I’ve been thinking a lot this year about how the world has been transformed in my lifetime through cheap air travel, mass media, and finally social media. They made us all more connected yet somehow more alienated from each other.
This book about people living in isolated, traditional societies in the Andaman Islands and their uneasy relationship with “civilization” shows, like no other book I’ve read, how much we lost in the long twentieth century.
Adam Goodheart (full disclosure – a friend) is a gifted writer who is capable of turning the most humdrum tasks, such as opening a TV screen on a plane, into a wondrous experience while making the strangest encounters seem vividly present. This is an amazing, luminous, fascinating book.
"A deft combination of adventure, history, reportage and elegy."-Washington Post
A journey to the coast of North Sentinel Island, home to a tribe believed to be the most isolated human community on earth. The Sentinelese people want to be left alone and will shoot deadly arrows at anyone who tries to come ashore. As the web of modernity draws ever closer, the island represents the last chapter in the Age of Discovery-the final holdout in a completely connected world.
In November 2018, a zealous American missionary was killed while attempting to visit an island he called "Satan's last stronghold," a…
In my writing, food is a means to explore culture and understand the world. I’ve been described as a ‘culinary detective’. I collect and create eclectic, evocative recipes from around the globe so I can travel from my kitchen when I'm back home in London. The Nutmeg Trail follows my multi-award-winning books, Fire Islands and Samarkand.
With a scholarly eye for detail, Keaye explores the history of the spice routes. The trade is at once mysterious and hard to trace yet also world-encompassing. It started more wars and sparked more discoveries than any other global exchange. This book elegantly covers over 3,000 years of human history and leaves the reader with much to think about.
An exotic saga with the tang of drama in every voyage, The Spice Route transports the reader from the dawn of history to the ends of the earth The Spice Route is one of history's great anomalies. Shrouded in mystery, it existed long before anyone knew of its extent or alignment. Spices came from lands unseen, possibly uninhabitable, and almost by definition unattainable; that was what made them so desirable. Yet more livelihoods depended on this pungent traffic, more nations participated in it, more wars were fought over it, and more discoveries resulted from it than from any other global…
I study and write about the Early Medieval period, and in a series of books about its most important characters, its archaeology and landscapes, I've tried to share my lifelong passion for this most obscure and tantalizing period of our history – what we still call the Dark Ages. From the two most shadowy centuries after Rome's fall (The First Kingdom) to Northumbrian King Oswald (The King in the North), who brought Christianity into pagan Anglo-Saxon England, and a walking, riding, sailing tour of Britain's Dark Age lands and seas (In the Land of Giants), I see a continuity of rich cultures, vibrant politics and regional characters that help us to understand how and why we are like we are.
Every subject needs a really sound, comprehensive introduction – and Parker's book is just that: a big, chunky history of the Vikings in all their guises, as traders, raiders, explorers, and entrepreneurs. It's very well illustrated with photos and maps, lucidly written, and with a passion for the subject that is infectious. If you're looking for just one book to see you through the Vikings, make it this one.
The Northmen's Fury tells the Viking story, from the first pinprick raids of the eighth century to the great armies that left their Scandinavian homelands to conquer larger parts of France, Britain and Ireland. It recounts the epic voyages that took them across the Atlantic to the icy fjords of Greenland and to North America over four centuries before Columbus and east to the great rivers of Russia and the riches of the Byzantine empire.
One summer's day in 793, death arrived from the sea. The raiders who sacked the island monastery of Lindisfarne were the first Vikings, sea-borne attackers…
I am a Professor of English at the University of Sussex. I have worked on a wide range of subjects over the years, mainly about the English Renaissance. I have a long-standing interest in travel and colonial writing, the ways in which the English interacted with other peoples and other places, which started with my interest in Ireland where I studied and which was the subject of my early books. I have broadened my perspective as I have read more on the Americas, Africa, Europe, and Asia, over the years and am committed to uncovering the truth of the uncomfortable, challenging, and fascinating history of the early British Empire.
This book contains a series of inspired readings that show how the newly discovered American continent transformed English/European notions of what it was to be human in an age dominated by religion.
The peoples found in America generated fear, hatred, confusion, but, most of all, wonder at the possibilities of human life, challenging the ways in which Europeans had habitually thought.
