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"Discoveries in geography -- American"
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The World and All the Things upon It
What if we saw indigenous people as the active agents of global exploration rather than as the passive objects of that exploration? What if, instead of conceiving of global exploration as an enterprise just of European men such as Columbus or Cook or Magellan, we thought of it as an enterprise of the people they \"discovered\"? What could such a new perspective reveal about geographical understanding and its place in struggles over power in the context of colonialism?
The World and All the Things upon Itaddresses these questions by tracing how Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian people) explored the outside world and generated their own understandings of it in the century after James Cook's arrival in 1778. Writing with verve, David A. Chang draws on the compelling words of long-ignored Hawaiian-language sources-stories, songs, chants, and political prose-to demonstrate how Native Hawaiian people worked to influence their metaphorical \"place in the world.\" We meet, for example, Ka?iana, a Hawaiian chief who took an English captain as his lover and, while sailing throughout the Pacific, considered how Chinese, Filipinos, Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans might shape relations with Westerners to their own advantage. Chang's book is unique in examining travel, sexuality, spirituality, print culture, gender, labor, education, and race to shed light on how constructions of global geography became a site through which Hawaiians, as well as their would-be colonizers, perceived and contested imperialism, colonialism, and nationalism.
Rarely have historians asked how non-Western people imagined and even forged their own geographies of their colonizers and the broader world. This book takes up that task. It emphasizes, moreover, that there is no better way to understand the process and meaning of global exploration than by looking out from the shores of a place, such as Hawai?i, that was allegedly the object, and not the agent, of exploration.
eBook
Polaris
Emil Bessels was chief scientist and medical officer on George Francis Hall's ill-fated American North Pole Expedition of 1871-73 on board the ship Polaris. Bessels' book, translated from the German in its entirety for the first time, is one of only two first-hand accounts of the voyage, and it is the only first-hand account of the experiences of the group which stayed with the ship after it ran afoul of arctic ice, leaving some of its crew stranded on an ice floe. Bessels and the others spent a second winter on shore in Northwest Greenland, where the drifting, disabled ship ran aground. Hall died suspiciously during the first winter, and Bessels is widely suspected of having poisoned him. Bill Barr has uncovered new evidence of a possible motive. Essential reading for researchers and students of arctic exploration history, this book is also a compelling read for the interested general reader.
eBook
True yankees : the South Seas and the discovery of American identity
With American independence came the freedom to sail anywhere in the world under a new flag. During the years between the Treaty of Paris and the Treaty of Wangxi, Americans first voyaged past the Cape of Good Hope, reaching the ports of Algiers and the bazaars of Arabia, the markets of India and the beaches of Sumatra, the villages of Cochin, China, and the factories of Canton. Their South Seas voyages of commerce and discovery introduced the infant nation to the world and the world to what the Chinese, Turks, and others dubbed the “new people.”
Drawing on private journals, letters, ships’ logs, memoirs, and newspaper accounts, True Yankees traces America’s earliest encounters on a global stage through the exhilarating experiences of five Yankee seafarers. Merchant Samuel Shaw spent a decade scouring the marts of China and India for goods that would captivate the imaginations of his countrymen. Mariner Amasa Delano toured much of the Pacific hunting seals. Explorer Edmund Fanning circumnavigated the globe, touching at various Pacific and Indian Ocean ports of call. In 1829, twenty-year-old Harriett Low reluctantly accompanied her merchant uncle and ailing aunt to Macao, where she recorded trenchant observations of expatriate life. And sea captain Robert Bennet Forbes’s last sojourn in Canton coincided with the eruption of the First Opium War.
How did these bold voyagers approach and do business with the people in the region, whose physical appearance, practices, and culture seemed so strange? And how did native men and women—not to mention the European traders who were in direct competition with the Americans—regard these upstarts who had fought off British rule? The accounts of these adventurous travelers reveal how they and hundreds of other mariners and expatriates influenced the ways in which Americans defined themselves, thereby creating a genuinely brash national character—the “true Yankee.” Readers who love history and stories of exploration on the high seas will devour this gripping tale.
eBook
Unknown waters : a firsthand account of the historic under-ice survey of the Siberian continental shelf by USS Queenfish (SSN-651)
Normal0falsefalsefalseEN-USX-NONEX-NONEMicrosoftInternetExplorer4Charting the Siberian continental shelf during the height of the Cold WarThis book tells the story of the brave officers and men of the nuclear attack submarine USS Queenfish (SSN-651), who made the first survey of an extremely important and remote region of the Artic Ocean. The unpredictability of deep-draft sea ice, shallow water, and possible Soviet discovery, all played a dramatic part in this fascinating 1970 voyage. Covering 3100 miles over a period of some 20 days at a laborious average speed of 6.5 knots or less, the attack submarine carefully threaded its way through innumerable underwater canyons of ice and over irregular seafloors, at one point becoming entrapped in an \"ice garage.\" Only cool thinking and skillful maneuvering of the nearly 5,000-ton vessel enabled a successful exit. The most hazardous phase of the journey began 240 nautical miles south of the North Pole with a detailed hydrographic survey of an almost totally uncharted Siberian shelf, from the northwestern corner of the heavily glaciated Severnaya Zemlya Archipelago to the Bering Strait via the shallow, thickly-ice-covered Laptev, East Siberian, and Chukchi seas. The skipper of theQueenfishhad been trained and selected by Admiral Hyman Rickover and, inspired by this polar experience, McLaren became one of the world's foremost Arctic scientists, studying first at Cambridge University and then obtaining his doctorate in physical geography of the Polar Regions from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
eBook
Explorers and Scientists in China's Borderlands, 1880-1950
The scientists and explorers profiled in this engaging study of pioneering Euro-American exploration of late imperial and Republican China range from botanists to ethnographers to missionaries. Although a diverse lot, all believed in objective, progressive, and universally valid science; a close association between scientific and humanistic knowledge; a lack of conflict between science and faith; and the union of the natural world and the world of \"nature people.\"Explorers and Scientists in China's Borderlandsexamines their cultural and personal assumptions while emphasizing their remarkable lives, and considers their contributions to a body of knowledge that has important contemporary significance.
