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"Discoveries in geography History 18th century."
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Curious encounters : voyaging, collecting, and making knowledge in the long eighteenth century
\"With contributions from historians, literary critics, and geographers, Curious Encounters uncovers a rich history of global voyaging, collecting, and scientific exploration in the long eighteenth century. Leaving behind grand narratives of discovery, these essays collectively restore a degree of symmetry and contingency to our understanding of encounters between European and Indigenous people. To do this the essays consider diverse agents of historical change, both human and inanimate: commodities, curiosities, texts, animals, and specimens moved through their own global circuits of knowledge and power. The voyages and collections rediscovered here do not move from a European center to a distant periphery, nor do they position European authorities as the central agents of this early era of globalization. Long distance voyagers from Greenland to the Ottoman Empire crossed paths with French, British, Polynesian, and Spanish travelers across the world, trading objects and knowledge for diverse ends. The dynamic contact zones of these curious encounters include the ice floes of the Arctic, the sociable spaces of the tea table, the hybrid material texts and objects in imperial archives, and the collections belonging to key figures of the Enlightenment, including Sir Hans Sloane and James Petiver.\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Captain Cook Rediscovered
This first modern study to focus on James Cook's polar adventures, Captain Cook Rediscovered introduces an entirely new explorer who is more at home along the edge of the polar ice packs than the Pacific's sandy beaches.
eBook
Island of the blue foxes : disaster and triumph on the world's greatest scientific expedition
\"The immense eighteenth-century scientific journey, variously known as the Second Kamchatka Expedition or the Great Northern Expedition, from St. Petersburg across Siberia to the coast of North America, involved over 3,000 people and cost Peter the Great over one-sixth of his empire's annual revenue. Led by the legendary Danish captain Vitus Bering, the ten-year voyage, which included scientists, artists, mariners, soldiers, and laborers, discovered Alaska, opened the Pacific fur trade, and, thanks to the brilliant naturalist Georg Steller, discovered dozens of New World plants and animals. The story of the expedition is a tale not only of adventure and historic achievement, but also of shipwreck, endurance, and \"one of the most tragic and ghastly trials of suffering in the annals of maritime and arctic history.\"\"--Jacket.
Book
The Elusive West and the Contest for Empire, 1713-1763
A truly continental history in both its geographic and political
scope, The Elusive West and the Contest for Empire,
1713-1763 investigates eighteenth-century diplomacy involving
North America and links geographic ignorance about the American
West to Europeans' grand geopolitical designs. Breaking from
scholars' traditional focus on the Atlantic world, Paul W. Mapp
demonstrates the centrality of hitherto understudied western
regions to early American history and shows that a Pacific focus is
crucial to understanding the causes, course, and consequences of
the Seven Years' War.
eBook
Measuring the new world
Prior to 1735, South America was largely terra incognita to many Europeans. But that year, the Paris Academy of Sciences sent a joint French and Spanish mission to the Spanish American province of Quito (in present-day Ecuador) to study the curvature of the Earth at the Equator—an expedition that would put South America on the map and in the minds of Europeans for centuries to come. Equipped with quadrants and telescopes, the mission’s participants referred to the transfer of scientific knowledge from Europe to the Andes as a “sacred fire” passing mysteriously through European astronomical instruments to curious observers in South America. By looking at the social and material traces of this expedition, Measuring the New World examines the transatlantic flow of knowledge in reverse—from West to East. Through ephemeral monuments and geographical maps, from the Andes to the Amazon River, the book explores how the social and cultural worlds of South America contributed to the production of European scientific knowledge during the Enlightenment. Neil Safier uses the notebooks of traveling philosophers, including Charles-Marie de La Condamine and others, as well as maps and specimens from the expedition, to place this particular scientific endeavor in the larger context of early modern print culture and the emerging intellectual category of scientist as author.
