history of slavery, colonial enterprise, and nineteenth-century imperialism. The availability of this full edition will give a new generation of readers access to a travel narrative that has inspired other readers and writers over two centuries and will enliven scholarly discussion in many fields.

Originally published in 1872, this work is based on the author's experiences in the town of Oberammergau, Germany, the site of the world famous Passion Play. Greatorex, a famous illustrator of the period, recounts her three-month stay during which time she illustrated twenty of the town's famous homes, which are an essential part of the work. Mork, a distinguished Passion Play scholar, not only places the book into an historical context, but describes the play as it was performed during that time.

There is nothing quite like parrot pie for breakfast. First one must catch one's parrot, of course, and build the hearth to bake it, but that is all in a days work for the women you will meet in this riveting anthology, whose experiences in settling the wildernesses of the world challenged to the limits their spirit, resourcefulness, and even survival.

Three men and three women: a plant collector, a merchant and his novelist wife, a military officer, and two famous women travelers went to China between the Opium War and the formal end of the opium trade, 1842-1907. Their range of perspectives, their acquaintance with one another and their similar scope of travel to Hong Kong, the treaty ports, and Sichuan lend intensity to their picture of China and the Western presence there.
What the travelers record reveals is a continuity in the response of the West and China to each other. Susan Schoenbauer Thurin's study of these writings presents a rich tapestry of impressions, biases, and cultural perspectives that inform our own understanding of the Victorians and their views of the world outside their own.
The strange mix of opium and missionaries, the aura of fabled "Cathay" and its valuable trade items, the attraction and repulsion of the exotic otherness the travelers experience, reflect the political, religious, and racial views of their era, and explain the allure of the Orient that, in part, characterized their age. "Victorian Travelers and the Opening of China, 1842-1907," is a remarkable look into the cultural past.

Martin and Osa Johnson thrilled American audiences of the 1920s and 30s with their remarkable movies of far-away places, exotic peoples, and the dramatic spectacle of African wildlife. Their own lives were as exciting as the movies they made--sailing through the South Sea Islands, dodging big game at African waterholes, flying small planes over the veldt, taking millionaires on safari. Osa Johnson's ghostwritten autobiography, I Married Adventure, became a national bestseller. The 1939 film version was billed as "the story of World Exploration's First Lady, whose indomitable daring would be stayed by neither snarling lion nor crouching leopard, tropic tempest nor savage tribesman " Heroes to millions, Osa and Martin seemed to embody glamor, daring, and the all-American ideal of self-reliance. Probing beneath the glamor of the Johnsons' public image, Pascal and Eleanor Imperato explore the more human side of the couple's lives--and ways the Johnsons shaped, for better and for worse, America's vision of Africa. Drawing on many years of research, access to a wealth of letters and archives, interviews with many who worked closely with the Johnsons, and their own deep knowledge of Africa, the authors present a fascinating and intimate portrait of this intrepid couple.

Playwright John Millington Synge visited an isolated group of rocky islands west of Ireland each year between 1898 and 1901, where he found inspiration for his dramas among the folklore and anecdotes told to him by local fisherfolk. This memorable record of Synge's days amid the islanders and their tales of fairies and Celtic heroes offers an enchanting portrait of the wellspring of the Irish cultural renaissance.

In A Journey through the West, Thomas Rodney writes vividly about flea-infested taverns, bad roads, drunken crew members, squatters, Indians sodden berths, food from the wild and treacherous waters. His is one of the most detailed early-nineteenth-century travel accounts. Rodney, a Revolutionary War patriot and veteran, had been active in Delaware politics and had served in the Continental Congress. In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson appointed him as a land commissioner and a territorial judge in the newly formed Mississippi Territory. To assume his duties, Rodney and a small party traveled overland from Delaware across the length of southern Pennsylvania to Wheeling, (West) Virginia. From there, they boarded their newly constructed boat on the Ohio River and rowed, sailed, and drifted along the borders of (West) Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Kentucky. Finally they left the clear rapids of the Ohio and entered the muddy yet majestic Mississippi. They traveled southwesterly into a vast, exotic wilderness valley. The western shore of the Mississippi was still owned by Spain, and foreign soldiers were spotted. Under pressure to meet Rodney's deadline for arrival in Mississippi Territory, the travelers were grateful for the Mississippi's fast current. Yet in the journey's last days they were faced with adventures and with near disaster when their boat struck a snag and partially sank. Rodney kept a precise journal and sent letters to President Jefferson documenting his trek from the settled East through the barely chartered paths of the western wilderness. He hobnobbed with Meriwether Lewis, enjoyed the hospitality of Harman Blennerhassett, and received a tour of Cincinnati from Arthur St. Clair. Dwight Smith and Ray Swick have compiled, edited and annotated Rodney's story to present it in complete form for the first time. A Journey through the West, is both a travel adventure and a colorful glimpse into the life of his day.

