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Books > Earth & environment > Geography > Geographical discovery & exploration
Footsteps in the Snow recounts a life shaped and dominated by Antarctica, a multi-facetted account of a life dedicated to Antarctic science, policy and governance. It is also the story of growth from callow youth to Antarctic professional in the most challenging of environments. Joining the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) straight from university in 1966 meant two years as a scientist at an isolated British research station with all the challenges of wintering in the hostile environment half a century ago. After just two years he became one of the youngest men to be made a base commander, and as Sir Vivian Fuchs (then Director of BAS) recounts 'proved himself one of the best we ever had under the most testing conditions'. The story recounts the many challenges of those testing conditions, while developing scientific ideas and accomplishing engineering feats with his team and on occasion looking death in the face and surviving. There were new developments in building research stations on the ice shelf, and the discovery of the ozone hole that gripped the world. Then followed the transition from research scientist to policy maker and diplomat when he became Deputy Director of BAS and advisor to the British delegation at the Antarctic Treaty. Tragedy struck at a base resulting in the author leading the first ever British midwinter flight into Antarctica. Since retiral, the author has become a polar historian "of repute", and his efforts have been directed to writing and being a guide for Antarctic tourism. This book allows the reader to feel the wonder, awe, excitement and passion for Antarctica which drove John Dudeney throughout his career, and which is as fresh today as it was on first encounter half a century ago.
The Coronado Expedition to Tierra Nueva is an engaging record of key research by archaeologists, ethnographers, historians, and geographers concerning the first organised European entrance into what is now the American Southwest and northwestern Mexico. In search of where the expedition went and what peoples it encountered, this volume explores the fertile valleys of Sonora, the basins and ranges of southern Arizona, the Zuni pueblos and the Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico, and the Llano Estacado of the Texas panhandle. The twenty-one contributors to the volume have pursued some of the most significant lines of research in the field in the last fifty years; their techniques range from documentary analysis and recording traditional stories to detailed examination of the landscape and excavation of campsites and Indian towns. With more confidence than ever before, researchers are closing in on the route of the conquistadors.
Covering the adventures of coastal and ocean explorers who made key discoveries and landmark observations from northern California up the coastline to Alaska during the mid-1700s to the early 1800s, this anthology of primary source journal entries, book excerpts, maps, and drawings enables readers to "discover" the Northwest Coast for themselves. More than 200 years ago, explorers traveled from Central America, Russia, and even Europe to explore the coastline of the American Pacific Northwest, with goals of developing new trade routes, claiming territory for their home countries, expanding their fur trade, or exploring in the name of scientific discovery. This book will take readers to the decks of the great ships and along for the adventures of legendary explorers, such as James Cook, Alejandro Malaspina, and George Vancouver. This book collects primary source materials such as journal entries, book excerpts, maps, and drawings that document how explorers first experienced the unknown Pacific Northwest coast, as seen through the eyes of non-native people. Readers will learn how explorers such as Vitus Bering and Robert Gray used the full extent of their powers of observation to record the landscape, animals, and plants they witnessed as well as their interactions with indigenous peoples during their search for the mythic Northwest Passage. The book also explains how the maritime explorers of this period mapped the remote regions of the Northwest Coast, working without the benefit of modern technology and relying instead on their knowledge of a range of sciences, mathematics, and seamanship-in addition to their ability to endure harsh and dangerous conditions-to produce exceptionally detailed maps. Provides interesting primary source documents that serve to guide students through the interpretation process Supplies clear explanation and analysis of each document to promote critical understanding of the topics Supports Common Core Standards relating to primary source analysis as well as National Geography Standards, including how to apply geography to interpret the past and understanding the processes, patterns, and functions of human settlement Includes comprehensive biographies and background on each person of significance Presents information on indigenous peoples of the area, including the Tlingit, Chinook, Haida, Tsimshian, Nuu-chah-nulth, and Gitxsan people
William Clark, co-captain of the famous Lewis and Clark Expedition, devoted his adult life to describing the American West. But this task raised a daunting challenge: how best to bring an unknown continent to life for the young republic? Through Clark's life and career, this book explores how the West entered the American imagination. While he never called himself a writer or an artist, Clark nonetheless drew maps, produced books, drafted reports, surveyed landscapes, and wrote journals that made sense of the West for a new nation fascinated by the region's potential but also fearful of its dangers. "William Clark's World" presents a new take on the manifest destiny narrative and on the way the West took shape in the national imagination in the early nineteenth century.
The Historical Dictionary of the American Frontier covers early Euro-American exploration and development of frontiers in North America but not only the lands that would eventually be incorporated into the Unites States it also includes the multiple North American frontiers explored by Spain, France, Russia, England, and others. The focus is upon Euro-American activities in frontier exploration and development, but the roles of indigenous peoples in these processes is highlighted throughout. The history of this period is covered through a chronology, an introductory essay, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 300 cross-referenced entries on explorers, adventurers, traders, religious orders, developers, and indigenous peoples. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the development of the American frontier.
