Hidden Histories of Exploration

Hidden Histories of Exploration
Author: Felix Driver
Publisher: Gwasg y Bwthyn
Total Pages: 68
Release: 2009
Genre: History
ISBN:

This project takes a new look at the extensive historical collections of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) by highlighting the role of intermediaries and indigenous peoples in the history of exploration. Its main focus will be a major exhibition to be held at the RGS-IBG, South Kensington, from 15 October to 10 December 2009.The Society's collections constitute a unique record of the history of global exploration and cultural encounter. The exhibition will consider the ways in which encounters between British explorers and indigenous peoples are represented in these collections. It aims to challenge the perspective of standard histories of exploration in which the contributions of 'locals' are relegated to the margins.

Indigenous Intermediaries

Indigenous Intermediaries
Author: Shino Konishi
Publisher: ANU Press
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2015-09-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 1925022773

This edited collection understands exploration as a collective effort and experience involving a variety of people in diverse kinds of relationships. It engages with the recent resurgence of interest in the history of exploration by focusing on the various indigenous intermediaries – Jacky Jacky, Bungaree, Moowattin, Tupaia, Mai, Cheealthluc and lesser-known individuals – who were the guides, translators, and hosts that assisted and facilitated European travellers in exploring different parts of the world. These intermediaries are rarely the authors of exploration narratives, or the main focus within exploration archives. Nonetheless the archives of exploration contain imprints of their presence, experience and contributions. The chapters present a range of ways of reading archives to bring them to the fore. The contributors ask new questions of existing materials, suggest new interpretive approaches, and present innovative ways to enhance sources so as to generate new stories.

The Spectral Arctic

The Spectral Arctic
Author: Shane McCorristine
Publisher: UCL Press
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2018-05-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1787352455

Visitors to the Arctic enter places that have been traditionally imagined as otherworldly. This strangeness fascinated audiences in nineteenth-century Britain when the idea of the heroic explorer voyaging through unmapped zones reached its zenith. The Spectral Arctic re-thinks our understanding of Arctic exploration by paying attention to the importance of dreams and ghosts in the quest for the Northwest Passage. The narratives of Arctic exploration that we are all familiar with today are just the tip of the iceberg: they disguise a great mass of mysterious and dimly lit stories beneath the surface. In contrast to oft-told tales of heroism and disaster, this book reveals the hidden stories of dreaming and haunted explorers, of frozen mummies, of rescue balloons, visits to Inuit shamans, and of the entranced female clairvoyants who travelled to the Arctic in search of John Franklin’s lost expedition. Through new readings of archival documents, exploration narratives, and fictional texts, these spectral stories reflect the complex ways that men and women actually thought about the far North in the past. This revisionist historical account allows us to make sense of current cultural and political concerns in the Canadian Arctic about the location of Franklin’s ships.

Mobilities of Knowledge

Mobilities of Knowledge
Author: Heike Jöns
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2017-01-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3319446541

This collection of essays examines how spatial mobilities of people and practices, technologies and objects, knowledge and ideas have shaped the production, circulation, and transfer of knowledge in different historical and geographical contexts. Targeting an interdisciplinary audience, Mobilities of Knowledge combines detailed empirical analyses with innovative conceptual approaches. The first part scrutinizes knowledge circulation, transfer, and adaption, focussing on the interpersonal communication process, early techniques of papermaking, a geographical text, indigenous knowledge in exploration, the genealogy of spatial analysis, and different disciplinary knowledges about the formation of cities, states, and agriculture. The second part analyses the interplay of mediators, networks, and learning by studying academic careers, travels, and collaborations within the British Empire, public internationalism in Geneva, the global transfer of corporate knowledge through expatriation, graduate mobility from the global south to the global north, and the international mobility of degree programs in higher education.This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.

The Hidden Histories of Houseplants

The Hidden Histories of Houseplants
Author: Maddie Bailey
Publisher: Hardie Grant Publishing
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2021-11-11
Genre: Gardening
ISBN: 1784884170

The Hidden Histories of Houseplants explores 20 of the world’s most common houseplants. This book isn’t just a dry exploration of historical cultivation; the narrative explores the plants’ places in social history, science and culture, showcasing the most fascinating elements of each plant’s story, be it the exploration as to why Monstera deliciosa have holes in their leaves, whether houseplants have the ability to count, or why Calathea leaves open during the day and close up at night. Accompanied by stunning illustrations, each text takes the reader on a journey through time, history and culture, told by the most universally binding objects in our homes from London to Beijing – houseplants.

