This study suggests how traditional language-rich narrative histories of the Pale of Settlement can benefit from drawing on the large vocabularies, questions, theories and analytical methods of human geography, economics and the social sciences for an understanding of how Jewish communities responded to multiple disruptions during the nineteenth century. Moving from the ecological level of systems of settlements and variations among individual ones down to the immediate built environment, the book explores how both physical and human space influenced responses to everyday lives and emigration to America.

Europe and the British Geographical Imagination, 1760-1830 explores what literate British people understood by the word 'Europe' in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Was Europe unified by shared religious heritage? Where were the edges of Europe? Was Europe primarily a commercial network or were there common political practices too? Was Britain itself a European country? While intellectual history is concerned predominantly with prominent thinkers, Paul Stock traces the history of ideas in non-elite contexts, offering a detailed analysis of nearly 350 geographical reference works, textbooks, dictionaries, and encyclopaedias, which were widely read by literate Britons of all classes, and can reveal the formative ideas about Europe circulating in Britain: ideas about religion; the natural environment; race and other theories of human difference; the state; borders; the identification of the 'centre' and 'edges' of Europe; commerce and empire; and ideas about the past, progress, and historical change. By showing how these and other questions were discussed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British culture, Europe and the British Geographical Imagination, 1760-1830 provides a thorough and much-needed historical analysis of Britain's enduringly complex intellectual relationship with Europe.

Safari Nation opens new lines of inquiry in the study of national parks in Africa and the rest of the world. The Kruger National Park is South Africa's most iconic nature reserve, renowned for its rich flora and fauna. According to author Jacob Dlamini, there is another side to the park, a social history neglected by scholars and popular writers alike in which blacks (meaning Africans, Coloureds, and Indians) occupy center stage. Safari Nation details the ways in which black people devoted energies to conservation and to the park over the course of the twentieth century--engagement that transcends the stock (black) figure of the laborer and the poacher. By exploring the complex and dynamic ways in which blacks of varying class, racial, religious, and social backgrounds related to the Kruger National Park, and with the help of previously unseen archival photographs, Dlamini's narrative also sheds new light on how and why Africa's national parks--often derided by scholars as colonial impositions--survived the end of white rule on the continent. Relying on oral histories, photographs, and archival research, Safari Nation engages both with African historiography and with ongoing debates about the "land question," democracy, and citizenship in South Africa.

The First World War led to a radical reshaping of Europe's political borders. Nowhere was this transformation more profound than in East Central Europe, where the collapse of imperial rule led to the emergence of a series of new states. New borders intersected centuries-old networks of commercial, cultural, and social exchange. The new states had to face the challenges posed by territorial fragmentation and at the same time establish durable state structures within an international order that viewed them as, at best, weak, and at worst, as merely provisional entities that would sooner or later be reintegrated into their larger neighbours' territory. Fragmentation in East Central Europe challenges the traditional view that the emergence of these states was the product of a radical rupture that naturally led from defunct empires to nation states. Using the example of Poland and the Baltic States, it retraces the roots of the interwar states of East Central Europe, of their policies, economic developments, and of their conflicts back to the First World War. At the same time, it shows that these states learned to harness the dynamics caused by territorial fragmentation, thus forever changing our understanding of what modern states can do.

This book explores three authors who wrote about the rise of the Roman Empire: Polybius, Posidonius, and Strabo. It examines the overlap between geography and history in their works, and considers the way in which pre-existing traditions were used but transformed in order to describe the new world of Rome.

The only compact yet comprehensive survey of environmental and cultural forces that have shaped the visual character and geographical diversity of the settled American landscape. The book examines the large-scale historical influences that have molded the varied human adaptation of the continent's physical topography to its needs over more than 500 years. It presents a synoptic view of myriad historical processes working together or in conflict, and illustrates them through their survival in or disappearance from the everyday landscapes of today.

Dismissed in early years as a wasteland, the rolling open country that covers the interior parts of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho is today one of the richest farmlands in the nation. This work is the story of its transformation. Meinig traces all of the aspects of its development by combining geographic description with historical narrative.

