On November 17th, 1874, when Henry Morton Stanley marched away from Bagamoyo on what was to be his greatest exploring achievement, he was retracing his own steps of 1871 along the well-worn caravan route used by Burton and Speke in 1857; by Speke and Grant in 1860, and, writes C.E. Hamshere, many Arab traders before them.
A geological discovery in the 1820s, writes A.D. Orange, altered the views of scholars upon the Mosaic story of the Creation and the Flood.
In 1867 the United States purchased Alaska from Tsar Alexander II at a price of just two cents an acre. What brought Russia’s American empire to such an ignominious end?
George Woodcock describes how, during the century that followed the ‘Glorious Revolution’ in Britain, servants of the Hudson’s Bay Company explored the Canadian west and the Arctic regions.
On the day that the Bastille was stormed, writes George Woodcock, the explorer Mackenzie stood on the Canadian Arctic shore at the mouth of the river that now bears his name.
The South-western United States were first explored by Spaniards from Mexico in the sixteenth and seventeeth centuries; Edward P. Murray describes how these states were ceded to the U.S. in 1848.
After long dispute between the Penn and Calvert families, writes Louis C. Kleber, the astronomers, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, sailed for America in November 1763 to lay down their momentous line.
The controversy over fracking finds echoes in 19th-century concerns over groundwater.
William Gardener investigates the history of American flora and finds among its contributions to the health and happiness of Europe the not inconsiderable commodities of maize, the potato, rubber, tobacco, and quinine.
Historians are becoming more ambitious in the breadth and depth of their coverage. Is there a danger that this will reduce the role of humans to a bit part? Not necessarily, says Paul Dukes.
