Kategoria BISAC: History >> Expeditions & Discoveries

On March 8, 1421, the largest fleet the world had ever seen set sail from China to -proceed all the way to the ends of the earth to collect tribute from the barbarians beyond the seas.- When the fleet returned home in October 1423, the emperor had fallen, leaving China in political and economic chaos. The great ships were left to rot at their moorings and the records of their journeys were destroyed. Lost in the long, self-imposed isolation that followed was the knowledge that Chinese ships had reached America seventy years before Columbus and had circumnavigated the globe a century before...

W hat happened in North America between Columbus's sail in 1492 and the Pilgrims' arrival in 1620?

On a visit to Plymouth Rock, Tony Horwitz realizes he doesn't have a clue, nor do most Americans. So he sets off across the continent to rediscover the wild era when Europeans first roamed the New World in quest of gold, glory, converts, and eternal youth. Horwitz tells the story of these brave and often crazed explorers while retracing their steps on his own epic trek--an odyssey that takes him inside an Indian sweat lodge in subarctic Canada, down the Mississippi in a canoe, on a...

Two hundred years ago, only the most reckless or eccentric Europeans had dared to traverse the unmapped territory of the modern-day Middle East. But in 1798, more than 150 French engineers, artists, doctors, and scientists--even a poet and a musicologist--traveled to the Nile Valley under the command of Napoleon Bonaparte and his invading army. Hazarding hunger, hardship, uncertainty, and disease, Napoleon's -savants- risked their lives in pursuit of discovery. The first large-scale interaction between Europeans and Muslims in the modern era, the audacious expedition was both a triumph and...

In this first study of the Greek and Roman exploration for over half a century, Duane W. Roller presents an important examination of the impact of the Greeks and Romans on the world through the Pillars of Herakles and beyond the Mediterranean.

Roller chronicles a detailed account of the series of explorers who were to discover the entire Atlantic coast; north to Iceland, Scandinavia and the Baltic, and south into the Africa tropics. His account examines these early pioneers and their discoveries, and contributes a brand new chapter to the history of exploration.

Based not...

Listen to a short interview with Tom GriffithsHost: Chris Gondek - Producer: Heron & Crane

From Scott and Shackleton to sled dogs and penguins, stories of Antarctica seize our imagination. In December 2002, environmental historian Tom Griffiths set sail with the Australian Antarctic Division to deliver the new team of winterers. In this beautifully written book, Griffiths reflects on the history of human experiences in Antarctica, taking the reader on a journey of discovery, exploration, and adventure in an unforgettable land.

He weaves together meditations on shipboard life...

In 1925, the legendary British explorer Percy Fawcett ventured into the Amazon jungle, in search of a fabled civilization. He never returned. Over the years countless perished trying to find evidence of his party and the place he called "The Lost City of Z." In this masterpiece of narrative nonfiction, journalist David Grann interweaves the spellbinding stories of Fawcett's quest for "Z" and his own journey into the deadly jungle, as he...

The disappearance of Colonel Fawcett in the Matto Grosso remains one of the great unsolved mysteries. In 1925, Fawcett was convinced that he had discovered the location of a lost city; he had set out with two companions, one of whom was his eldest son, to destination 'Z', never to be heard of again. His younger son, Brian Fawcett, has compiled this book from letters and records left by his father, whose last written words to his wife were: 'You need have no fear of any failure . ....

Globalization is one of the most significant developments of our time. But what distinguishes the present era from "golden" periods of empire building in past? Which elements of contemporary globalization and forms of autonomy are particularly novel and which are merely continuations of long-standing historical trends?To address these questions, Empires and Autonomy brings together a distinguished group of scholars who explore particular historical moments that involved either the establishment or protection of autonomy. These global encounters inevitably involved friction, and the...

In the 1890s, the Danish lieutenant Ole Olufsen set out to lead two expeditions to Tsarist Central Asia. Exploring areas that were still blank on European and Russian maps, the participants spent more than a year traveling on horseback in the pamirs and adjacent valleys bordering Afghanistan, China, and British India.

Esther Fihl offers an in-depth study of these Danish expeditions and presents the magnificent collection of objects brought back to the National Museum of Denmark. Drawing on diaries, reports, and published works and a scrutiny of the guiding principles for their...

Inuit elders who grew up in camps on the shores of Frobisher Bay can tell you what happened when Martin Frobisher arrived with his vessel in 1576: "He fired two warning shots into the air. So right away there were some grievances." Frobisher's shots were the opening salvos in the search for the Northwest Passage, a search that lasted for more than four hundred years and riveted the Western world, particularly in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. In Encounters on the Passage, present day Inuit tell the stories that have been passed down from their ancestors of the first...