Described by Charles Darwin as "the greatest scientific traveller who ever lived," Alexander von Humboldt helped to transform western science in the nineteenth century. Naturalist, botanist, zoologist, author, cartographer, artist, and sociologist, he is widely respected as the founder of physical geography (and climatalogy), and his influence on all branches of natural science still persists today.

Alexander von Humboldt was the most celebrated modern chronicler of North and South America and the Caribbean, and this translation of his essay on New Spain--the first modern regional economic and political geography--covers his travels across today's Mexico in 1803-04. The work canvases both natural-scientific and cultural-scientific objects alike, combining the results of fieldwork with archival research and expert testimony. To show how people, plants, animals, goods, and ideas moved across the globe, Humboldt wrote in a variety of styles, bending and reshaping familiar writerly conventions to keep readers attentive to new inputs. Above all, he wanted his readers to keep an open mind when confronted with cultural and other differences in the Americas. Fueled by his comparative global perspective on politics, economics, and science, he used his writing to support Latin American independence and condemn slavery and other forms of colonial exploitation. It is these voluminous and innovative writings on the New World that made Humboldt the undisputed father of modern geography, early American studies, transatlantic cultural history, and environmental studies. This two-volume critical edition--the third installment in the Alexander von Humboldt in English series--is based on the full text, including all footnotes, tables, and maps, of the second, revised French edition of Essai politique sur le royaume de de Nouvelle Espagne from 1825-27, which has never been translated into English before. Extensive annotations and full-color atlases are available on the series website.

Alexander von Humboldt was the most celebrated modern chronicler of North and South America and the Caribbean, and this translation of his essay on New Spain--the first modern regional economic and political geography--covers his travels across today's Mexico in 1803-04. The work canvases both natural-scientific and cultural-scientific objects alike, combining the results of fieldwork with archival research and expert testimony. To show how people, plants, animals, goods, and ideas moved across the globe, Humboldt wrote in a variety of styles, bending and reshaping familiar writerly conventions to keep readers attentive to new inputs. Above all, he wanted his readers to keep an open mind when confronted with cultural and other differences in the Americas. Fueled by his comparative global perspective on politics, economics, and science, he used his writing to support Latin American independence and condemn slavery and other forms of colonial exploitation. It is these voluminous and innovative writings on the New World that made Humboldt the undisputed father of modern geography, early American studies, transatlantic cultural history, and environmental studies. This two-volume critical edition--the third installment in the Alexander von Humboldt in English series--is based on the full text, including all footnotes, tables, and maps, of the second, revised French edition of Essai politique sur le royaume de de Nouvelle Espagne from 1825-27, which has never been translated into English before. Extensive annotations and full-color atlases are available on the series website.

The first volume of "Cosmos," his five-volume survey of the universe, appeared in 1845, though Humboldt had labored on the entire work for nearly half a century. He scrupulously sent sections of the work to other experts for suggestions and corrections. The last volume, put together from his notes after his death, appeared in 1861. The volumes were translated almost as rapidly as they appeared. This paperback edition reprints the Harper & Brothers edition, published in New York in 1858-59.

Linguistic Variability and Intellectual Development, Wilhelm von Humbolt's most famous work, was published by his brother Alexander posthumously, in 1836. It promptly established itself as a classic in the philosophy of language and has held that position ever since. With many examples from a vast multitude of languages, from Sanskrit to Delaware Indian, the author shows how character and structure of a language expresses the inner life and knowledge of its speakers and how their intellectual development is in turn shaped by their language.

While the influence of Alexander von Humboldt (1769 1859) looms large over the natural sciences, his legacy reaches far beyond the field notebooks of naturalists. Von Humboldt's 1799 1804 research expedition to Central and South America with botanist Aime Bonpland not only set the course for the great scientific surveys of the nineteenth century, but also served as the raw material for his many volumes works of both scientific rigor and aesthetic beauty that inspired such essayists and artists as Emerson, Goethe, Thoreau, Poe, and Frederic Edwin Church. Views of Nature, or Ansichten der Natur, was von Humboldt's best-known and most influential work and his personal favorite. While the essays that comprise it are themselves remarkable as innovative, early pieces of nature writing they were cited by Thoreau as a model for his own work the book's extensive endnotes incorporate some of von Humboldt's most beautiful prose and mature thinking on vegetation structure, its origins in climate patterns, and its implications for the arts. Written for both a literary and a scientific audience, Views of Nature was translated into English (twice), Spanish, and French in the nineteenth century, and it was read widely in Europe and the Americas. But in contrast to many of von Humboldt's more technical works, Views of Nature has been unavailable in English for more than one hundred years. Largely neglected in the United States during the twentieth century, von Humboldt's contributions to the humanities and the sciences are now undergoing a revival to which this new translation will be a critical contribution.

The legacy of Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) looms large over the natural sciences. His 1799-1804 research expedition to Central and South America with botanist Aime Bonpland set the course for the great scientific surveys of the nineteenth century, and inspired such essayists and artists as Emerson, Goethe, Thoreau, Poe, and Church. The chronicles of the expedition were published in Paris after von Humboldt's return, and first among them was the 1807 "Essay on the Geography of Plants." Among the most cited writings in natural history, after the works of Darwin and Wallace, this work appears here for the first time in a complete English-language translation. Covering far more than its title implies, it represents the first articulation of an integrative "science of the earth," encompassing most of today's environmental sciences. Ecologist Stephen T. Jackson introduces the treatise and explains its enduring significance two centuries after its publication.

In 1799, Alexander von Humboldt and Aime Bonpland set out to determine whether the Orinoco River connected with the Amazon. But what started as a trip to investigate a relatively minor geographical controversy became the basis of a five-year exploration throughout South America, Mexico, and Cuba. The discoveries amassed by von Humboldt and Bonpland were staggering, and much of today's knowledge of tropical zoology, botany, geography, and geology can be traced back to von Humboldt's numerous records of these expeditions. One of these accounts, "Views of the Cordilleras and Monuments of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas," firmly established Alexander von Humboldt as the founder of Mesoamerican studies. In "Views of the Cordilleras"--first published in French between 1810 and 1813--von Humboldt weaves together magnificently engraved drawings and detailed texts to achieve multifaceted views of cultures and landscapes across the Americas. In doing so, he offers an alternative perspective on the New World, combating presumptions of its belatedness and inferiority by arguing that the "old" and the "new" world are of the same geological age. This critical edition of "Views of the Cordilleras"--the second volume in the Alexander von Humboldt in English series--contains a new, unabridged English translation of von Humboldt's French text, as well as annotations, a bibliography, and all sixty-nine plates from the original edition, many of them in color.