Kirjahaku

For as long as there have been civilizations, there has been the urge to venture outside of them, either in search of other civilizations or in search of novelty. Exploration: A Very Short Introduction surveys this quintessential human impulse, tracing it from pre-history to the present, from east to west around the globe, and from the depths of volcanoes to the expanses of space. Stewart Weaver arranges the history of world explorations into thematic chapters, each of which isolates the distinctive qualities and characteristics of exploration in a particular era, period, or place. He introduces the reader to the definition of exploration; to the Polynesians crossing vast seas on their canoes and other early explorers; through Columbus and the European discovery of the Americas. James Cook and the place of exploration in the Enlightenment form the subject of a chapter. So too do the natural histories and explorations of Alexander von Humboldt in South America and Lewis and Clark in North America. The book's final chapters chart exploration through imperial expansion and into new frontiers, guiding the reader through exploration in Africa and Central Asia, the race to the North and South Poles, and today's efforts in space and deep sea exploration. But what accounts for this urge? Through this unique survey of the history of exploration, Weaver clearly shows how the impulse to explore is also the foundation of the globalized world we inhabit today. Exploration combines a narration of explorers' daring feats with a wide-lens examination of what it fundamentally means to explore. As Weaver shows us, the act of exploration in the largest possible global context is the natural history of the earth itself. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Here for the first time is the story of one of history's great scholarly and marital collaborations. J. L. and Barbara Hammond were among the most innovative and influential historians of the twentieth century. Between 1911 and 1934, they wrote eight books together that amount, in effect, to the first sustained social history of modern England. Three of their books in particular—The Village Labourer (1911), The Town Labourer (1917), and The Skilled Labourer (1919)—not only anticipated what came to be known as "history from below," but also permanently changed the way most people think about the Industrial Revolution, which they defined in the apocalyptic terms to which we have become accustomed. The Hammonds were also public figures prominently involved, along with L. T. Hobhouse, J. A. Hobson, C. P. Scott, and others, in the definition and dissemination of "the new liberalism." From the point of involvement in the politics of one century, they helped give enduring historical shape to another, and thus exercise, like their friends Sidney and Beatrice Webb, a dual fascination. Of the two Hammonds, J. L. was the more prolific, writing six books on his own and serving as a political journalist for virtually his entire professional life, which saw him intervene editorially in every public crisis from the Boer War to the Second World War. Ireland was (after the Industrial Revolution) arguably his greatest passion, one to which he devoted much of his editorial life and his supreme literary effort, Gladstone and the Irish Nation (1938). Barbara Hammond was an accomplished classicist, the first woman to earn a First Class degree in Greats at Oxford. She is shown here to have done much more work on the labourer books than has been previously recognized, and to sustain through her letters an artful running commentary on the foibles of her age. Through her, especially, the author evokes a radical but also doggedly Victorian sensibility that survived uneasily into the age of Bloomsbury and beyond. The Hammonds were unique in the extent of their fused identity, in the extent to which they became, as G. M. Trevelyan once put it, "one flesh and one author." The Hammonds is part dual-biography, part evocation of an age, but it is also a study of marriage, a marriage at a particular moment in history, a marriage in the art and craft of history.