The book draws on the history of economics, literary theory, and the history of science to explore how European travelers like Alexander von Humboldt and their readers, circa 1750-1850, adapted the work of British political economists, such as Adam Smith, to help organize their observations, and, in turn, how political economists used travelers' observations in their own analyses. Cooper examines journals, letters, books, art, and critical reviews to cast in sharp relief questions raised about political economy by contemporaries over the status of facts and evidence, whether its principles admitted of universal application, and the determination of wealth, value, and happiness in different societies. Travelers citing T.R. Malthus's population principle blurred the gendered boundaries between domestic economy and British political economy, as embodied in the idealized subjects: domestic woman and economic man. The book opens new realms in the histories of science in its analyses of debates about gender in social scientific observation: Maria Edgeworth, Maria Graham, and Harriet Martineau observe a role associated with women and methodically interpret what they observe, an act reserved, in theory, by men.

'Based on meticulous research in original sources ... Goodman illustrates vividly how adept [Banks] was ... Shining a light on individuals whose achievements are relatively uncelebrated' Jenny Uglow, New York Review of Books A bold new history of how botany and global plant collecting - centred at Kew Gardens and driven by Joseph Banks - transformed the earth. Botany was the darling and the powerhouse of the eighteenth century. As European ships ventured across the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans, discovery bloomed. Bounties of new plants were brought back, and their arrival meant much more than improved flowerbeds - it offered a new scientific frontier that would transform Europe's industry, medicine, eating and drinking habits, and even fashion. Joseph Banks was the dynamo for this momentous change. As botanist for James Cook's great voyage to the South Pacific on the Endeavour, Banks collected plants on a vast scale, armed with the vision - as a child of the Enlightenment - that to travel physically was to advance intellectually. His thinking was as intrepid as Cook's seafaring: he commissioned radically influential and physically daring expeditions such as those of Francis Masson to the Cape Colony, George Staunton to China, George Caley to Australia, William Bligh to Tahiti and Jamaica, among many others. Jordan Goodman's epic history follows these high seas adventurers and their influence in Europe, as well as taking us back to the early years of Kew Gardens, which Banks developed devotedly across the course of his life, transforming it into one of the world's largest and most diverse botanical gardens. In a rip-roaring global expedition, based on original sources in many languages, Goodman gives a momentous history of how the discoveries made by Banks and his collectors advanced scientific understanding around the world.

'This is the story of how, on 29 May, 1953, two men, both endowed with outstanding stamina and skill, reached the top of Everest and came back unscathed to rejoin their comrades. 'Yet this will not be the whole story, for the ascent of Everest was not the work of one day, nor even of those few anxious, unforgettable weeks in which we prepared and climbed this summer. It is, in fact, a tale of sustained and tenacious endeavour by many, over a long period of time... We of the 1953 Everest Expedition are proud to share the glory with our predecessors.' Sir John Hunt

Captain James Cook is one of the most recognisable in Australian history - an almost mythic figure who is often discussed, celebrated, reviled and debated. But who was the real James Cook? The name Captain James Cook is one of the most recognisable in Australian history - an almost mythic figure who is often discussed, celebrated, reviled and debated. But who was the real James Cook? This Yorkshire farm boy would go on to become the foremost mariner, navigator and cartographer of his era, and to personally map a third of the globe. His great voyages of discovery were incredible feats of seamanship and navigation. Leading a crew of men into uncharted territories, Cook would face the best and worst of humanity as he took himself and his crew to the edge of the known world - and beyond. With his masterful storytelling talent, Peter FitzSimons brings James Cook to life. Focusing on his most iconic expedition, the voyage of the Endeavour, where Cook first set foot on Australian and New Zealand soil, FitzSimons contrasts Cook against another figure who looms large in Australasian history: Joseph Banks, the aristocratic botanist. As they left England, Banks, a rich, famous playboy, was everything that Cook was not. The voyage tested Cook's character and would help define his legacy. Now, 240 years after James Cook's death, FitzSimons reveals what kind of man James was at heart. His strengths, his weaknesses, his passions and pursuits, failures and successes. JAMES COOK reveals the man behind the myth.

Sir Edmund Hillary described Douglas Mawson's epic and punishing journey across 600 miles of unknown Antarctic wasteland as 'the greatest story of lone survival in polar exploration'.This Accursed Land tells that story; how Mawson declined to join Captain Robert Scott's ill-fated British expedition and instead lead a three-man husky team to explore the far eastern coastline of the Antarctic continent. But the loss of one member and most of the supplies soon turned the hazardous trek into a nightmare. Mawson was trapped 320 miles from base with barely nine days' food and nothing for the dogs. Eating poisoned meat, watching his body fall apart, crawling over chasms and crevices of deadly ice, his ultimate and lone struggle for survival, starving, poisoned, exhausted and indescribably cold, is an unforgettable story of human endurance. Grippingly told by Lennard Bickel, this is the most extraordinary journey from the brutal golden age of Antarctic exploration. Perfect for fans of Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air or Michael Palin's Erebus.

