Helen Maria Williams (1761 or 1762A1827) was a British novelist, poet, and translator of French-language works. She was an abolitionist, religious dissenter and supported of the French Revolution. Her 1786 Poems touch on topics ranging from religion to a critique of Spanish colonial practices. She allied herself with the cult of feminine sensibility, deploying it politically in opposition to war ("Ode on the Peace," a 1786 poem about Peru) and slavery (the abolitionist "Poem on the Bill Lately Passed for Regulating the Slave Trade," 1788).

Alexander von Humboldt (1769 1859) was an internationally respected scientist and explorer whose meticulous approach to scientific observation greatly influenced later research. He travelled the world, once staying at the White House as a guest of Thomas Jefferson, and is commemorated in the many species and places which bear his name. This two volume work, published in French in 1810 as Vue des Cordilleres, and in this English translation in 1814, was one of the many publications that resulted from Humboldt's expedition to Latin America in 1799 1804. It describes geographical features such...

Alexander von Humboldt (1769 1859) was an internationally respected scientist and explorer whose meticulous approach to scientific observation greatly influenced later research. He travelled the world, once staying at the White House as a guest of Thomas Jefferson, and is commemorated in the many species and places which bear his name. This two volume work, published in French in 1810 as Vue des Cordilleres, and in this English translation in 1814, was one of the many publications that resulted from Humboldt's expedition to Latin America in 1799 1804. It describes geographical features such...

The radical writer and poet Helen Maria Williams (1759 1827) is best remembered for her eight-volume Letters from France (1790 6), charting the progress of the French Revolution. Having published poetry and a novel, Julia (1790), she travelled to France, where her salon welcomed the likes of Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine and leading Girondists. Forced to flee the country in 1794, she went into exile in Switzerland for six months, travelling with the printer and political reformer John Hurford Stone (1763 1818). This two-volume account of the journeys she made during her time there, first...

The radical writer and poet Helen Maria Williams (1759 1827) is best remembered for her eight-volume Letters from France (1790 6), charting the progress of the French Revolution. Having published poetry and a novel, Julia (1790), she travelled to France, where her salon welcomed the likes of Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine and leading Girondists. Forced to flee the country in 1794, she went into exile in Switzerland for six months, travelling with the printer and political reformer John Hurford Stone (1763 1818). This two-volume account of the journeys she made during her time there, first...