Marco Polo, Ferdinand Magellan, David Livingstone, Amelia Earhart, Neil Armstrong: these are some of the greatest travellers of all time. This book chronicles their stories and many more, describing epic voyages of discovery from the extraordinary migrations out of Africa by our earliest ancestors to the latest voyages into space. In antiquity, we follow Alexander the Great to the Indus and Hannibal across the Alps; in medieval times we trek beside Genghis Khan and Ibn Battuta. The Renaissance brought Columbus to the Americas and the circumnavigation of the world. The following centuries saw gaps in the global maps filled by Tasman, Bering and Cook, and journeys made for scientific purposes, most famously by von Humboldt and Darwin. In modern times, the last inhospitable ends of the earth were reached including both poles and the world's highest mountain and new elements were conquered. With evocative photographs, paintings and portraits, The Great Journeys in History reveals the stories of those who were there first, who explored the unexplored and who set out into the unknown, bringing alive the romance and thrill of travel.

Penetrating biographies written by a group of distinguished travel writers, broadcasters, and historians reveal the lives, motives, and passions of forty major explorers in history. It has always been mankind’s gift, or curse, to be inquisitive, and through the ages people have been driven to explore the limits of the worlds known to them—and beyond. Here are the stories of forty of the world’s greatest explorers from Europe, America, Asia, and Australia. These are men and women who changed our perception of the world through their courageous adventures. Organized thematically, the book opens with the oceanic journeys of five hundred years ago, when the great era of recorded exploration began. The following sections look at The Land, Rivers, Polar Ice, Deserts, Life on Earth, and New Frontiers. Many of these explorers recounted their journeys in vivid firsthand accounts; others were superb artists or photographers. The book features quotes from their journals and reports, and it is illustrated with paintings, photographs, engravings, and maps, so that we can experience their adventures through their own eyes and in their own words. Featured explorers include: Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, James Cook, Lewis and Clark, Richard Burton, Samuel de Champlain, David Livingstone, Roald Amundsen, Gertrude Bell, Alexander von Humboldt, Yuri Gagarin, and Jacques-Yves Cousteau.

Travelling through the wartorn Balkans with her husband on what proved to be a wholly useless diplomatic mission to Constantinople, Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) left a vivid, informative, clever account of her adventures in the mysterious, sophisticated culture of Ottoman palaces, bathing places and courts which - even as her husband's career was falling apart - she could not have enjoyed more. Great Journeys allows readers to travel both around the planet and back through the centuries – but also back into ideas and worlds frightening, ruthless and cruel in different ways from our own. Few reading experiences can begin to match that of engaging with writers who saw astounding things: Great civilisations, walls of ice, violent and implacable jungles, deserts and mountains, multitudes of birds and flowers new to science. Reading these books is to see the world afresh, to rediscover a time when many cultures were quite strange to each other, where legends and stories were treated as facts and in which so much was still to be discovered.

The Atlas of Great Journeys allows readers to follow in the footsteps of the most daring adventurers as they set out to explore the unknown. Fascinating original map illustrations show the world's greatest journeys, and lavishly illustrated fact pages tell the stories of each expedition - what dangers they faced, how long they travelled, and much more. As well as amazing illustrated maps and stories, this book has a unique Augmented Reality component that magically brings these journeys to life. Use your tablet or phone on each map spread to trace the routes they took and read about every stage of their journeys.

Drawing upon numerous manuscripts from China and Central Asia, the articles presented in this volume by leading scholars in the field examine a broad range of topics on the multi-lingual, multi-religious, and multi-ethnic communities along the Silk Road in the medieval period, and cover such topics as the social history of Kucha, book history in Dunhuang, the spread of Manichaeism, the political history of Turkic and Khotanese Kingdoms, and the travelogue of the Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang. They demonstrate that Han Chinese, Khotanese, Sogdians, Tocharians, Tibetans, and Uyghurs have all contributed to constructing a sophisticated international network across Asia. Contributors are: Bi Bo, Chao-jung Ching, Jean Pierre Drège, Ogihara Hirotoshi, Xiaohe Ma, Nicholas Sims-Williams, Xinjiang Rong, Tokio Takata, Xiaofu Wang, Wenkan Xu, Yutaka Yoshida, Lishuang Zhu, Peter Zieme.

Whether you're on the Orient Express or the Inverness to Wick and Thurso route traversing some of the wildest country in Britain, train travel affords a vision of the world like no other. From the modest line through North Yorkshire's Esk Valley to the Trans-Siberian; from a narrow-gauge web of lines in the Harz Mountains to the coast-tocoast journey through the mountains of Corsica, acclaimed travel writer Anthony Lambert presents an unmissable selection for any traveller who loves the journey as much as the destination. Here is a carefully chosen, wide-ranging selection of train journeys with character, sublime scenery and a real sense of history.

Americans have always been a people on the move. Journeys in Time maps twenty journeys that have shaped our national past. These are stories of change -- of pilgrims and pioneers, soldiers and children, explorers and adventurers building new lives and finding new worlds. From a cabin boy who sailed with Columbus to a Union soldier and a young migrant farm worker, these journeys changed the lives of those who took them.