Hundreds of exceptional cartographic images are scattered throughout medieval and early modern Arabic, Persian, and Turkish manuscript collections. The plethora of copies created around the Islamic world over the course of eight centuries testifies to the enduring importance of these medieval visions for the Muslim cartographic imagination. With Medieval Islamic Maps, historian Karen C. Pinto brings us the first in-depth exploration of medieval Islamic cartography from the mid-tenth to the nineteenth century. Pinto focuses on the distinct tradition of maps known collectively as the Book of Roads and Kingdoms (Kitab al-Masalik wa al-Mamalik, or KMMS), examining them from three distinct angles--iconography, context, and patronage. She untangles the history of the KMMS maps, traces their inception and evolution, and analyzes them to reveal the identities of their creators, painters, and patrons, as well as the vivid realities of the social and physical world they depicted. In doing so, Pinto develops innovative techniques for approaching the visual record of Islamic history, explores how medieval Muslims perceived themselves and their world, and brings Middle Eastern maps into the forefront of the study of the history of cartography.

""The Worst Journey in the World" is to travel writing what "War and Peace" is to the novel . . . a masterpiece."--"The New York Review of Books
""When people ask me, 'What is your favorite travel book?' I nearly always name this book. It is about courage, misery, starvation, heroism, exploration, discovery, and friendship." --Paul Theroux
"National Geographic Adventure "magazine hailed this volume as the #1 greatest adventure book of all time. Published in 1922 by an expedition survivor, it recounts the riveting tale of Robert Falcon Scott's ill-fated race to the South Pole. Apsley Cherry-Garrard, the youngest member of the party, offers sensitive characterizations of each of his companions. Their journal entries complement his narrative, providing vivid perspectives on the expedition's dangers and hardships as well as its inspiring examples of optimism, strength, and selflessness.
Hoping to prove a missing link between reptiles and birds, the author and his companions traveled through the dead of Antarctic winter to the remote breeding grounds of the Emperor Penguin. They crossed a frozen sea in utter darkness, dragging an 800-pound sledge through blizzards, howling winds, and average temperatures of 60 below zero. This "worst journey" was followed by the disastrous trek to the South Pole. Cherry-Garrard's compelling account constitutes a moving testament to Scott and to the other men of the expedition. This new edition of the adventure classic features several pages of vintage photographs.

With its filigreed, formidable representations of tears and suffering, sentimentalism has remained a divisive genre and category of analysis. On Sympathetic Grounds offers a new interpretation of the sentimental by mapping its grounds in North America. During sweeping transformations of territory, land stewardship, personhood, and citizenship in the nineteenth century, sentimentalists evoked sympathy to express a desire for a place that was both territorial and emotional-what Naomi Greyser calls an "affective geography." Greyser traces the intricacies attending Americans' sentimental sense that bodies could merge and mutually occupy the same space at the same time. Affective geographies complicate normative, linear assumptions about intimacy and distance, and consequently compel a reconsideration of geopolitics, geophysics and the distribution of resources and care. Mapping feelings in and also about space, On Sympathetic Grounds focuses on the experiences and perspectives of those whose bodies, labor and sovereignty have been occupied to ground others' lives and world-making projects. Bringing literary and rhetorical studies together with critical race and gender theory, cultural geography, American studies, affect studies and the new materialism, this book lays out sentimentalism's usefulness to settler colonialism and the maintenance of racialized labor. The book also carefully charts sentimentalism's value as a means of resisting geographic displacement and both physical and metaphysical dispossession. Philosophers and rhetoricians regard grounds as necessary conditions for argumentation; Greyser treats grounds as also geopolitical, geoaffective, and geophysical. Sympathy has enriched conditions for living at the same time that it has mercilessly enlisted some bodies and lives as the grounds for others' wellbeing. Ultimately, On Sympathetic Grounds uncovers a moving, non-linear cartography of sympathy's vital place in shaping North America.