The book addresses the relationship between the literary representations of North Greenland and the Inughuit people in Knud Rasmussen's expedition accounts The New People and My Travel Diary and the historical process of Danish colonization of North Greenland. The aim of reading both works is to demonstrate the ambivalence in representing North Greenland and the Inughuit, and, through this, to prove the existence of common mechanisms and cultural practices connected to mapping of the Other in a situation of asymmetric power relations. Applying a textual approach founded on colonial discourse analysis, the reading proves that literary mappings of geography and identity can never be stable, as they are in the state of constant transformation, perpetually recontextualized and reinvented.

Access to new plants and consumer goods such as sugar, tobacco, and chocolate from the beginning of the sixteenth century onwards would massively change the way people lived, especially in how and what they consumed. While global markets were consequently formed and provided access to these new commodities that increasingly became important in the 'Old World', especially with regard to the establishment early modern consumer societies. This book brings together specialists from a range of historical fields to analyse the establishment of these commodity chains from the Americas to Europe as well as their cultural implications.

"An extraordinary exploration into the world of healing ministries, spiritual guides, and esoteric experiences. Those who remain enclosed in a world of 'hard facts' will be challenged, for sure, but those who are open to other dimensions, other worlds within this one, have a wide-eyed journey ahead."-- Rev. Samuel T. Lloyd III, Rector, Trinity Church, Boston"Joan Diver is a highly respected leader and accomplished foundation executive who left an inspiring legacy of social change. Her grounding in work for justice, followed by her fall into faith and mystery is captured in this compelling, provocative and generous telling of her journey. I found myself turning pages as if reading a mystery novel, all the while experiencing a deep healing."--Pat Brandes, Former COO, United Way of Massachusetts BayWhen Spirit Calls is at once an adventure story and meditation on the healing journey that traces Joan Diver's odyssey from Boston foundation executive to spiritual healer. Imbued with the wisdom of great spiritual teachers from both East and West, Joan Diver shares a remarkable journey through urban violence, family crisis, physical pain and spiritual awakening.Joan Diver's family is one of three profiled in J. Anthony Lukas' Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families. A national bestseller in 1985, it is still taught in classrooms today. Joan and Colin Diver continue to be treated as celebrities by Boston media and those touched by the pain of their story and the school-busing crisis of the 1970s and '80s.

During the long twentieth century, explorers went in unprecedented numbers to the hottest, coldest, and highest points on the globe. Taking us from the Himalayas to Antarctica and beyond, Higher and Colder presents the first history of extreme physiology, the study of the human body at its physical limits. Each chapter explores a seminal question in the history of science, while also showing how the apparently exotic locations and experiments contributed to broader political and social shifts in twentieth-century scientific thinking. Unlike most books on modern biomedicine, Higher and Colder focuses on fieldwork, expeditions, and exploration, and in doing so provides a welcome alternative to laboratory-dominated accounts of the history of modern life sciences. Although this is a book about two male dominated practices--science and exploration--it recovers the stories of women's contributions, sometimes accidentally, and sometimes deliberately, erased.

The publication of key voyaging manuscripts has contributed to the flourishing of enduring and prolific worldwide scholarship across numerous fields. These navigators and their texts were instrumental in spurring on further exploration, annexation and ultimately colonisation of the pacific territories in the space of only a few decades. This series will present new sources and primary texts in English, paving the way for postcolonial critical approaches in which the reporting, writing, rewriting and translating of Empire and the 'Other' takes precedence over the safeguarding of master narratives. Each of the volumes contains an introduction that sets out the context in which these voyages took place and extensive annotations clarify and explain the original texts. The first volume makes available Samuel Wallis' logs of the Dolphin's voyage 1766-68 in their original form for the first time. Captain Samuel Wallis was the first Englishman to come across the Tuamotus and the Society Isles in the South Pacific, specifically Tahiti. His writings predate the available textual sources by Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, the logs of the Spanish voyages and James Cook - whose text Wallis' prefigures. The three logs attest to the very first encounter between Europeans and Tahitians, but until now comparatively little research has been conducted on the more elaborate second volume and none on the first. The Polynesian archipelagos grew into objects of discourse over the years and Wallis' logs may very well be located at the heart of these evocative constructs.