As a group of islands in the far south-west Pacific Ocean, New Zealand has a history that is steeped in the sea. Its people have encountered the sea in many different ways: along the coast, in port, on ships, beneath the waves, behind a camera, and in the realm of the imagination. While New Zealanders have continually altered their marine environments, the ocean, too, has influenced their lives.A multi-disciplinary work encompassing history, marine science, archaeology and visual c...

Between 1750 and 1920 over 15,000 people visited Antarctica. Despite such a large number the historiography has ignored all but a few celebrated explorers. Maddison presents a study of Antarctic exploration, telling the story of these forgotten facilitators, he argues that Antarctic exploration can be seen as an offshoot of European colonialism.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Band of Brothers and D-Day, the definitive book on Lewis and Clark’s exploration of the Louisiana Purchase, the most momentous expedition in American history and one of the great adventure stories of all time.In 1803 President Thomas Jefferson selected his personal secretary, Captain Meriwether Lewis, to lead a voyage up the Missouri River to the Rockies, over the mountains, down the Columbia ...

The discovery and deciphering of Europe's earliest known written language is recounted with "almost nail-biting suspense" in this prize-winning account ( Booklist, starred review).In 1900, famed archaeologist Arthur Evans uncovered the ruins of Knossos, a sophisticated Bronze Age civilization that flowered on Crete 1,000 years before Greece's Classical Age. The massive discovery included a cache of ancient tablets, Europe's earliest written records. For hal...

The legendary reporter and author of The Right Stuff takes on Darwin, Chomsky, and the origin of language in "his boldest bit of dueling yet" ( The New York Times).Tom Wolfe, the great journalist-provocateur, aims his piercing wit at the presiding theories of what makes us human. The Kingdom of Speech is a captivating, paradigm-shifting argument that speech—not evolution—is responsible for humanity's com...

For hundreds of years, the history of the conquest of Mexico and the defeat of the Aztecs has been told in the words of the Spanish victors. Miguel León-Portilla has long been at the forefront of expanding that history to include the voices of indigenous peoples. In this new and updated edition of his classic The Broken Spears, León-Portilla has included accounts from native Aztec descendants across the centuries. These texts bear witness to the extraordinary vitality of an oral t...

Amelia Earhart's account of her ill-fated last flight around the world, begun in 1937, remains one of the most moving and absorbing adventure stories of all time. Last Flight compiles the letters, diary entries and charts that she sent to her husband, G.P. Putnam at each stage of her trip. In her own words, these dispatches offer a window into her experience on this ground-breaking journey and illustrate her cheerful, charming nature. Her story continues to intrigue and inspire pe...

After the triumphant end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the British took it upon themselves to complete something they had been trying to do since the sixteenth century: find the fabled Northwest Passage. For the next thirty-five years the British Admiralty sent out expedition after expedition to probe the ice-bound waters of the Canadian Arctic in search of a route, and then, after 1845, to find Sir John Franklin, the Royal Navy hero who led the last of these Admiralty expeditions. Enthr...

When Marco Polo arrived at the court of the Great Khan Pekin had just been rebuilt. Kublai Khan was at the height of his glory. Polo rose rapidly in favour and became governor of an important district. In this way he gained first-hand knowledge of a great civilisation and described it with astounding accuracy and detail.

This book tells the story of Bali-the "paradise island of the Pacific"-its rulers and its people, and their encounters with the Western world.Balinese history tells a fascinating story. For a thousand years, the peculiar splendor of BalineseHindu culture came very close to satisfying the social, religious and artistic needs of the people. The arrival of European visitors in the 1920s and 1930s soon made the island's magical charms known to the outside world, and f...

From the author of A Venetian Affair and Lucia comes a charming odyssey in the path of the mysterious Zen brothers, who explored parts of the New World a century before Columbus, and became both a source of scandal and a cause célèbre among geographers in the following centuries.This delightful journey begins with Andrea di Robilant’s serendipitous discovery of a travel narrative published in Venice in 1558 by the Renaissance statesman Nicolò Zen: the text and its...

As the Dutch replied in darkness with shouts and trumpet calls from the decks of their ships, the warriors must have been mystified by these creatures who entered into their rituals, yet used exotic instruments and spoke an unintelligible tongue.With the publication of her book Two Worlds, Anne Salmond introduced a penetrating rewriting of our traditional views of first contacts between the Māori and European worlds, helping us to see these meetings with fresh eye...