First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) was a world traveler, bestselling writer, and versatile researcher, a European salon sensation, and global celebrity. Yet the enormous literary echo he generated has remained largely unexplored. Humboldt inspired generations of authors, from Goethe and Byron to Enzensberger and Garcia Marquez, to reflect on cultural difference, colonial ideology, and the relation between aesthetics and science. This collection of one-hundred texts features tales of adventure, travel reports, novellas, memoirs, letters, poetry, drama, screenplays, and even comics-many for the first time in English. The selection covers the foundational myths and magical realism of Latin America, the intellectual independence of Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, and Whitman in the United States, discourses in Imperial, Weimar, Nazi, East, and West Germany, as well as recent films and fiction. This documented source book addresses scholars in cultural and postcolonial studies as well as readers in history and comparative literature.
Alexander von Humboldt explored the Spanish Empire on the verge of its collapse (1799-1804). He is the most significant German travel writer and the most important mediator between Europe and the Americas of the nineteenth century. His works integrated knowledge from two dozen domains. Today, he is at the center of debates on imperial discourse, postcolonialism, and globalization. This collection of fifty essays brings together a range of responses, many presented here for the first time in English. Authors from Schiller, Chateaubriand, Sarmiento, and Nietzsche, to Robert Musil, Kurt Tucholsky, Ernst Bloch, and Alejo Carpentier paint the historical background. Essays by contemporary travel writers and recent critics outline the current controversies on Humboldt. The source materials collected here will be indispensable to scholars of German, French, and Latin and North American literature as well as cultural and postcolonial studies, history, art history, and the history of science.
This book, first published in 1875 and reissued in 1973, analyses the limited evidence from the works of early Chinese historians that explorers from China had discovered a country they called Fusang - possibly western America, and in all probability Mexico. The original document on which Chinese historians based their accounts of Fusang was the report of a Buddhist monk called Hoei-shin, who, in the year 499 AD, returned from a long journey to the east.
How can one pilot cram so much into a single lifetime? Climb into Captain Terry Reece's cockpit, fasten your seatbelt, and hold on for an exciting journey into the world of aviation. Born to a family of transplanted North Carolinians who moved to Washington State, a young Reece explored the hills of the Pacific Northwest. Hiking in the mountains and being a fire lookout gave him a taste of adventure, but he craved more-and he got it. Reece's first flying lesson ended in a cloud of billowing dust, ripped metal, and broken Plexiglas. But that didn't keep him grounded. Over the next few years, he navigated his Lockheed C-130 to steamy nights in Rangoon, risky undercover aircraft deliveries to Libya, icy Arctic expeditions, and desperate flights out of the desert with machine guns pointed at his gut, to landing Boeing jets on short, icy runways on Alaska's Aleutian Chain. Reece's entertaining biography delves into the fast-paced world of aviation and is filled with compassion, danger, bits of humor, and the follies of youth. It's also the remarkable tale of how Reece and his wife, Nancy, sought to keep his dream of flying alive through the years. From the freezing, isolated North Pole to the heat and heart of Africa, "Flying North South East and West" takes you to every direction on the compass and leads you to the adventure of a lifetime.
This volume aims to advance the analysis about Amerigo Vespucci by considering and connecting several fields of study such as literary history, philology, the history of science and cartography, economic history, and the history of ideas. The multifaceted research frames guide the reader through the complex vicissitudes of Amerigo Vespucci's life. The receptions and implications explore the intense cultural and historical dynamics that shaped the decades between the end of the fifteenth and the first half of the sixteenth century.
Originally published in 1985. After the epoch-making voyages of exploration of Captain Cook, a series of further exploratory missions was financed by the British government to add to the knowledge of the lands of the southern hemisphere: 'a more minute examination of the coast' was, for example, the brief of the voyage of the Investigator. Specimens of plants and fauna were to be collected, and useful products noted. The combination of the commercial streak with a commitment to empirical science was typical of the interests of the eighteenth century. This book traces the explorations and achievements of those who undertook missions of this kind, as extensions of their patrons' eyes, as it were. The commercial possibilities - of cotton, furs, foodstuffs, and other products - were exploited to the full, and the achievements of science thus helped to strengthen the imperial effort. Notable figures include the distinguished naturalist Sir Joseph Banks and the notorious Captain Bligh of the Bounty. The fascination and wide-ranging story is told with full scholarly documentation and many new insights and discoveries.
In 2014, a collection of papers was found on eBay: a scrapbook, inside which was written 'Testimonial Book of Dragoman Solomon N. Negima'. The letters pasted into the testimonial book bear recommendations of Negima's services as dragoman - a combination of tourist guide and interpreter - in the Holy Land, from travellers of different nationalities, social classes, religions, genders and races. Using these reference letters, and the first-hand published and unpublished accounts of the travellers themselves, this book tells the stories of several such tourists, including the intrepid Victorian female traveller, Ellen E. Miller, and an African-American minister, Rev. Charles T. Walker, who had been born into slavery. Between the lines of others' letters, Solomon Negima's remarkable life story also emerges: from a German mission school in Jerusalem, to the British army in the Sudan, to a successful career as a dragoman in Palestine and Syria, and finally to comfortable retirement with his son, Aziz, and daughter, Olinda, at a Mormon mission in Jerusalem. The discovery of this unique scrapbook allows us an insight into the lives of individuals whose histories would otherwise be lost to us, and a new perspective on the history of travel in the Middle East.
