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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.
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Views of Nature (Paperback)
Alexander Von Humboldt, Stephen T. Jackson, Laura Dassow Walls, Mark W Person
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R802
Discovery Miles 8 020
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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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.
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.
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