A masterwork of history and cultural studies, Marvelous Possessions is a brilliant meditation on the interconnected ways in which Europeans of the Age of Discovery represented non-European peoples and took possession of their lands, particularly in the New World. In a series of innovative readings of travel narratives, judicial documents, and official reports, Stephen Greenblatt shows that the experience of the marvelous, central to both art and philosophy, was manipulated by Columbus and others in the service of colonial appropriation. Much more than simply a collection of the odd and exotic, Marvelous Possessions is both a highly original extension of…
Nearly 50 years ago I was completely taken with the patterns drawn, woven, or embroidered by the Indigenous Peoples of the Upper Amazon of Peru. This was my first experience with the power of pattern and led to a career in collecting and curating the pottery and textiles from that area. By the end of the 1980s, I was ready to start a family and a more settled job. The Design Library was the perfect segue. The patterns created in Europe, Africa, and Asia over the past 250 years are also important cultural statements and are continually re-interpreted by our clients for today's market.
This scholarly book accompanied the enlightening exhibition of the same name at the MET 2013-2014. The way we learn how trade in textiles united the world is fascinating. One revelation for me was discovering that the first non-noble wealth was generated in the 18th century through textile trade.
Beginning in the 16th century, the golden age of European navigation created a vigorous textile trade, and a breathtaking variety of textile designs subsequently spread across the globe. Trade textiles blended the traditional designs, skills, and tastes of their cultures of origin, with new techniques learned through global exchange, creating beautiful new works that are also historically fascinating. Interwoven Globe is the first book to analyze these textiles within the larger history of trade and design. Richly illustrated texts explore the interrelationship of textiles, commerce, and taste from the age of discovery to the 19th century, including a detailed discussion…
I have been pursuing nuclear and particle physics as a career for nearly half a century, mostly in Western countries and Japan. As a professor of physics and engineering physics, I always strive to bring conceptual clarity to what I teach for application-oriented and abstract physics, even when I cannot bring the same level of connection to physical reality in my research. I am deeply concerned that physicists have gone astray in their mathematical quest to develop a glamorous picture of the building blocks of matter and the basic interactions among them. This book is an outgrowth of my search to understand the limits of human knowledge to unravel nature’s mysteries.
This book is a pleasure to read as it narrates the interlinks between geography, cosmography, and astronomy in simple language. It takes the reader through an exciting journey from antiquity to the 19th-century developments of astronomy and geography, examining the links and struggles between the sciences and humanities. It exhorts educators and researchers to advocate a truly humanistic science.
It is not surprising that there exists a tension between science, humanities, and other professions today. Astronomy has many narrations of its links to navigation and geography. This book traces these links from antiquity to the 19th century in one place. The quest to map out the stars has not been just for knowledge's sake, after all.
This book tells the comprehensive history of cosmography from the 15th Century Age of Discovery onward. During this time, cosmography-a science that combined geography and astronomy to inform us about our place in the universe-was deeply tied to ongoing developments in politics, exploration, culture, and technology.
The book offers in-depth historical context over nearly four centuries, focusing in particular on the often neglected role that Portugal and Spain played in the development of cosmography. It details the great activity emerging from the Iberian and Italic peninsulas, including numerous voyagers of exploration, a clear commercial intention, and advancements in map-making techniques.…
I’m a social and cultural historian of North America and Latin America, specializing in the history of alcohol, food, and identity. When I’m not researching, writing, or teaching about food history, I’m generally cooking, eating or thinking about food, perusing recipe books, or watching cookery programs on TV. I have been especially fascinated by all things Mexico since I read Bernal Díaz’s A True History of the Conquest of New Spainas a teenager, and I think Mexican cuisine is the best in the world.
As an undergraduate student I was lucky enough to take Professor Earle’s class on the history of food in Latin America and this book encapsulates the expansive outlook and conceptual complexity that made that class so mind-bogglingly brilliant and enjoyable. By examining the systems of thought through which European colonizers and Indigenous peoples of the Americas understood different foods, ways of cooking and eating, and the influence of diet on people’s bodies,The Body of the Conquistador helped me to think about the axiom “you are what you eat” in a whole new way.
This fascinating history explores the dynamic relationship between overseas colonisation and the bodily experience of eating. It reveals the importance of food to the colonial project in Spanish America and reconceptualises the role of European colonial expansion in shaping the emergence of ideas of race during the Age of Discovery. Rebecca Earle shows that anxieties about food were fundamental to Spanish understandings of the new environment they inhabited and their interactions with the native populations of the New World. Settlers wondered whether Europeans could eat New World food, whether Indians could eat European food and what would happen to each…
I have always been a fan of history. As a journalist by education and an investigator by trade, I love to carefully research my settings and weave original fictional plots through actual history in a seamless manner that both entertains and informs the reader. I also appreciate the need for compelling characters, page-turning plots, conflict, and tension to keep readers engaged. I have a long-term fascination with piracy, privateering, and exploration during the early age of sail. I am also attracted to Elizabethan England and the Renaissance period with its ideological struggles. I really love a good sea story, and who doesn’t? Enjoy my reading list!