First published in 1964. This book is concerned with impressions of Arabic culture on the British before the First World War. More particularly, it is concerned with three Victorian travellers, all of whom knew Arabic culture first hand through their travels in the Middle and Near East, and especially in Arabia, Arabic North Africa, and the seaboard of the eastern Mediterranean. This title will be of interest to students of history.
In this succinct dual biography, Laura Chmielewski demonstrates how the lives of two French explorers - Jacques Marquette, a Jesuit missionary, and Louis Jolliet, a fur trapper - reveal the diverse world of early America. Following the explorers' epic journey through the center of the American continent, Marquette and Jolliet combines a story of discovery and encounter with the insights derived from recent historical scholarship. The story provides perspective on the different methods and goals of colonization and the role of Native Americans as active participants in this complex and uneven process.
In this succinct dual biography, Laura Chmielewski demonstrates how the lives of two French explorers - Jacques Marquette, a Jesuit missionary, and Louis Jolliet, a fur trapper - reveal the diverse world of early America. Following the explorers' epic journey through the center of the American continent, Marquette and Jolliet combines a story of discovery and encounter with the insights derived from recent historical scholarship. The story provides perspective on the different methods and goals of colonization and the role of Native Americans as active participants in this complex and uneven process.
When this book was first published in 1958, Arabia was even then one of the least known corners of the globe. The foreigner was strictly forbidden from entering, except those with the Imam's personal consent, and then under close supervision. Foreigners were only allowed as far as the capital, and what lay beyond was practically unexplored. To Hans Helfritz the only hope of seeing the forbidden area was to make a secret journey, approaching it in disguise by the back door. He decided to reach the borders of the Yemen by a wide detour through the interior, crossing a desert previously considered impassable and still recorded on the maps as a blank. Beginning on the coast at the eastern extremity of the Gulf of Aden, he made his way through the Hadhramaut, the Rub' al Khali and the Yemen to the Red Sea, the first crossing ever of the south-western part of the peninsula. From this journey he brought back a fascinating record of adventure and exploration, together with many wonderful pictures of cities never before photographed.
This volume recounts the experiences of female missionaries who worked in Uganda in and after 1895. It examines the personal stories of those women who were faced with a stubbornly masculine administration representative of a wider masculine administrative network in Westminster and other outposts of the British Empire. Encounters with Ugandan women and men of a range of ethnicities, the gender relations in those societies and relations between the British Protectorate administration and Ugandan Christian women are all explored in detail. The analysis is offset by the author's experience of working in Uganda at the close of British Protectorate status in the 1960s, employed by the Uganda Government Education Department in a school founded by the Uganda Mission.
Exploring the Explorers: Spaniards in Oceania 1519-1794 is the first study of cross-cultural engagements between the indigenous peoples of the Pacific and Spanish explorers during the early modern period. Bridging disciplines, the book sets out to analyse in detail eight main voyages and their aims and outcomes, looking at the different patterns of contact and the use of gift-giving and bartering as social cement. This fascinating and original study will broaden the investigation of world exploration and Pacific ethnography, as many of the sources from these voyages are scarcely known and have not been translated before. It will also expand an understanding of Spanish and world exploration, developing the history of the Spanish Pacific beyond the long-standing colony of the Philippines. The study will be of particular interest to scholars and students of Early Modern European history as well as anthropologists, ethnographers and those interested in stories of exploration and discovery throughout history. -- .
Exploring the diverse factors that persuaded Christopher Columbus that he could reach the fabled "East" by sailing west, Dante, Columbus and the Prophetic Tradition considers, first, the impact of Dante's Divine Comedy and the apocalyptic prophetic tradition that it reflects, on Columbus's perception both of the cosmos and the eschatological meaning of his journey to what he called an 'other world.' In so doing, the book considers how affinities between himself and the exiled poet might have led Columbus to see himself as a divinely appointed agent of the apocalypse and his enterprise as the realization of the spiritual journey chronicled in the Comedy. As part of this study, the book necessarily examines the cultural space that Dante's poem, its geography, cosmography and eschatology, enjoyed in late fifteenth century Spain as well as Columbus's own exposure to it. As it considers how Italian writers and artists of the late Renaissance and Counter Reformation received the news of Columbus' 'discovery' and appropriated the figure of Dante and the pseudo-prophecy of the Comedy to interpret its significance, the book examines how Tasso, Ariosto, Stradano and Stigliani, in particular, forge a link between Dante and Columbus to present the latter as an inheritor of an apostolic tradition that traces back to the Aeneid. It further highlights the extent to which Italian writers working in the context of the Counter Reformation, use a Dantean filter to propagate the notion of Columbus as a new Paul, that is, a divinely appointed apostle to the New World, and the Roman Church as the rightful emperor of the souls encountered there. |
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