In this rich exploration of the era of the Grand Tour, contributors from the fields of history, art history, literary history and theory, science history, and anthropology investigate the experiences of travelers and their ways of understanding and representing their encounters with the foreign. From the beginning of the seventeenth century through the early decades of the nineteenth century, the practice of the Grand Tour supplied a crucial point of reference for travel and imaginative geography in general. At the same time, concepts of pleasure and enjoyment became entangled with visual and verbal representations of that which was foreign. With chapters by Ken Arnold, Rosemary Bechler, Richard Hamblyn, Roy Porter, E. S. Shaffer, Nicholas Thomas, Tzvetan Todorov, Richard Wrigley, and the editors, Transports discusses a range of original topics. These include narrative orderings of travel; the classification of exotic objects; pastoral and paradisal topography in the paintings of Claude Lorrain; Beckford's invocations of China as he travels through Italy; volcanoes in the discourses of travel and geology; the experience of Rome; crossing boundaries and exceeding limits in travel and in the sublime; liberty and license in New Zealand; foreigners' responses to the high-velocity culture of London; and Byron's sublime impulse beyond the established bounds of the Grand Tour. Published for the Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art

In 1839 a journalist for the New Orleans Picayune, Matthew C. Field, joined a company of merchants and tourists headed west on the Santa Fe Trail. Leaving Independence, Missouri, early in July "with a few wagons and a carefree spirit," Field recorded his vivid impressions of travel westward on the Santa Fe Trail and, on the return trip, eastward along the Cimarron Route. Written in verse in his journal and in eighty-five articles later published in the Picayune, Field's observations offer the modern reader a unique glimpse of life in the settlements of Mexico and on the Santa Fe Trail.

"Travel Fact and Travel Fiction" contains 18 articles by different authors on important examples of travel writing from Classical Antiquity (Herodotus) until the first half of the nineteenth century. Discussed are among others Herodotus, Egeria, Rubruck, Marco Polo, Columbus, Joachim Du Bellay, Busbequius, Gryphius, Goethe and Dickens. Central themes are fiction, literary tradition, scholarly discovery and observation.

Volume 2 of great explorer's classic account of explorations of lakes of Central Africa, perilous journey down unexplored Congo River. Incredible hardships, perseverance. Total in set: 149 illustrations. Map.

Four journeys by early Americans Mary Rowlandson, Sarah Kemble Knight, William Byrd II, and Dr. Alexander Hamilton recount the vivid physical and psychological challenges of colonial life. Essential primary texts in the study of early American cultural life, they are now conveniently collected in a single volume.

'The best conceivable guide to the city' - an essential cultural history for all visitors of Florence The rich and glorious past of one of the best loved cities in the world, Florence, is brought vividly to life for today's visitor in this collection which draws on letters, diaries and memoirs of travellers to Florence and the Florentines themselves. Of all Italian cities, Florence has always had the strongest English accent: the Goncourt brothers in 1855 called it 'ville tout anglaise'. Though that accent is diminished now, Florence remains for the English-speaking traveller what it always has been - one of the best loved, and most visited, of cities. In this Traveller's Reader, Florence's rich and glorious past is brought vividly to life for the tourist of today through the medium of letters, diaries and memoirs of travellers to Florence from past centuries and of the Florentines themselves. The extracts chosen by cultural historain Edward Chaney include: Boccaccio on the Black Death; Vasari on the building of Giotto's Campanile; an eye-witness account of the installation of Michaelangelo's 'David'; the death of Elizabeth Barrett Browning at the Casa Guidi; and D. H. Lawrence and Dylan Thomas on twentieth-century Florentine society. Sir Harold Acton's introduction provides a concise history of the city from its origins, through its zenith as a prosperous city state which, under the Medici, gave birth to the Renaissance, and up to the Arno's devastating flood in 1966. Sir Harold Acton, man of letters, historian, aesthete, novelist and poet, spent most of his life in Florence. Among his best-known books is The Last Medici, Memoirs of an Aesthete.

In 1899 a chartered yacht, the Casco, brought to Honolulu Robert Louis Stevenson and his family. The writer was then already at the height of his popularity in Europe and the United States. He spent the next six months and another, shorter period in 1893 in the Hawaiian Islands, participating in the life of the "royal crowd" and enjoying the best health of a lifetime plagued with illness. Travels in Hawaii brings together many of the diverse works from a romantic interlude in the career of this famous writer.

"Here is a valuable and rare document providing a woman's perspective on a western passage that has received little attention from historians. Margaret Dwight's journal gives us a first-hand account that goes way beyond the usual reckoning of miles traveled and notes on the weather. She provides an intimate view of the people on the trail. From her observations we get a sense of the back-country settlements of Pennsylvania and Ohio in 1810, the language, the sounds, and even the smells of this early American West. Her journal is full of witty and occasionally sarcastic remarks. For all her prejudices and self-admitted pride, she emerges as a likeable person and valuable guide."-Jay Gitlin, in his introduction. In his introduction, Jay Gitlin, a professor of history at Yale University, says more about Margaret Van Horn Dwight's wagon journey in 1810 from New Haven, Connecticut, to Warren, Ohio, where she would find a husband, bear thirteen children, and die in middle-age.

Volume 1 of great explorer's classic account of explorations of lakes of Central Africa, perilous journey down unexplored Congo River. Incredible hardships, perseverance. Total in set: 149 illustrations. Map.