An award-winning environmental historian explores American history through wrenching, tragic, and sometimes humorous stories of getting lost "Fascinating. . . . Underlying . . . is a deep belief in the importance of collaboration and cooperation between humans and their environments, as well as between humans and other humans."-Robert Macfarlane, New York Review of Books The human species has a propensity for getting lost. The American people, inhabiting a mental landscape shaped by their attempts to plant roots and to break free, are no exception. In this engaging book, environmental historian Jon Coleman bypasses the trailblazers so often described in American history to follow instead the strays and drifters who went missing. From Hernando de Soto's failed quest for riches in the American southeast to the recent trend of getting lost as a therapeutic escape from modernity, this book details a unique history of location and movement as well as the confrontations that occur when our physical and mental conceptions of space become disjointed. Whether we get lost in the woods, the plains, or the digital grid, Coleman argues that getting lost allows us to see wilderness anew and connect with generations across five centuries to discover a surprising and edgy American identity.

The third volume in The Cambridge Urban History of Britain examines the process of urbanisation and suburbanisation from the early Victorian period to the twentieth century. Twenty-eight leading scholars provide a coherent, systematic, historical investigation of the rise of cities and towns in England, Scotland and Wales, examining not only the evolving networks and types of towns, but their economic, demographic, social, political, cultural and physical development. The contributors discuss pollution and disease, the resolution of social conflict, the relationships between towns and the surrounding countryside, new opportunities for leisure and consumption, the development of local civic institutions and identities, and the evolution of municipal and state responsibilities. This comprehensive volume gives unique insights into the development of the urban landscape. Its detailed overview and analyses of the problems and opportunities which arise shed historical light on many of the issues and challenges that we face today.

In 1770, Thomas Forrest (c.1729-c.1802) was involved in establishing a new free port at Balambangan, Malaysia, which would improve the British East India Company's trade routes eastwards. In 1774 he agreed to lead an expedition on the Company's behalf to find out more about the waters between Malaysia and New Guinea. This 1779 publication (reissued in the Dublin edition) tells the story of Forrest's fifteen-month voyage in a small local vessel crewed by Malaysians, exploring the archipelago between the Philippines and present-day Indonesia. A French translation appeared in 1780, and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt referred to the book fifty years later. Forrest describes the islands, their populations, and their vegetation, including different spices. He discusses relations between local rulers, and the rivalries between the British and the Dutch, particularly as regards control of the spice trade. The book also contains a substantial vocabulary of the Maguindanao language.

'Beautiful ... endless, brilliant unforgettable stories' Cerys Matthews, BBC Radio 6 'Combining myth and science, this breathtaking book [is] packed with stunning images' Daily Mail After the enormous international success of The Phantom Atlas and The Golden Atlas, Edward Brooke-Hitching's brilliant book unveils some of the most beautiful maps and charts ever created during mankind's quest to map the skies above us. This richly illustrated treasury showcases the finest examples of celestial cartography - a glorious genre of map-making often overlooked by modern map books - as well as medieval manuscripts, masterpiece paintings, ancient star catalogues, antique instruments and other appealing curiosities. This is the sky as it has never been presented before: the realm of stars and planets, but also of gods, devils, weather wizards, flying sailors, medieval aliens, mythological animals and rampaging spirits. The reader is taken on a tour of star-obsessed cultures around the world, learning about Tibetan sky burials, star-covered Inuit dancing coats, Mongolian astral prophets and Sir William Herschel's 1781 discovery of Uranus, the first planet to be found since antiquity. Even stranger are the forgotten stories from European history, like the English belief of the Middle Ages in ships that sailed a sea above the clouds, 16th-century German UFO sightings and the Edwardian aristocrat who mistakenly mapped alien-made canals on the surface of Mars. As the intricacies of our universe are today being revealed with unprecedented clarity, there has never been a better time for a highly readable book as beautiful as the night sky to contextualise the scale of these achievements for the general reader.

To join a conversation, one must know what is being said. Writing Early America is a field report on the current state of the historiography on the colonial era-from the time of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 to the end of the American Revolution around 1784. Based on a close reading of nearly four hundred articles in leading journals published over the past decade, Trevor Burnard provides an unprecedented analysis of the direction of the field encompassed by the popular hashtag #VastEarlyAmerica. He examines scholarship on the most important areas of current research-Indigenous history, slavery and race, and gender. Burnard also demonstrates how important imperialism has become in providing a framework for colonial American history, especially for new scholarship on the American War of Independence, which historians increasingly see in its context as part of a broader Age of Revolutions. This is the first book in over thirty years to offer advanced undergraduate and graduate students and scholars a comprehensive guide to the historiography of early America.