Take a journey back to the uncharted oceans with the most celebrated European explorers!Interest in Southeast Asian history and culture is higher than ever before. Ancient cartography of Oceania holds mysteries as old as time—were these early ocean maps molded as much by fantasy as fact? Early Mapping of the Pacific bravely delves into all the questions surrounding the history of maps.The Pacific Ocean remained a mystery to mapmakers until the latt...

With dozens of rare color maps and other documents, Early Mapping of Southeast Asia follows the story of map-making, exploration and colonization in Asia from the 16th to the 19th centuries.It documents the idea of Southeast Asia as a geographical and cosmological construct, from the earliest of times up until the down of the modern era. using maps, itineraries, sailing instructions, traveler's tales, religious texts and other contemporary sources, it exam...

The Israel-Palestine "conflict" is typically understood to be a clash between two ethnic groups—Arabs and Jews—inhabiting the same land. Thomas Suárez digs deep below these preconceptions and their supporting "narratives" to expose something starkly different: The violent take-over of Palestine by a European racial-nationalist settler movement, Zionism, using terror to assert by force a claim to the land that has no legal or moral basis.Drawing extensively from original source docu...

The increasing interest attached to all that part of The American Continent situated within and near The tropics, has suggested The publication of The present edition of Humboldt's celebrated work, as a portion of The SCIENTIFIC LIBRARY. Prior to The travels of Humboldt and Bonpland, The countries described in The following narrative were but imperfectly known to Europeans. For our partial acquaintance with Them we were chiefly indebted to The early navigators, and to some of The followers...

Ever since the dawn of human history, islands have been at the heart of our desires - and our fears. Drawing on anthropology, literature, biology, art, philosophy and earth science, Island tells the groundbreaking story of humans and islands throughout history, and celebrates islands as a central part of the world we live in. With a unique cross-disciplinary approach, encompassing everything from the wonder of an island's flora and fauna, to the geological roots of island formations, via r...

Coral ReefsByCharles Darwin

A lost continent is a hypothetical landmass that for whatever reason no longer exists. A prime example is Atlantis, which, according to Greek myth, sank to the bottom of the sea. This book is a list of similar lost continents.

An engrossing history of the voyages of exploration that ignited curiosity about nature and gave birth to modern science.When Columbus first returned to Spain from the Caribbean, he dazzled King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella with exotic parrots, tropical flowers, and bits of gold. Inspired by the promise of riches, countless seafarers poured out of the Iberian Peninsula and wider Europe in search of spices, treasure, and land. Many returned with strange tales of the New World.

The classic account of how volcanism has shaped human culture and science, from the Bronze Age eruption that destroyed Minoan Crete to Mount St. HelensWhen the volcano Tambora erupted in Indonesia in 1815, as many as one hundred thousand people perished from the blast and ensuing famine. Gases and dust particles ejected into the atmosphere changed weather patterns around the world, resulting in the infamous “year without a summer” in North America, food riots in Eu...

Famed for its breathtaking isolation, Easter Island was a verdant South-Sea idyll when a small canoeful of Polynesians arrived in c. AD 700. Centuries later the island's statues were famous throughout the world. This book presents a comprehensive history of Easter Island told by a writer who is intimately familiar with the island, its people and their extraordinary story.When voyaging in the South Pacific became far less widespread around 1500, Easter Islanders became stra...

Easter Island has captivated the worlds imagination since its discovery in 1722. This enthralling book deals with the now famous bird cult and the customs and beliefs of the islanders who lived on Rapa Nui. This Unusual book will appeal greatly to all who have a fascination for cultures so different and so nearly lost. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900's and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic w...

Early Europeans may have believed the world was flat, but by the Middle Ages there was widespread acceptance that it was, in fact, a globe. What remained a mystery, however, was what lay on the "other side". The belief in a vast southern continent went back centuries, and many expeditions set out to find it, sometimes in search of wealth, sometimes to convert its inhabitants to Christianity. This is the story of the voyages into this great unknown, by the Chinese and early Americans, the D...