Showing results by publisher "Tantor Media" in Expeditions & Discoveries

This book interweaves two narratives. The first treats the Royal Navy's Arctic Overland Expedition of 1819, a harbinger-misadventure during which Franklin rejected the advice of Dene and Metis leaders and lost eleven of his twenty-one men. The second discovers a startling new answer to that greatest of Arctic mysteries: what was the root cause of the catastrophe that engulfed Franklin's last expedition?

"If you seek vicarious adventure, these pages await the armchair explorer." —Providence Journal In 1804, John Colter set out with Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on the first US expedition to traverse the North American continent. During the twenty-eight-month ordeal, Colter served as a...

What accounts for the rise of the state, the creation of the first global system, and the dominance of the West? The conventional answer asserts that superior technology, tactics, and institutions forged by Darwinian military competition gave Europeans a decisive advantage in war from 1500 onward. Empires of the Weak argues that Europeans had no general military superiority in the early modern era. Sharman shows instead that European expansion is better explained by deference to strong Asian and African polities, disease in the Americas, and maritime supremacy earned by default.

In 1957 the Soviet Union sent Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, into space. America took up the challenge to explore the next frontier. A dozen years, and 25 billion dollars later, the mission of Apollo 11 would yield man's finest hour. For that was the first time man's foot left prints on another heavenly body. And that was only the beginning. Apollo 11 is the incredible story of how a nation forged the technology during the turbulent 1960s to slip humanity from the bonds of its native planet. This inside look remembers those who made the great enterprise succeed.

Under the cover of night, on February 19, 1973, another U.S. president witnessed extraterrestrials. President Richard Nixon made a secret trip to a top security U.S. Air Force base, as his former boss, President Dwight Eisenhower, did in 1954. Nixon was said to have taken his golfing buddy, comedian Jackie Gleason. According to Gleason's then wife, Beverly McKittrick Gleason, Jackie was deeply shaken later that night when he returned home and confessed to their clandestine trip.

From 1792 to 1795, George Vancouver sailed the Pacific as the captain of his own expedition and as an agent of imperial ambition. To map a place is to control it, and Britain had its eyes on America's Pacific coast. And map it Vancouver did. His voyage was one of history's greatest feats of maritime daring, discovery, and diplomacy, and his marine survey of Hawaii and the Pacific coast was at its time the most comprehensive ever undertaken. 

A new history of the Renaissance's greatest feat of exploration: Sir Walter Ralegh's search for the legendary city of El Dorado, by New York Times bestselling author David Gibbins. In 1594, English adventurer Sir Walter Ralegh heard the story of a lost city in South America from a Spanish...

The greatest controversy in the history of the US Navy of the early American Republic was the revelation that the son of the Secretary of War had seemingly plotted a bloody mutiny that would have turned the US brig Somers into a pirate ship. The plot discovered, he and his coconspirators were hastily condemned and hanged at sea.

Two thousand books have been written about Columbus, most of them spirited defenses or relentless attacks. Recently, the balance has shifted: the Genoese navigator, once considered a hero, is now blamed for bringing plunder and genocide to the Americas. In The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus, historian Matthew Restall takes us beyond polemic, sifting through the evidence across nations, languages, and five centuries to explore the central questions of Columbiana.

In this true story of adventure, author Jack Nisbet recreates the life and times of David Thompson—fur trader, explorer, surveyor, and mapmaker. From 1784 to 1812, Thompson explored western North America, and his field journals provide the earliest written accounts of the natural history and indigenous cultures of the what is now British Columbia, Alberta, Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. Thompson was the first person to chart the entire route of the Columbia river, and his wilderness expeditions have become the stuff of legend.

Jackie was an ordinary American woman whose life changed after a blind date with rugged Antarctic explorer Finn Ronne. After marrying, they began planning the 1946-1948 Ronne Antarctic Research Expedition. Her participation was not welcomed by the expedition team of red-blooded males eager to prove themselves in the frozen, hostile environment of Antarctica.

Between 1700 and 1900, an art movement unveiled nature's great secret: the global diversity of life-forms. Centuries before the word "biodiversity" existed, naturalists began to glimpse the reality that lay behind Charles Darwin's lyrical evocation of nature's "endless forms most beautiful." The...

Palace of Deception uncovers the complicated legacy of three iconic figures of the American Museum: the preeminent explorer Roy Chapman Andrews; Carl Akeley, the pioneering taxidermist; and Osborn, the museum's president. Darrin Lunde tells the story of the American's Museum foundational years. Lunde also shows how the achievements of the museum's adventurers were used to introduce residents of New York to a version of the natural world endorsed by the museum's leader.

Unfurling a tapestry of surprising and historically overlooked figures spanning forty centuries and six continents, historian Matthew Lockwood narrates lives filled with imagination and wonder, curiosity, connection, and exchange. Adventurers from every corner of the globe search for the unknown and try to understand it, remaking the world and themselves in the process. Exploration is for everyone who sets off into the unknown. It is the inheritance of all.

After the extinction of the dodo and Carolina parakeet and the collapse of the American bison population, naturalists expected many more vulnerable species to die out with spread of industrialization. This triggered a race to collect rare species of animals expected soon to be lost forever. Established in 1893, Chicago's Field Museum aimed to become a global center of study. Zoologist Daniel Giraud Elliot persuaded museum patrons to fund an immediate expedition to British Somaliland (contemporary Somalia). There, his team hunted and killed hundreds of animals for the growing collection.

The Seventymile Kid tells the remarkable account of Harry Karstens, who was the actual—if unheralded—leader of the Hudson Stuck Expedition that was the first to summit Mount McKinley in Alaska. All but forgotten by history, a young Karstens arrived in the Yukon during the 1897 Gold Rush, gained fame as a dog musher hauling U.S. Mail in Alaska, and eventually became the first superintendent of Mount McKinley National Park (now known as Denali National Park and Preserve).