Explorers: A New History (A Norton Short)
Description
A surprising history of exploration featuring a new cast—including fugitives, indigenous pathfinders, and immigrants—that celebrates the universal qualities of discovery.
The impulse to seek out new worlds is universal to humanity. In a truly inclusive account of exploration, historian Matthew Lockwood interweaves stories of famous figures—including Sacagawea, Pocahontas, and Dr. David Livingstone—with tales of individuals who are usually denied the title “explorer.” Lockwood’s new cast of adventurers includes Rabban Bar Sawma, a Uighur monk who traversed the Middle East and Europe; Yatsuke, an East African traveler to Japan during the sixteenth century; and David Dorr, a man born in slavery whose travelogues reshaped Americans’ understanding of Africa. In lives filled with imagination and wonder, curiosity, connection, and exchange, these figures unfurl a human tapestry of discovery. Spanning forty centuries and six continents, this thrilling and concise history redefines what it means to discover, who counts as an explorer, and what counts as exploration.
Praise for Explorers: A New History (A Norton Short)
Matthew Lockwood's global history of people who set off for strange lands is an expansive and compassionate account that complicates the old trope of heroic conquerors. Here, 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 romance of exploration without losing a sense of awe, curiosity, and wonder.
— Melissa L. Sevigny, author ofBrave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon
Histories of exploration too often focus on white men heroically discovering new lands and ideas. Largely absent from the literature are the stories of people of color, as well as unheralded white women and men, who were explorers too, and deserve to be recognized and applauded for playing a crucial role in creating the interconnected world in which we live. Lockwood's wonderfully insightful and entertaining book helps to fill in this gap and gives voice to those who have been overlooked too long, and without whom the history of exploration is far less interesting and consequential.
— Eric Jay Dolin, author ofLeft for Dead and Black Flags, Blue Waters