eBook
James Cook
The twenty-fifth of August 2018 marks the 250th anniversary of the departure of the Endeavour from Plymouth, England, and the first of three voyages by James Cook that would nearly complete the map of the world. Interweaving accounts of scientific discovery with the personal stories of the voyages’ key participants, William Frame and Laura Walker explore the charting of the Pacific and the natural world, the first encounters and exchange between Western and indigenous cultures, and the representation of the voyages in art. The illustrations, many of which have never before been published, include drawings by all the artists employed on the voyages, including Alexander Buchan, Sydney Parkinson, William Hodges, and John Webber. It also includes the only surviving paintings by Tupaia, a Polynesian high priest and navigator who joined the first voyage at Tahiti and sailed with Cook to New Zealand and Australia. A stunningly illustrated object-centred history, James Cook: The Voyages offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity to discover the extensive Captain Cook collection of the British Library, including original maps, artworks, journals, and printed books.The twenty-fifth of August 2018 marks the 250th anniversary of the departure of the Endeavour from Plymouth, England, and the first of three voyages by James Cook that would nearly complete the map of the world. Interweaving accounts of scientific discovery with the personal stories of the voyages’ key participants, William Frame and Laura Walker explore the charting of the Pacific and the natural world, the first encounters and exchange between Western and indigenous cultures, and the representation of the voyages in art. The illustrations, many of which have never before been published, include drawings by all the artists employed on the voyages, including Alexander Buchan, Sydney Parkinson, William Hodges, and John Webber. It also includes the only surviving paintings by Tupaia, a Polynesian high priest and navigator who joined the first voyage at Tahiti and sailed with Cook to New Zealand and Australia. A stunningly illustrated object-centred history, James Cook: The Voyages offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity to discover the extensive Captain Cook collection of the British Library, including original maps, artworks, journals, and printed books.
eBook
The great ocean : Pacific worlds from Captain Cook to the gold rush
The Great Ocean examines the convergence and fragmentation of Pacific worlds during a period of rapidly expanding trade, indigenous depopulation, and scientific investigations. With a particular focus on the eastern Pacific in the decades between the 1770s and the 1840s, this study uncovers world history in the coastal localities where voyagers, traders, hunters, and native peoples met one another through episodes often marked by violence and tragic outcomes. Igler reveals a vast oceanic and coastal geography that gradually became entangled with global circuits. Rather than a single ocean world, this study demonstrates how the eastern Pacific encompassed a variety of seas and a multiplicity of human communities. At the same time, The Great Ocean situates this story in the personal and intimate interactions of different groups, including indigenous \"ocean peoples, \" mainland native groups, and a diverse assortment of foreign voyagers.This story poignantly presents the individuals and the themes they embody. The American William Shaler sought wealth through trans-Pacific trade with China. Indigenous communities struggled against introduced diseases that cut through the heart of their communities. The Russian Timofei Tarakanov desired freedom from his ordeal in captivity. Mary Brewster longed for a cargo of whale oil and a safe voyage home. Kadu desired to see more of the ocean, while his European companion Adelbert vonChamisso carefully compiled his notes on natural history. Finally, James Dwight Dana pursued knowledge of the largest scale, including the origins of the earth. Their stories-and the historical themes that tie them together-offers a stunning perspective on the oceanic worlds of the eastern Pacific. Ambitious and broadly conceived, this is the first study of its kind to examine the Pacific Basin through the intersection of American, oceanic, and world history.
eBook
The French 'discovery' of the pacific: New worlds in the south
In early European exploration of the southern regions of the globe the French, focussing on the Indian Ocean, were relatively late in coming to the Pacific Ocean. In this paper I shall explore how, firstly, geo-political factors, and then, from the late seventeenth century, the French search for the Terres australes, delayed their interest in the Pacific. I shall look at how these circumstances, joined to the long-standing French interest in the indigenous Other, conditioned the nature of the French 'discovery' of the Pacific Ocean in the late eighteenth century.
Journal Article
Modernity and Its Other
InModernity and Its OtherRobert Woods Sayre examines eighteenth-century North America through discussion of texts drawn from the period. He focuses on this unique historical moment when early capitalist civilization (modernity) in colonial societies, especially the British, interacted closely with Indigenous communities (the \"Other\") before the balance of power shifted definitively toward the colonizers.Sayre considers a variety of French perspectives as a counterpoint to the Anglo-American lens, including J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur and Philip Freneau, as well as both Anglo-American and French or French Canadian travelers in \"Indian territory,\" including William Bartram, Jonathan Carver, John Lawson, Alexander Mackenzie, Baron de Lahontan, Pierre Charlevoix, and Jean-Baptiste Trudeau.Modernity and Its Otheris an important addition to any North American historian's bookshelf, for it brings together the social history of the European colonies and the ethnohistory of the American Indian peoples who interacted with the colonizers.
eBook