The Great Explorers: The European Discovery of America is a seminal non-fiction work by a premiere historian detailing those intrepid early explorers who dared uncharted seas for greed and glory. The work really resonates with me because it showcases how difficult it was to navigate the world’s oceans in the days before electricity, reliable navigation aids, modern medicine, refrigeration, and dependable propulsion. Despite these handicaps, audacious seamen dared the unknown and challenged their resolve and endurance to meet their goals. I believe the inherent elements of drama and conflict in these voyages lend grist for the development of action and adventure-filled historical fiction. This book directly inspired me to develop my featured novel in an Age of Exploration setting.
This is an abridgement of Samuel Morison's magnum opus, The European Discovery of America, in which he describes the early voyages that led to the discovery of the New World. All the acclaimed Morison touches are here - the meticulous research and authoritative scholarship, along with the personal and compelling narrative style that gives the reader the feeling of having been there. Morison, of course, has been there, and The Great Explorers is enriched with photographs and maps he made while personally retracing the great voyages.
I’m a writer and an editor with eclectic interests. I’ve published two books of popular history—Da Vinci's Ghost (2012), about Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, and The Fourth Part of the World (2009), about the map that gave America its name. I’ve also written extensively for national publications on such topics as the sociology of new religious movements, privacy protection in the Internet age, the Voynich manuscript, the revisionist study of the Qur’an, the revival of ancient Greek music, and alphabet reform in Azerbaijan. I’m presently a senior editor at the Harvard Business Review and acontributing editor at The Atlantic. From 1988-1990, I served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Yemen.
This is a lapidary introduction to the stories and ideas that prompted Columbus to sail away from Europe into the Atlantic in search of a direct sea route to Asia—and that determined how he interpreted what he came across after making landfall in the Americas. In just 200 pages, Flint nimbly covers all sorts of material: Christian theories of cosmology and eschatology; medieval conceptions of geography; the travel stories of St. Brendan, Sinbad the Sailor, Sir John Mandeville, and Marco Polo; the books that Columbus read, and the notes he made in them to himself; and more. In doing so, she reanimates a fascinating landscape of the imagination.
Rather than focusing on the well-rehearsed facts of Columbus's achievements in the New World, Valerie Flint looks instead at his imaginative mental images, the powerful "fantasies" that gave energy to his endeavors in the Renaissance. With him on his voyages into the unknown, he carried medieval notions gleaned from a Mediterranean tradition of tall tales about the sea, from books he had read, and from the mappae-mundi, splendid schematic maps with fantastic inhabitants. After investigating these sources of Columbus's views, Flint explains how the content of his thinking influenced his reports on his discoveries. Finally, she argues that problems besetting…
I’m a writer and an editor with eclectic interests. I’ve published two books of popular history—Da Vinci's Ghost (2012), about Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, and The Fourth Part of the World (2009), about the map that gave America its name. I’ve also written extensively for national publications on such topics as the sociology of new religious movements, privacy protection in the Internet age, the Voynich manuscript, the revisionist study of the Qur’an, the revival of ancient Greek music, and alphabet reform in Azerbaijan. I’m presently a senior editor at the Harvard Business Review and acontributing editor at The Atlantic. From 1988-1990, I served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Yemen.
You can certainly find more recent surveys of the history of cartography, but this accessible work, first published in 1949, still stands out as an engaging and enlightening survey of the territory. Lloyd Brown begins his story some 2000 years ago, in Alexandria, Egypt, with the ancient Greeks and Romans, whose geographical ideas came together in the work of Claudius Ptolemy, and he then goes on, in an enjoyable narrative style, to show how scholars and monks and merchants and sailors and scientists all contributed to the art of mapmaking. The first half of the book provides an excellent summary of the kinds of maps that thinkers and travelers would have been familiar with by the time the Age of Discovery got underway.
"An important and scholarly work; bringing together much information available heretofore only in scattered sources … easily readable." — Gerald I. Alexander, F.R.G.S. Cartographer, Map Division, New York Public Library Early map making was characterized by secrecy. Maps were precious documents, drawn by astrologers and travelers, worn out through use or purposely destroyed. Just as men first mapped the earth indirectly, via the sun and stars, so must the history of maps be approached circuitously, through chronicles, astronomy, Strabo and Ptolemy, seamanship, commerce, politics. From the first determination of latitude 2000 years ago through the dramatic unraveling of longitude 1700…