On the Way to the "(Un)Known"?

On the Way to the
Author: Doris Gruber
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 428
Release: 2022-09-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 3110698048

This volume brings together twenty-two authors from various countries who analyze travelogues on the Ottoman Empire between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. The travelogues reflect the colorful diversity of the genre, presenting the experiences of individuals and groups from China to Great Britain. The spotlight falls on interdependencies of travel writing and historiography, geographic spaces, and specific practices such as pilgrimages, the hajj, and the harem. Other points of emphasis include the importance of nationalism, the place and time of printing, representations of fashion, and concepts of masculinity and femininity. By displaying close, comparative, and distant readings, the volume offers new insights into perceptions of "otherness", the circulation of knowledge, intermedial relations, gender roles, and digital analysis.

The Hidden History of International Law in the Americas

The Hidden History of International Law in the Americas
Author: Juan Pablo Scarfi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2017
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0190622342

This book offers the first exploration of the deployment of international law for the legitimization of U.S. ascendancy as an informal empire in Latin America. This book explores the intellectual history of a distinctive idea of American international law in the Americas, focusing principally on the evolution of the American Institute of International Law (AIIL).

The Last Blank Spaces

The Last Blank Spaces
Author: Dane Kennedy
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 366
Release: 2013-03-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674074971

The challenge of opening Africa and Australia to British imperial influence fell to a coterie of proto-professional explorers who sought knowledge, adventure, and fame but often experienced confusion, fear, and failure. The Last Blank Spaces follows the arc of these explorations, from idea to practice, intention to outcome, myth to reality.

Mobile Museums

Mobile Museums
Author: Felix Driver
Publisher: UCL Press
Total Pages: 372
Release: 2021-04-19
Genre: Art
ISBN: 178735508X

Mobile Museums presents an argument for the importance of circulation in the study of museum collections, past and present. It brings together an impressive array of international scholars and curators from a wide variety of disciplines – including the history of science, museum anthropology and postcolonial history - to consider the mobility of collections. The book combines historical perspectives on the circulation of museum objects in the past with contemporary accounts of their re-mobilisation, notably in the context of Indigenous community engagement. Contributors seek to explore processes of circulation historically in order to re-examine, inform and unsettle common assumptions about the way museum collections have evolved over time and through space. By foregrounding questions of circulation, the chapters in Mobile Museums collectively represent a fundamental shift in the understanding of the history and future uses of museum collections. The book addresses a variety of different types of collection, including the botanical, the ethnographic, the economic and the archaeological. Its perspective is truly global, with case studies drawn from South America, West Africa, Oceania, Australia, the United States, Europe and the UK. Mobile Museums helps us to understand why the mobility of museum collections was a fundamental aspect of their history and why it continues to matter today. Praise for Mobile Museums 'This book advances a paradigm shift in studies of museums and collections. A distinguished group of contributors reveal that collections are not dead assemblages. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries were marked by vigorous international traffic in ethnography and natural history specimens that tell us much about colonialism, travel and the history of knowledge – and have implications for the remobilisation of museums in the future.’ – Nicholas Thomas, University of Cambridge 'The first major work to examine the implications and consequences of the migration of materials from one scientific or cultural milieu to another, it highlights the need for a more nuanced understanding of collections and offers insights into their potential for future re-mobilisation.' – Arthur MacGregor

The Royal Navy in Indigenous Australia, 1795–1855

The Royal Navy in Indigenous Australia, 1795–1855
Author: Daniel Simpson
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2021-01-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 3030600971

This book offers the first in-depth enquiry into the origins of 135 Indigenous Australian objects acquired by the Royal Navy between 1795 and 1855 and held now by the British Museum. In response to increasing calls for the ‘decolonisation’ of museums and the restitution of ethnographic collections, the book seeks to return knowledge of the moments, methods, and motivations whereby Indigenous Australian objects were first collected and sent to Britain. By structuring its discussion in terms of three key ‘stages’ of a typical naval voyage to Australia—departure from British shores, arrival on the continent’s coasts, and eventual return to port—the book offers a nuanced and multifaceted understanding of the pathways followed by these 135 objects into the British Museum. The book offers important new understandings of Indigenous Australian peoples’ reactions to naval visitors, and contains a wealth of original research on the provenance and meaning of some of the world’s oldest extant Indigenous Australian object collections.