For many the dawn of the twentieth century ushered in an era where the world map had few if any blank spaces left to discover. The age of exploration was supposedly dead. "New Spaces of Exploration" challenges this assumption. Focusing specifically on exploration in the twentieth century, the authors demonstrate how new technologies and changing geopolitical configurations have ensured that exploration has remained a key feature of our rapidly globalizing world. Ranging widely in their geo...

When Ferdinand Magellan set out to circumnavigate the globe in 1519, he wasn’t able to take a digital camera or a smartphone with him. Yet, as the eagerly awaited images from the Mars Rover prove, modern exploration is inconceivable without photography. Since its invention in 1839, photography was integral to exploration and used by explorers, sponsors and publishers alike, and in the early twentieth century, advances in technology – and photography’s newfound cultural currency as a truthf...

While the cultural history of the British Empire has recently attracted much interest, relatively little attention has been paid to the significance of its visualization. Yet the Empire was pictured across a wide spectrum of imagery, from paintings to postcards, maps to documents. Focusing on the role of photography, this wide-ranging book explores the aesthetics of empire.The development of photography in the Victorian era coincided with the dramatic expansion of the British Empir...

Most people who have taken a biology course in the past 50 years are familiar with the work of David Lack, but few remember his name. Almost all general biology texts produced during that period have a figure showing the beak size differences among the finches of the Galapagos Islands from Lack's 1947 classic, Darwin's Finches. Lack's pioneering conclusions in Darwin's Finches mark the beginning of a new scientific discipline, evolutionary ecology. Tim Birkhead, in his acclaimed book, The ...

"Intriguing [and] enjoyable." —Ian McGuire, New York Times Book ReviewIce Ghosts weaves together the epic story of the lost Franklin Expedition of 1845—whose two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, and their crew of 129 were lost to the Arctic ice—with the modern tale of the scientists, divers, and local Inuit behind the recent incredible discoveries of the wrecks. Paul Watson, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was on the ice...

The Antarctic is one the most hostile natural environments in the world. It is an extraordinary physical space, which changes significantly in shape and size with the passing of the seasons. Politically, it is unique as it contains one of the few areas of continental space not claimed by any nation-state. Scientifically, the continental ice sheet has provided us with vital evidence about the Earth's past climate. In this Very Short Introduction, Klaus Dodds provides a modern accou...

When Sir John Franklin disappeared in the Arctic in the 1840s, the British Admiralty launched the largest rescue mission in its history. Among the search vessels was HMS Investigator, which left England in 1850 under the command of Captain Robert McClure. While the ambitious McClure never found Franklin, he and his crew did discover the fabled Northwest Passage.Like Franklin’s ships, though, Investigator disappeared in the most remote, bleak and unknown place on E...

Australian history has changed drastically over the last fifty years and has found itself at the centre of heated and consuming public debates.So how do historians themselves read this history? Where do they see themselves in these momentous shifts in historical reading and writing? With contributions from prominent historians including Marilyn Lake, Tom Griffiths, Peter Stanley and Ann Curthoys, Australian History Now offers revealing and refreshing accounts of the ways A...

The Secret Museum is a unique treasure trove of the most intriguing artifacts hidden away in museum archives from all over the world – curated, brought to light, and brought to life by Molly Oldfield in a beautifully illustrated collection.Who knows what’s hidden from view? Locked away in cabinets, secure storage and aircraft hangars.Most of a museum’s collection never gets seen. It sits in the quiet dark of an archive waiting for a treasure hunter or obsessive researcher t...

Climate change is the greatest challenge that the world has ever faced. In this groundbreaking new book, Alastair McIntosh summarises the science of what is happening to the planet - both globally and using Scotland as a local case study. He moves on, controversially, to suggest that politics alone is not enough to tackle the scale and depth of the problem. At root is our addictive consumer mentality. Wants have replaced needs and consumption drives our very identity.In a fascinati...

For a British Empire that stretched across much of the globe at the start of the nineteenth century, the interiors of Africa and Australia remained intriguing mysteries. The challenge of opening these continents to imperial influence fell to a proto-professional coterie of determined explorers. They sought knowledge, adventure, and fame, but often experienced confusion, fear, and failure. The Last Blank Spaces follows the arc of these explorations, from idea to practice, from inte...

Our fern might be silver but us Kiwis love to take that gold medal spot. First to give women the vote, first to climb Mount Everest, first to split the atom .But did you know that it was a Kiwi who was the first player to be sent off in a rugby test? Or that it was a Kiwi who was the first two-time world Scrabble champion? Or indeed that it was a Kiwi who invented the tranquiliser dart gun? Or that a Kiwi was the first person to free dive to 100 metres unassisted?Great ...