The Philippines and France: Discovery, Rediscovery


Book Description

THE DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS BETWEEN THE PHILIPPINES AND FRANCE DID NOT MERELY BEGIN OVER 70 YEARS AGO. The journey of discovery began even earlier, when French cartography was being developed as early routes to and around the Philippines were first being plotted by adventurous maritime explorers. The cover of this book depicts this journey: a French frigate bravely traverses the seas of Guillaume Deliste's 17th century world map, headed eastward in search of new discoveries, guided by the Philippine sun. As both countries rediscover each other by building an even better relationship in the future, it will be a continuous journey of both discovery and rediscovery.




Sea of Glory


Book Description

"A treasure of a book."—David McCullough The harrowing story of a pathbreaking naval expedition that set out to map the entire Pacific Ocean, dwarfing Lewis and Clark with its discoveries, from the New York Times bestselling author of Valiant Ambition and In the Hurricane's Eye. A New York Times Notable Book America's first frontier was not the West; it was the sea, and no one writes more eloquently about that watery wilderness than Nathaniel Philbrick. In his bestselling In the Heart of the Sea Philbrick probed the nightmarish dangers of the vast Pacific. Now, in an epic sea adventure, he writes about one of the most ambitious voyages of discovery the Western world has ever seen—the U.S. Exploring Expedition of 1838–1842. On a scale that dwarfed the journey of Lewis and Clark, six magnificent sailing vessels and a crew of hundreds set out to map the entire Pacific Ocean and ended up naming the newly discovered continent of Antarctica, collecting what would become the basis of the Smithsonian Institution. Combining spellbinding human drama and meticulous research, Philbrick reconstructs the dark saga of the voyage to show why, instead of being celebrated and revered as that of Lewis and Clark, it has—until now—been relegated to a footnote in the national memory. Winner of the Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt Naval History Prize










Europe's Lost World


Book Description

This excellent book, which deserves a wide readership, reports on the work of the North Sea Palaeolandscapes Project, which has been researching the fascinating lost landscape of Doggerland which until the end of the last Ice Age connected Britain to the continent in the North Sea area. It aims to make the findings available to a general readership, and show just how impressive they have been, with nearly 23,000km2 mapped. The techniques used to reconstruct the landscape are explained, and conclusions and speculation about the climate and vegetation of the area in the Mesolithic offered. It also tells the story of the rediscovery of Doggerland, and the Mesolithic landscape more generally, from the pioneering work of Clement Reid in the nineteenth century, to the research of Grahame Clark and Bryony Coles in the twentieth. It's also worth pointing out just how well produced and illustrated the book is, and one can only hope that it can spark public interest in a comparatively little known phase of our prehistory.




Scientific American


Book Description

Monthly magazine devoted to topics of general scientific interest.




Sophie's World


Book Description

A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.




Commentary


Book Description




International Encyclopedia of Human Geography


Book Description

The International Encyclopedia of Human Geography provides an authoritative and comprehensive source of information on the discipline of human geography and its constituent, and related, subject areas. The encyclopedia includes over 1,000 detailed entries on philosophy and theory, key concepts, methods and practices, biographies of notable geographers, and geographical thought and praxis in different parts of the world. This groundbreaking project covers every field of human geography and the discipline’s relationships to other disciplines, and is global in scope, involving an international set of contributors. Given its broad, inclusive scope and unique online accessibility, it is anticipated that the International Encyclopedia of Human Geography will become the major reference work for the discipline over the coming decades. The Encyclopedia will be available in both limited edition print and online via ScienceDirect – featuring extensive browsing, searching, and internal cross-referencing between articles in the work, plus dynamic linking to journal articles and abstract databases, making navigation flexible and easy. For more information, pricing options and availability visit http://info.sciencedirect.com/content/books/ref_works/coming/ Available online on ScienceDirect and in limited edition print format Broad, interdisciplinary coverage across human geography: Philosophy, Methods, People, Social/Cultural, Political, Economic, Development, Health, Cartography, Urban, Historical, Regional Comprehensive and unique - the first of its kind in human geography




Visible Empire


Book Description

Between 1777 and 1816, botanical expeditions crisscrossed the vast Spanish empire in an ambitious project to survey the flora of much of the Americas, the Caribbean, and the Philippines. While these voyages produced written texts and compiled collections of specimens, they dedicated an overwhelming proportion of their resources and energy to the creation of visual materials. European and American naturalists and artists collaborated to manufacture a staggering total of more than 12,000 botanical illustrations. Yet these images have remained largely overlooked—until now. In this lavishly illustrated volume, Daniela Bleichmar gives this archive its due, finding in these botanical images a window into the worlds of Enlightenment science, visual culture, and empire. Through innovative interdisciplinary scholarship that bridges the histories of science, visual culture, and the Hispanic world, Bleichmar uses these images to trace two related histories: the little-known history of scientific expeditions in the Hispanic Enlightenment and the history of visual evidence in both science and administration in the early modern Spanish empire. As Bleichmar shows, in the Spanish empire visual epistemology operated not only in scientific contexts but also as part of an imperial apparatus that had a long-established tradition of deploying visual evidence for administrative purposes.