Tibet's Mount Kailas is one of the world's great pilgrimage centres, renowned as an ancient sacred site that embodies a universal sacrality. But Kailas Histories: Renunciate Traditions and the Construction of Himalayan Sacred Geography demonstrates that this understanding is a recent construction by British colonial, Hindu modernist, and New Age interests. Using multiple sources, including fieldwork, Alex McKay describes how the early Indic vision of a heavenly mountain named Kailas became identified with actual mountains. He emphasises renunciate agency in demonstrating how local beliefs were subsumed as Kailas developed within Hindu, Buddhist, and Boen traditions, how five mountains in the Indian Himalayan are also named Kailas, and how Kailas sacred geography constructions and a sacred Ganges source region were related.

A "New York Times" best-seller when it was first published, Rice's biography is the gripping story of a fierce, magnetic, and brilliant man whose real-life accomplishments are the stuff of legend. Rice retraces Burton's steps as the first European adventurer to search for the source of the Nile; to enter, disguised, the forbidden cities of Mecca and Medina; and to travel through remote stretches of India, the Near East, and Africa. From his spying exploits to his startling literary accomplishments (the discovery and translation of the Kama Sutra and his seventeen-volume translation of "Arabian Nights"), Burton was an engrossing, larger-than-life Victorian figure, and Rice's splendid biography lays open a portrayal as dramatic, complicated, and compelling as the man himself.

In this stimulating and timely book, Scott Bailey, an American teaching Russian and Eurasian history in Japan, traces the history of the dynamic Russian Geographical Society, which carried out major research expeditions to Central Eurasia during the second half of the nineteenth century. The immediate goal of its expeditions was to collect ethnographic, geographic, and natural-scientific information on these regions and their peoples. Their wider benefits established and extended Russia's imperial control in Central Eurasia, including some regions under direct or indirect Chinese control. These expeditions served the acquisition of social and scientific information to benefit the Russian Empire's colonization efforts. Their leaders were often elites trained in ethnography, geography, and natural science subjects, and a major objective of this book is to give a fuller picture of the diverse biographies of these figures, not all of whom were Russian or European males. In the `Wild Countries' moves chronologically from the founding of the Russian Geographical Society in 1845 to the beginning of the revolutionary period in Russia in 1905. During these decades, research missions became more overtly "imperial" and coincided with the consolidation of Russian hegemony over Central Eurasia and an increasing Russian interest in territories in the western and northern regions of the Chinese Q'ing Empire. The book also addresses wider moves toward imperial projects worldwide.

Europeans' romanticist imaginings of people from the South Pacific have been around since the Enlightenment and have been significantly informed by the accounts of voyages to Tahiti by people such as Louis Bougainville. This book shows that the overtly promiscuous behavior that the French perceived as hospitality on the part of the Tahitians in 1768 was actually a defensive ploy, and that our contemporary image of sex and sexuality in Pacific Island societies is influenced by a fantasy based on this French misperception. This volume takes a very detailed look at traditional Tahitian culture and society and provides a realistic description of what happened on Tahiti when Europeans encountered the people who lived there. Bolyanatz provides a very readable history of South Pacific exploration and Enlightenment thinking. Anyone interested in the development of Enlightenment thought and the way it has developed since the 18th century will enjoy this book.

From an early age, Brice H. Goldsborough exhibited an unending curiosity about the world around him; he was interested in almost anything mechanical, was inquisitive about weather patterns, and yearned to know more about aerodynamics. This lifelong quest for information led him to found Pioneer Instrument Company in New York in 1919, a firm that eventually became one of the world's largest producers of reliable aviation instruments. In this biography, author Robert Dye, Goldsborough's great-nephew, tells the story of a man who became an expert in meteorology, navigation, and aircraft instrument design and changed the course of aviation history. Based on personal letters, articles, and news clippings, "A Pioneer in Aviation" follows Goldsborough's life as a teen, his time in the navy studying electricity, and his accomplishments, such as establishing China's first offshore radio station and supervising the construction of Haiti's first radio station. Detailing one of aviation's unsung heroes, "A Pioneer in Aviation" shows the man who designed, built, and installed the instrument panel for "The Spirit of St. Louis" and flew with Charles Lindbergh during September 1927 and how he came to be associated with other great names in aviation history such as Glenn Curtiss, Clyde Cessna, Walter Beech, and Igor Sikorsky.

