The Humboldt Current

The Humboldt Current PDF Author: Aaron Sachs
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101201614
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 516

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Book Description
A masterly and beautifully written account of the impact of Alexander von Humboldt on nineteenth-century American history and culture The naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) achieved unparalleled fame in his own time. Today, however, he and his enormous legacy to American thought are virtually unknown. In The Humboldt Current, Aaron Sachs traces Humboldt's pervasive influence on American history through examining the work of four explorers—J. N. Reynolds, Clarence King, George Wallace, and John Muir—who embraced Humboldt's idea of a "chain of connection" uniting all peoples and all environments. A skillful blend of narrative and interpretation that also discusses Humboldt's influence on Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, Melville, and Poe, The Humboldt Current offers a colorful, passionate, and superbly written reinterpretation of nineteenth-century American history.

The Humboldt Current

The Humboldt Current PDF Author: Aaron Sachs
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101201614
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 516

Get Book Here

Book Description
A masterly and beautifully written account of the impact of Alexander von Humboldt on nineteenth-century American history and culture The naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) achieved unparalleled fame in his own time. Today, however, he and his enormous legacy to American thought are virtually unknown. In The Humboldt Current, Aaron Sachs traces Humboldt's pervasive influence on American history through examining the work of four explorers—J. N. Reynolds, Clarence King, George Wallace, and John Muir—who embraced Humboldt's idea of a "chain of connection" uniting all peoples and all environments. A skillful blend of narrative and interpretation that also discusses Humboldt's influence on Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, Melville, and Poe, The Humboldt Current offers a colorful, passionate, and superbly written reinterpretation of nineteenth-century American history.

Explorations in the Icy North

Explorations in the Icy North PDF Author: Nanna Katrine Luders Kaalund
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780822946595
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Science in the Arctic changed dramatically over the course of the nineteenth century, when early, scattered attempts in the region to gather knowledge about all aspects of the natural world transitioned to a more unified Arctic science under the First International Polar Year in 1882. The IPY brought together researchers from multiple countries with the aim of undertaking systematic and coordinated experiments and observations in the Arctic and Antarctic. Harsh conditions, intense isolation, and acute danger inevitably impacted the making and communicating of scientific knowledge. At the same time, changes in ideas about what it meant to be an authoritative observer of natural phenomena were linked to tensions in imperial ambitions, national identities, and international collaborations of the IPY. Through a focused study of travel narratives in the British, Danish, Canadian, and American contexts, Nanna Katrine Lüders Kaalund uncovers not only the transnational nature of Arctic exploration, but also how the publication and reception of literature about it shaped an extreme environment, its explorers, and their scientific practices. She reveals how, far beyond the metropole--in the vast area we understand today as the North American and Greenlandic Arctic--explorations and the narratives that followed ultimately influenced the production of field science in the nineteenth century.

Arctic Exploration in the Nineteenth Century

Arctic Exploration in the Nineteenth Century PDF Author: Frédéric Regard
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317321529
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Focusing on nineteenth-century attempts to locate the northwest passage, the essays in this volume present this quest as a central element of British culture.

African-American Exploration in West Africa

African-American Exploration in West Africa PDF Author: James Fairhead
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253110046
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 514

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Book Description
In the 1860s, as America waged civil war, several thousand African Americans sought greater freedom by emigrating to the fledgling nation of Liberia. While some argued that the new black republic represented disposal rather than emancipation, a few intrepid men set out to explore their African home. African-American Exploration in West Africa collects the travel diaries of James L. Sims, George L. Seymour, and Benjamin J. K. Anderson, who explored the territory that is now Liberia and Guinea between 1858 and 1874. These remarkable diaries reveal the wealth and beauty of Africa in striking descriptions of its geography, people, flora, and fauna. The dangers of the journeys surface, too -- Seymour was attacked and later died of his wounds, and his companion, Levin Ash, was captured and sold into slavery again. Challenging the notion that there were no black explorers in Africa, these diaries provide unique perspectives on 19th-century Liberian life and life in the interior of the continent before it was radically changed by European colonialism.

In the Company of Books

In the Company of Books PDF Author: Sarah Wadsworth
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 9781558495418
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Tracing the segmentation of the literary marketplace in 19th century America, this book analyses the implications of the subdivided literary field for readers, writers, and literature itself.

White Horizon

White Horizon PDF Author: Jen Hill
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791472309
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
From explorers’ accounts to boys’ adventure fiction, how Arctic exploration served as a metaphor for nation-building and empire in nineteenth-century Britain.

