Pathfinders

Pathfinders

Author: Felipe Fernández-Armesto

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 492

ISBN-13: 9780393062595

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This book is about encounters between cultures and the outreach of ambitions, imaginations, efforts, and innovations that made them possible.


Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration

Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration

Author: Felipe Fernández-Armesto

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2007-10-17

Total Pages: 457

ISBN-13: 0393242471

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"A brilliant and readable book…a rich study of humankind's restless spirit." —Candice Millard, New York Times Book Review Greeted with coast-to-coast acclaim on publication, Fernández-Armesto's ambitious history of world exploration sets a new standard. Presenting the subject for the first time on a truly global scale, Fernández-Armesto tracks the pathfinders who, over the past five millennia, lay down the routes of contact that have drawn together the farthest reaches of the world. The Wall Street Journal calls it "impressive...a huge story [told] with gusto and panache." To the Washington Post, "Pathfinders is propelled by an Argonaut of an author, indefatigable and daring. It's a wild ride." And in a front-page review, the Seattle Times hails its "tart and elegant presentation...full of surprises. Fernández-Armesto's lively mind, pithy phrasing, and stunningly thorough and diverse knowledge are a constant pleasure." A plenitude of illustrations and maps in color and black and white augment this rich history. In Pathfinders, winner of the 2007 World History Association Book Prize, we have a definitive treatment of a grand subject.


Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration

Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration

Author: Felipe Fernández-Armesto

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2007-10-17

Total Pages: 457

ISBN-13: 0393330915

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This book is about encounters between cultures and the outreach of ambitions, imaginations, efforts, and innovations that made them possible.


Straits

Straits

Author: Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2022-03-29

Total Pages: 379

ISBN-13: 0520383370

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An uncompromising study of the fictions, the failures, and the real man behind the myth of Magellan. With Straits, celebrated historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto subjects the surviving sources to the most meticulous scrutiny ever, providing a timely and engrossing biography of the real Ferdinand Magellan. The truth that Fernández-Armesto uncovers about Magellan’s life, his character, and the events of his ill-fated voyage offers up a stranger, darker, and even more compelling narrative than the fictional version that has been celebrated for half a millennium. Magellan did not attempt—much less accomplish—a journey around the globe. In his lifetime he was abhorred as a traitor, reviled as a tyrant, self-condemned to destruction, and dismissed as a failure. Straits untangles the myths that made Magellan a hero and discloses the reality of the man, probing the passions and tensions that drove him to adventure and drew him to disaster. We see the mutations of his character: pride that became arrogance, daring that became recklessness, determination that became ruthlessness, romanticism that became irresponsibility, and superficial piety that became, in adversity, irrational exaltation. As the real Magellan emerges, so do his real ambitions, focused less on circumnavigating the world or cornering the global spice market than on exploiting Filipino gold. Straits is a study in failure and the paradox of Magellan’s career, showing that renown is not always a reflection of merit but often a gift and accident of circumstance.


Columbus

Columbus

Author: Felipe Fernández-Armesto

Publisher: Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13:

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Discusses the character of Columbus in the context of the world of the late fifteenth century.


A Foot in the River

A Foot in the River

Author: Felipe Fernández-Armesto

Publisher:

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 0198744420

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We are a weird species. Like other species, we have a culture. But by comparison with other species, we are strangely unstable: human cultures self-transform, diverge, and multiply with bewildering speed. They vary, radically and rapidly, from time to time and place to place. And the way we live--our manners, morals, habits, experiences, relationships, technology, values--seems to be changing at an ever accelerating pace. The effects can be dislocating, baffling, sometimes terrifying. Why is this? In A Foot in the River, best-selling historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto sifts through the evidence and offers some radical answers to these very big questions about the human species and its history--and speculates on what these answers might mean for our future. Combining insights from a huge range of disciplines, including history, biology, anthropology, archaeology, philosophy, sociology, ethology, zoology, primatology, psychology, linguistics, the cognitive sciences, and even business studies, he argues that culture is exempt from evolution. Ultimately, no environmental conditions, no genetic legacy, no predictable patterns, no scientific laws determine our behaviour. We can consequently make and remake our world in the freedom of unconstrained imaginations. A revolutionary book which challenges scientistic assumptions about culture and how and why cultural change happens, A Foot in the River comes to conclusions which readers may well find by turns both daunting and also potentially hugely liberating.


Travel Narratives from the Age of Discovery

Travel Narratives from the Age of Discovery

Author: Peter C. Mancall

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 431

ISBN-13: 0195155971

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This is a primary source collection of narratives about the travel and discovery in North and South America, Africa, Asia, and Europe in the 16th century.


Pathfinders

Pathfinders

Author: Jim Al-Khalili

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2010-09-30

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0141965010

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For over 700 years the international language of science was Arabic. In Pathfinders, Jim al-Khalili celebrates the forgotten pioneers who helped shape our understanding of the world. All scientists have stood on the shoulders of giants. But most historical accounts today suggest that the achievements of the ancient Greeks were not matched until the European Renaissance in the 16th century, a 1,000-year period dismissed as the Dark Ages. In the ninth-century, however, the Abbasid caliph of Baghdad, Abu Ja'far Abdullah al-Ma'mun, created the greatest centre of learning the world had ever seen, known as Bayt al-Hikma, the House of Wisdom. The scientists and philosophers he brought together sparked a period of extraordinary discovery, in every field imaginable, launching a golden age of Arabic science. Few of these scientists, however, are now known in the western world. Abu Rayhan al-Biruni, a polymath who outshines everyone in history except Leonardo da Vinci? The Syrian astronomer Ibn al-Shatir, whose manuscripts would inspire Copernicus's heliocentric model of the solar system? Or the 13th-century Andalucian physician Ibn al-Nafees, who correctly described blood circulation 400 years before William Harvey? Iraqi Ibn al-Haytham who practised the modern scientific method 700 years before Bacon and Descartes, and founded the field of modern optics before Newton? Or even ninth-century zoologist al-Jahith, who developed a theory of natural selection a thousand years before Darwin? The West needs to see the Islamic world through new eyes and the Islamic world, in turn, to take pride in its extraordinarily rich heritage. Anyone who reads this book will understand why.


Prince Henry 'the Navigator'

Prince Henry 'the Navigator'

Author: Peter Edward Russell

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2001-01-01

Total Pages: 508

ISBN-13: 9780300091304

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Studie over de centrale rol die prins Hendrik de Zeevaarder (1394-1460) speelde bij de eerste Portugese ontdekkingsreizen.


The Invention of Power

The Invention of Power

Author: Bruce Bueno de Mesquita

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Published: 2022-01-18

Total Pages: 339

ISBN-13: 154177440X

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In the tradition of Why Nations Fail, this book solves one of the great puzzles of history: Why did the West become the most powerful civilization in the world? Western exceptionalism—the idea that European civilizations are freer, wealthier, and less violent—is a widespread and powerful political idea. It has been a source of peace and prosperity in some societies, and of ethnic cleansing and havoc in others. Yet in The Invention of Power, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita draws on his expertise in political maneuvering, deal-making, and game theory to present a revolutionary new theory of Western exceptionalism: that a single, rarely discussed event in the twelfth century changed the course of European and world history. By creating a compromise between churches and nation-states that, in effect, traded money for power and power for money, the 1122 Concordat of Worms incentivized economic growth, facilitated secularization, and improved the lot of the citizenry, all of which set European countries on a course for prosperity. In the centuries since, countries that have had a similar dynamic of competition between church and state have been consistently better off than those that have not. The Invention of Power upends conventional thinking about European culture, religion, and race and presents a persuasive new vision of world history.