Showing titles in Expeditions & Discoveries

The mysterious disappearance of Michael Rockefeller in remote New Guinea in 1961 has kept the world, and even Michael's powerful, influential family, guessing for years. Now, Carl Hoffman uncovers startling new evidence that finally tells the full, astonishing story.

Adventure, politics, suspense, drama, diplomacy, romance, and personal tragedy combine to make this outstanding work of scholarship about Captain Meriwether Lewis, hand-picked by President Thomas Jefferson to explore and acquire the American West.

When Columbus triumphantly returned from America to Spain in 1493, his discoveries inflamed an already smoldering conflict between Spain's renowned monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, and Portugal's João II. Which nation was to control the world's oceans? To quell the argument, Pope Alexander VI issued a proclamation laying the foundation for the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494, an edict that created an imaginary line in the Atlantic Ocean dividing the entire known (and unknown) world between Spain and Portugal.

Seven years ago, readers and listeners around the country fell in love with a singular American voice: Rinker Buck, whose infectious curiosity about history launched him across the West in a covered wagon pulled by mules and propelled his book about the trip, The Oregon Trail, to ten weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Now, Buck returns to chronicle his latest incredible adventure: building a wooden flatboat from the bygone era of the early 1800s and journeying down the Mississippi River to New Orleans.

Published to coincide with the centenary of the first expeditions to reach the South Pole, An Empire of Ice presents a fascinating new take on Antarctic exploration. Retold with added information, it's the first book to place the famed voyages of Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, his British rivals Robert Scott and Ernest Shackleton, and others in a larger scientific, social, and geopolitical context.

If you want to discover the captivating history of the Age of Discovery, then pay attention.... The Age of Discovery began in the early part of the 15th century and carried on through most of the 17th century. It is sometimes also referred to as the Age of Exploration. This was a time when the people of Europe began to travel, discover, and explore more of the world than ever before, mapping and naming the places they found. They bravely went out on the seas to learn about the world, often never sure if they would find anything at all, let alone ever return home.

It began with a secret mission, no expenses spared. Spain, plotting to break Portugal’s monopoly trade with the fabled Orient, set sail from a hidden Mexican port to cross the Pacific - and then, critically, to attempt the never-before-accomplished return, the vuelta. Four ships set out from Navidad, each one carrying a dream team of navigators. The smallest ship, guided by seaman Lope Martín, a mulatto who had risen through the ranks to become one of the most qualified pilots of the era, soon pulled far ahead and became mysteriously lost from the fleet.

During the Ice Age, early humans saw themselves constantly reflected in these planes of ice - and became more reflective themselves, beginning to create works of art, innovate through technology and develop language. In A Cold Spell: A Human History of Ice, Max Leonard takes us from the beginning of our story to the modern day, tracing the ways ice has influenced our development, our economies, our social customs and our lives - and what it means for us that it is rapidly disappearing from our planet.

A gripping and wholly original account of the epic human tragedy that was the great Klondike Gold Rush of 1897-98. One hundred thousand men and women rushed heedlessly north to make their fortunes; very few did, but many thousands of them died in the attempt. The unvarnished tale of this mass migration is always striking, revealing the amazing truth of what people will do for a chance to be rich.

In December of 1914, the British Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, led by Sir Ernest Shackleton, sailed from the island of South Georgia in the Southern Ocean. Its goal: the first overland crossing of Antarctica. Soon trapped in a prison of solid pack ice, the crew became engaged in a legendary fight against brutal cold, impenetrable ice, dwin­dl­ing food, and complete isolation. Despite these seemingly insurmountable obstacles, the team remained cohesive, congenial, and mercifully alive - a fact that speaks not just to luck but to an unparalleled feat of leadership.

Imperial conquest and colonization depended on pervasive raiding, slaving, and plunder. European empires amassed global power by asserting a right to use unilateral force at their discretion. They Called It Peace is a panoramic history of how these routines of violence remapped the contours of empire and reordered the world from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries.

In Polish: A stunning story of the trailblazing expedition into the heart of the most dangerous jungle in the world, full of venomous snakes, jaguars, and sandflies which spread infections. This is were the legendary, cursed City of the Monkey God was supposed to be. Many years of expeditions didn't show any results, until Steve Elkins, a documentalist, discoverer, and laureate of the Emmy Award, managed to find the position of the mistery Pre-Columbian city thanks to the use of modern laser technology.

Cândido Rondon is by any measure the greatest tropical explorer in history. Between 1890 and 1930, he navigated scores of previously unmapped rivers, traversed untrodden mountain ranges, and hacked his way through jungles so inhospitable that even native peoples had avoided them—and led Theodore Roosevelt and his son, Kermit, on their celebrated "River of Doubt" journey in 1913-14. Originally published in Brazil, Into the Amazon is the first comprehensive biography of the Indigenous Brazilian explorer, scientist, stateseman, and conservationist.

In the spring of 1804, at the behest of President oThomas Jefferson, a party of explorers called the Corps of Discovery crossed the Mississippi River and started up the Missouri, heading west into the newly acquired Louisiana Territory.

The heroes of each generation reflect the conditions, priorities, and goals of the era in which they reside. In the United States and throughout Europe, the wilderness explorer enjoyed widespread public adulation long before leading sports figures, rock stars, and astronauts of later decades. The ingenuity of the Industrial Revolution gave way to early manned flight, and other breakthroughs in communication and travel.

Five hundred years before Columbus, a Viking woman named Gudrid sailed off the edge of the known world. She landed in the New World and lived there for three years, giving birth to a baby before sailing home. Or so the Icelandic sagas say.

Blind Descent explores both the brightest and darkest aspects of the timeless human urge to discover - to be first. It is also a thrilling epic about a pursuit that makes even extreme mountaineering and ocean exploration pale by comparison.

Pulitzer Prize winner Wallace Stegner recounts the remarkable career of Major John Wesley Powell, the distinguished ethnologist and geologist who explored the Colorado River, the Grand Canyon, and the homeland of the Southwest Indian tribes. This classic work is a penetrating and insightful study of the Powell’s career, from the beginning of the Powell Survey, in which Powell and his men famously became the first to descend the Colorado River, to his eventual expulsion from the Geological Survey.

This lively history traces the evolution of the idea of evolution, showing how it has changed and been changed by different societies over time. It will put 'Darwin’s Dangerous Idea' into its proper context, showing how it built on what went before and how it was developed in the 20th century, through an understanding of genetics and the biochemical basis evolution. None of this diminishes the achievement of Darwin himself, but his contribution was one link in a chain that extends back into antiquity and is still being forged today.

In 1610 Henry Stuart was a celebrity throughout Europe, at a momentous period for European history and culture. Eldest son of James VI and the epitome of heroic Renaissance princely virtue, his life was set against a period about as rich as any. The King James Bible, religious tension throughout Europe, the Gunpowder plot, Jacobean theatre and the dark tragedies pouring from Shakespeare's quill, innovation in learning and science, exploration and trade and the bloody traumas of the Thirty Years' War were his backdrop.