Essays are devoted to D. C. Graham, Joseph Rock, Reginald Farrer and George Forrest, Ernest Henry Wilson, Paul Vial, Johan Gunnar Andersson and Ding Wenjiang, and Friedrich Weiss and Hedwig Weiss-Sonnenburg. Richly illustrated with historic photographs, this collection reveals the extraordinary lives and times of these remarkable people.
eBook
Overland to Starvation Cove
In May 1845 Sir John Franklin sailed westward from England in search of the Northwest Passage and was never seen again. Some thirty-five years later, Heinrich Klutschak of Prague, artist and surveyor on a small expedition led by Lieutenant Frederick Schwatka of the 3rd US Cavalry Regiment, stumbled upon the grisly remains at Starvation Cove of the last survivors among Franklin's men.
Overland to Starvation Cove is the first English translation of Klutschak's account. A significant contribution to Canadian exploration history, it is also an important anthropological document, providing some of the earliest reliable descriptions of the Aivilingmiut, the Utkuhikhalingmiut, and the Netsilingmiut. But above all, it is a fascinating story of arctic adventure.
eBook
The coldest crucible
In the late 1800s, “Arctic Fever” swept across the nation as dozens of American expeditions sailed north to the Arctic to find a sea route to Asia and, ultimately, to stand at the North Pole. Few of these missions were successful, and many men lost their lives en route. Yet failure did little to dampen the enthusiasm of new explorers or the crowds at home that cheered them on. Arctic exploration, Michael F. Robinson argues, was an activity that unfolded in America as much as it did in the wintry hinterland. Paying particular attention to the perils facing explorers at home, The Coldest Crucible examines their struggles to build support for the expeditions before departure, defend their claims upon their return, and cast themselves as men worthy of the nation’s full attention. In so doing, this book paints a new portrait of polar voyagers, one that removes them from the icy backdrop of the Arctic and sets them within the tempests of American cultural life. With chronological chapters featuring emblematic Arctic explorers—including Elisha Kent Kane, Charles Hall, and Robert Peary—The Coldest Crucible reveals why the North Pole, a region so geographically removed from Americans, became an iconic destination for discovery.
eBook
Ancient Ocean Crossings
Paints a compelling picture of impressive pre-Columbian
cultures and Old World civilizations that, contrary to many
prevailing notions, were not isolated from one another
In
Ancient Ocean Crossings: Reconsidering the Case for Contacts
with the Pre-Columbian Americas , Stephen Jett encourages
readers to reevaluate the common belief that there was no
significant interchange between the chiefdoms and civilizations
of Eurasia and Africa and peoples who occupied the alleged
terra incognita beyond the great oceans. More than a
hundred centuries separate the time that Ice Age hunters are
conventionally thought to have crossed a land bridge from Asia
into North America and the arrival of Columbus in the Bahamas in
1492. Traditional belief has long held that earth’s two
hemispheres were essentially cut off from one another as a result
of the post-Pleistocene meltwater-fed rising oceans that covered
that bridge. The oceans, along with arctic climates and daunting
terrestrial distances, formed impermeable barriers to
interhemispheric communication. This viewpoint implies that the
cultures of the Old World and those of the Americas developed
independently. Drawing on abundant and concrete evidence to
support his theory for significant pre-Columbian contacts, Jett
suggests that many ancient peoples had both the seafaring
capabilities and the motives to cross the oceans and, in fact,
did so repeatedly and with great impact. His deep and broad work
synthesizes information and ideas from archaeology, geography,
linguistics, climatology, oceanography, ethnobotany, genetics,
medicine, and the history of navigation and seafaring, making an
innovative and persuasive multidisciplinary case for a new
understanding of human societies and their diffuse but
interconnected development.
eBook
Contested Territory
Landscape is never static, but changes continuously when seen in
relation to human occupation, movement, labor, and discourse.
Contested Territory explores the ways in which Peru's
early colonial landscapes were experienced and portrayed,
especially by the Spanish conquerors but also by their conquered
subjects. It focuses on the role played by indigenous groups in
shaping the Spanish experiences of landscapes, the diverse
geographical images of Peru and ways in which these were
constructed and contested, and what this can tell us about the
nature of colonial relations in post-conquest Peru.
This exceptional study, which draws from archival records and
sources such as cartographies, offers a richly nuanced view of the
complexity of colonial relations. It will be read with appreciation
by those interested in Spanish history, geography, and
colonialism.
eBook