During the time he spent in the Portuguese islands of Porto Santo and Madeira, Cristopher Columbus, a navigator from Genoa, was in charge of a dying sailor, from Castile whose caravel had been carried by the current from the Gulf of Guinea to a remote sea, possibly the Caribean.

On his deathbed, this man had told

Columbus the secret of some lands where Siberians had arrived during the Pleistocene and some documents about some possible previous trips. This sailor assured that such lands he had achieved carried by the currents were the same ones he was referring to.

When Columbus arrived in Spain, he tried to convince the Crown of Castile about his projects, which were precisely the same ones that Isaiah had prophesied as destined for getting the limits of the horizons. During his description, Columbus looked so sure that both the Queen Isabel and the King Fernando wondered whether he was trying to conceal a proved reality, a mistery he took to his grave.

When Columbus asked them for a subsidy, Fernando el Catolico commented him that coffers were empty at that point as they had just subjugated the whole Al-Andalus after the seizure of Granada and therefore the defeat of the most unlucky Nasrid king, Boabdil, known as "the little man."

Due to the Spanish explorers of the 15th century, Spain became the biggest commercial power amongst the European countries. They built up settlements which would last until three centuries later in a colonizing expansive process; until the loss of Spanish power on such territories from the decade of 1810s on, when the Independence began. Since the late 18th century, until the early 19th Century, the West witnessed a series of chain revolutions which affected Western Europe and Spanish America at the same time.

The invasion of Napoleon, Francisco de Miranda, Simon Bolivar, Masonic lodges, together with envies, betrayals or lovers make this book to be a thrilling adventure based on historic real.

If you centre a globe on Kiritimati (Christmas Island), all you see around it is a vast expanse of ocean. Islands of various sizes float in view while glimpses of continents encroach on the fringes, but this is a view dominated by water. The immense stretch of the Pacific Ocean is inhabited by a diverse array of peoples and cultures bound by a common thread: their relationship with the sea. The rich history of the Pacific is explored through specific objects, each one beautifully illustrated, from the earliest human engagement with the Pacific through to the modern day. With entries covering mapping, trade, whaling, flora and fauna, and the myriad vessels used to traverse the ocean, Pacific builds on recent interest in the voyages of James Cook to tell a broader history. This visually stunning publication highlights the importance of an ocean that covers very nearly a third of the surface of the globe, and which has dramatically shaped the world and people around it.

David Livingstone (1813-1873) was one of the supreme representatives of the British Empire. Yet his career suffered many set-backs during his own life-time, and since his death his reputation has swung between extremes of adulation and dismissal. Were his epic journeys through Africa purely to save souls and counter the slave trade? Or were they the first steps towards bringing the peoples of Central Africa under the control of Europeans who would destroy their values and exploit them economically? Beyond these questions, there lies the puzzle of Livingstone's own character and its contradictions.
Livingstone's career was certainly an extraordinary one. Born in poverty in Blantyre, Scotland, he educated himself by heroic endeavor, later proving him-self to be a remarkable linguist and scientist. His missionary journeys brought him into contact with a wide range of African peoples, for whom he showed remarkable sympathy. "David Livingstone: Mission and Empire is a scholarly and readable account of Livingstone's life and of his achievements.

Discover the truth about ENDURANCE in this superb true story of adventure, shipwreck, storms and survival on the high seas. 'Superb ... the greatest survival story of all time' Sir Chris Bonington 'One of the most remarkable tales of human courage and determination. The story is gripping and the book is a classic' Sir Ranulph Fiennes ENDURANCE is the story of one of the most astonishing feats of exploration and human courage ever recorded. In 1914 Sir Ernest Shackleton and a crew of 27 men set sail for the South Atlantic on board a ship called the Endurance. The object of the expedition was to cross the Antarctic overland. In October 1915, still half a continent away from their intended base, the ship was trapped, then crushed in ice. For five months Shackleton and his men, drifting on ice packs, were castaways on one of the most savage regions of the world. This utterly gripping book, based on first-hand accounts of crew members and interviews with survivors, describes how the men survived, how they lived together in camps on the ice for 17 months until they reached land, how they were attacked by sea leopards, the diseases which they developed, and the indefatigability of the men and their lasting civility towards one another in the most adverse conditions conceivable.