The Spectral Arctic

The Spectral Arctic PDF Author: Shane McCorristine
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 1787352455
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Visitors to the Arctic enter places that have been traditionally imagined as otherworldly. This strangeness fascinated audiences in nineteenth-century Britain when the idea of the heroic explorer voyaging through unmapped zones reached its zenith. The Spectral Arctic re-thinks our understanding of Arctic exploration by paying attention to the importance of dreams and ghosts in the quest for the Northwest Passage. The narratives of Arctic exploration that we are all familiar with today are just the tip of the iceberg: they disguise a great mass of mysterious and dimly lit stories beneath the surface. In contrast to oft-told tales of heroism and disaster, this book reveals the hidden stories of dreaming and haunted explorers, of frozen mummies, of rescue balloons, visits to Inuit shamans, and of the entranced female clairvoyants who travelled to the Arctic in search of John Franklin’s lost expedition. Through new readings of archival documents, exploration narratives, and fictional texts, these spectral stories reflect the complex ways that men and women actually thought about the far North in the past. This revisionist historical account allows us to make sense of current cultural and political concerns in the Canadian Arctic about the location of Franklin’s ships.

Mapping the Nation

Mapping the Nation PDF Author: Susan Schulten
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226740706
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
“A compelling read” that reveals how maps became informational tools charting everything from epidemics to slavery (Journal of American History). In the nineteenth century, Americans began to use maps in radically new ways. For the first time, medical men mapped diseases to understand and prevent epidemics, natural scientists mapped climate and rainfall to uncover weather patterns, educators mapped the past to foster national loyalty among students, and Northerners mapped slavery to assess the power of the South. After the Civil War, federal agencies embraced statistical and thematic mapping in order to profile the ethnic, racial, economic, moral, and physical attributes of a reunified nation. By the end of the century, Congress had authorized a national archive of maps, an explicit recognition that old maps were not relics to be discarded but unique records of the nation’s past. All of these experiments involved the realization that maps were not just illustrations of data, but visual tools that were uniquely equipped to convey complex ideas and information. In Mapping the Nation, Susan Schulten charts how maps of epidemic disease, slavery, census statistics, the environment, and the past demonstrated the analytical potential of cartography, and in the process transformed the very meaning of a map. Today, statistical and thematic maps are so ubiquitous that we take for granted that data will be arranged cartographically. Whether for urban planning, public health, marketing, or political strategy, maps have become everyday tools of social organization, governance, and economics. The world we inhabit—saturated with maps and graphic information—grew out of this sea change in spatial thought and representation in the nineteenth century, when Americans learned to see themselves and their nation in new dimensions.

The Sea and Nineteenth-Century Anglophone Literary Culture

The Sea and Nineteenth-Century Anglophone Literary Culture PDF Author: Steve Mentz
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317016599
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
During the nineteenth century, British and American naval supremacy spanned the globe. The importance of transoceanic shipping and trade to the European-based empire and her rapidly expanding former colony ensured that the ocean became increasingly important to popular literary culture in both nations. This collection of ten essays by expert scholars in transatlantic British and American literatures interrogates the diverse meanings the ocean assumed for writers, readers, and thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic during this period of global exploration and colonial consolidation. The book’s introduction offers three critical lenses through which to read nineteenth-century Anglophone maritime literature: "wet globalization," which returns the ocean to our discourses of the global; "salt aesthetics," which considers how the sea influences artistic culture and aesthetic theory; and "blue ecocriticism," which poses an oceanic challenge to the narrowly terrestrial nature of "green" ecological criticism. The essays employ all three of these lenses to demonstrate the importance of the ocean for the changing shapes of nineteenth-century Anglophone culture and literature. Examining texts from Moby-Dick to the coral flower-books of Victorian Australia, and from Wordsworth’s sea-poetry to the Arctic journals of Charles Francis Hall, this book shows how important and how varied in meaning the ocean was to nineteenth-century Anglophone readers. Scholars of nineteenth-century globalization, the history of aesthetics, and the ecological importance of the ocean will find important scholarship in this volume.

Calcutta in the Nineteenth Century

Calcutta in the Nineteenth Century PDF Author: Bidiśā Cakrabartī
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789381523810
Category : Calcutta (India)
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
This collection examines Calcutta's rapid transformation from a cluster of three villages into the second city of the British Empire. Bidisha Chakraborty and Sarmistha De, two talented archivists, remind us that the ancient and crumbling British legacy scattered all around Calcutta was once a fledgling imperial dream of the most astounding scope. Through rare photographs, plans, blueprints and other documentary evidence we get a glimpse of Calcutta as the British wanted the city to be.