Explorers: A New History

by Matthew Lockwood Narrated by Rick Adamson

Overview

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. Familiar icons of exploration like Pocahontas, Columbus, Sacagawea, and Captain Cook find new company in the untold stories of people usually denied the title "explorers," including immigrants, indigenous interpreters, local guides, and fugitive slaves. He highlights female voyagers like Gudrid Far-Traveler and Freydís Eiríksdóttir, Viking women who sailed to North America in 1000 AD, and Mary Wortley Montagu, whose pioneering travels to Constantinople would lead to the development of the world's first smallpox vaccine. Figures like Ghulam Rassul Galwan, a guide for European travelers in the Himalayas, reveal the hidden labor, expertise, and local enthusiasm behind many grand stories of discovery. Other characters, like David Dorr, a man born into slavery in New Orleans who embarked on a Grand Tour of Europe and Egypt, embody discovery and wonder as universal parts of the human condition.



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.

Editorial Reviews

Booklist - Barrie Olmstead

"A concise and appealing history."

Eric Jay Dolin

"Wonderfully insightful and entertaining…gives voice to those who have been overlooked for too long and without whom the history of exploration is far less interesting and consequential."

Ruby Lal

"Expansive and playful, this book is a mediation on the dense history of human urge to explore. Matthew Lockwood brings together the globe in reminding us that there is no one time, one place, or one person with an exclusive pleasure of curiosity. A homage to the adventures of our world ancestors - and to our own."

Melissa L. Sevigny

"In this expansive and compassionate account, we find the lost voices of Indigenous guides, female voyagers, immigrants, and kidnapped and enslaved persons whose experiences have long been overlooked. Explorers: A New History is a long overdue reckoning that strips away the old trope of heroic conquerors without losing a sense of awe, curiosity, and wonder."

Kirkus Reviews

2024-07-10
An examination of the travels of both famous and lesser-known individuals that seeks to redefine the meaning of exploration.

The impulse to explore is as “universal” as it is key to understanding history and the human condition, avers Lockwood, a history professor at the University of Alabama. Yet history has too often flattened exploration narratives to focus on specific individuals (white males) and motivations (economic gain and/or political interest). Analyzing Sumerian, Sinhalese, Greek, Hopi, and Aztec legends, Lockwood suggests that all these imagined journeys echo humanity’s original travels out of Africa. But even when explorations such as those undertaken by Venetian Marco Polo to China and Uyghur monk Rabban Bar Sauma to Europe are documented, the actual explorers tend to “become legends themselves.” Those legends in turn inspired both European and Chinese explorers to embark on voyages across open seas that would lead to what Lockwood calls “the age of convergence.” Some, like Christopher Columbus, dreamed of New World riches and glory; others, like naturalists Alexander von Humboldt, sought to understand the natural world of the Americas. While the knowledge gained and exchanged on these journeys led to narratives that “were used to justify imperialism and exploitation," Lockwood argues that counternarratives emerged from explorers who used travel “to interpret the world and its peoples in altogether different ways.” Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, for example, used her insights into Middle Eastern culture and health practices to refute stories of Eastern salaciousness and to help Europeans fight smallpox. And Matthew Henson, the African American sharecropper’s son who accompanied Robert Peary to the Arctic Circle, transformed the act of journeying into the ultimate statement of freedom and self-determination. As it thoughtfully demystifies and democratizes the concept of exploration, Lockwood’s book reminds readers that discovery itself is “not unidirectional and never belongs to a single group of people.”

Engaging and thought provoking.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940191065410
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	10/29/2024
Edition description:	Unabridged