Exploration was a central and perhaps defining aspect of the West's encounters with other peoples and lands. Rather than reproduce celebratory narratives of individual heroism and national glory, this volume focuses on exploration's instrumental role in shaping a European sense of exceptionalism and its iconic importance in defining the terms of cultural engagement with other peoples. In chapters offering broad geographic range, the contributors address many of the key themes of recent research on exploration, including exploration's contribution to European imperial expansion, Western scientific knowledge, Enlightenment ideas and practices, and metropolitan print culture. They reassess indigenous peoples' responses upon first contacts with European explorers, their involvement as intermediaries in the operations of expeditions, and the complications that their prior knowledge posed for European claims of discovery. Underscoring that exploration must be seen as a process of mediation between representation and reality, this book provides a fresh and accessible introduction to the ongoing reinterpretation of exploration's role in the making of the modern world.

The Eucharist continues to be central to contemporary Christian religious tradition and to be the focus for a wide range of assumptions and disputes. Chief amongst these disputes is the role of women in the theology and the ritual of the Eucharist.Reinterpreting the Eucharist brings together a diverse range of voices with each using their own marginalized experience to explore other ways – indigenous culture, medieval and contemporary art, social history, and environmental ethics – of engaging with the Eucharist. Presenting new forms of theological and ethical engagement, the book responds to the challenge of reconsidering the meaning of the Eucharist today.

As globalization has deepened in recent years, historians have begun to see that many of the global challenges we face today first drew serious attention in the 1960s. This book examines how the Johnson presidency responded to these problems and draws out the lessons for today.

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.

One of the greatest stories of world exploration ever told. By the late eighteenth century, the river Niger was a 2,000-year-old two-part geographical problem. Solving it would advance European knowledge of Africa, provide a route to commercial opportunity and help eradicate the evil of slavery. Mungo Park achieved lasting fame in 1796 by solving the first part of the Niger problem – which way did the river run? Park died in 1806, in circumstances which are still uncertain, in failing to solve the second – where did the Niger end? Numerous expeditions explored the river in the decades following Park's death, but not until 1830 was its final course revealed following in-the-field exploration. By then, however, the Niger problem had been solved by 'armchair geographers' who had never even visited Africa. Majestic River celebrates Mungo Park's achievements and illuminates his rich afterlife – how and why he was commemorated long after his death. It is also the thrilling story of the many expeditions that sought to determine the Niger's course and the facts of Park's disappearance, as well as a biography of the Niger itself as the river slowly took shape in the European imagination.

The Unseen Leader delivers one simple but immensely powerful point: we need to radically rethink how we discuss leadership. In this book, American historian Martin Gutmann passionately challenges the received wisdom that history's great leaders were individuals with a proclivity for action and brash words. Drawing on extensive historical scholarship and contemporary leadership theory, Gutmann delves into the journeys of four unknown or misunderstood leaders who achieved remarkable successes in vastly different environments—the Polar North, the deserts of Arabia, the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, and Second World War London. What emerges is an entirely new narrative on leadership. Contrary to the perception of heroic protagonists forging ahead boldly, history's truly great leaders were often precisely those who didn't need to generate excessive noise or activity. Instead, they skillfully minimized dramatic circumstances. Their stories challenge our present-day conception of leadership and can inspire the leaders of tomorrow.

A path-breaking exploration of how space, place, and scale influenced the production and circulation of scientific knowledge in the nineteenth century. Over the past twenty years, scholars have increasingly questioned not just historical presumptions about the putative rise of modern science during the long nineteenth century but also the geographical contexts for and variability of science during the era. In Geographies of Knowledge, an internationally distinguished array of historians and geographers examine the spatialization of science in the period, tracing the ways in which scale and space are crucial to understanding the production, dissemination, and reception of scientific knowledge in the nineteenth century. Engaging with and extending the influential work of David Livingstone and others on science's spatial dimensions, the book touches on themes of empire, gender, religion, Darwinism, and much more. In exploring the practice of science across four continents, these essays illuminate the importance of geographical perspectives to the study of science and knowledge, and how these ideas made and contested locally could travel the globe. Dealing with everything from the local spaces of the Surrey countryside to the global negotiations that proposed a single prime meridian, from imperial knowledge creation and exploration in Burma, India, and Africa to studies of metropolitan scientific-cum-theological tussles in Belfast and in Confederate America, Geographies of Knowledge outlines an interdisciplinary agenda for the study of science as geographically situated sets of practices in the era of its modern disciplinary construction. More than that, it outlines new possibilities for all those interested in knowledge's spatial characteristics in other periods. Contributors: John A. Agnew, Vinita Damodaran, Diarmid A. Finnegan, Nuala C. Johnson, Dane Kennedy, Robert J. Mayhew, Mark Noll, Ronald L. Numbers, Nicolaas Rupke, Yvonne Sherratt, Charles W. J. Withers