Expedition History

Adventure, politics, suspense, drama, diplomacy, romance, and personal tragedy combine to make this outstanding work of scholarship about Captain Meriwether Lewis, hand-picked by President Thomas Jefferson to explore and acquire the American West. Browse more Ambrose, including his latest, Nothing Like It in the World.

In 1804, John Colter set out with Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on the first US expedition to traverse the North American continent. During the 28-month ordeal, Colter served as a hunter and scout, and honed his survival skills on the western frontier. But when the journey was over, Colter stayed behind. He spent two more years trekking alone through dangerous and unfamiliar territory, charting some of the West's most treasured landmarks.

Africa has long been considered the cradle of life - where life and humans evolved - but somewhere west of Munich, Germany, paleoclimatologist and paleontologist Madelaine Böhme and her team make a discovery that is beyond anything they ever imagined: the 12-million-year-old bones of an ancient ape - Danuvius guggenmos - which makes headlines around the world and defies prevailing theories of human history and where human life began.

In 1803, the United States made a deal to purchase a big area of land called the Louisiana Territory. Soon after, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were asked to lead an expedition into the American Northwest to explore the new land. After the journey, many stories were told about it—but not all of them are true.

Meriwether Lewis discovered far more than the history books tell - ancient civilizations, strange monuments, "nearly white, blue-eyed" Indians, and evidence that the American continent was visited long before the first European settlers arrived. And he was murdered to keep it all secret. Examining the shadows and cracks between America's official version of history, Xaviant Haze and Paul Schrag propose that the America of old taught in schools is not the America that was discovered by Lewis and Clark and other early explorers.

The Spanish Conquest: What really happened? If you like to use your drive time for education by audiobook, consider this audiobook for widening and deepening your view of an event you studied briefly in school - the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Conquistador Voices, neither glamorizes nor condemns the conquistadors. Somewhat in the manner of a modern film documentary, it treats the so-called conquest as an historical event that’s worth learning about for its own sake, with most of the moralizing left to the listener.

In the 1930s, as official government expeditions set their sights on conquering Mount Everest, a little-known World War I veteran named Maurice Wilson conceives his own crazy, beautiful plan: He will fly a plane from England to Everest, crash-land on its lower slopes, then become the first person to reach its summit — completely alone.

Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton tried and failed to cross the coldest and windiest continent on Earth.

Spain's position on Europe's southwestern corner has exposed it to cultural, political and actual winds blowing from all quadrants. Africa lies a mere nine miles to the south. The Mediterranean connects it to the civilisational currents of Phoenicians, Romans, Carthaginians and Byzantines as well as the Arabic lands of the Near East. Hordes from the Russian steppes were amongst the first to arrive. They would be followed by Visigoths, Arabs, Napoleonic armies and many more invaders and immigrants.

In 1881, U.S. Army Lieutenant Adolphus Greely and his crew set sail for the Arctic. Their mission was to collect scientific data on the polar climate. They also had a second, secret goal: to achieve Farthest North, the record for highest latitude reached by explorers. But when resupply ships failed to arrive two years in a row, the team’s dreams of glory turned into a nightmarish fight for survival in one of the most remote and harshest regions in the world.

In December of 1914, the British Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, led by Sir Ernest Shackleton, sailed from the island of South Georgia in the Southern Ocean. Its goal: the first overland crossing of Antarctica. Soon trapped in a prison of solid pack ice, the crew became engaged in a legendary fight against brutal cold, impenetrable ice, dwin­dl­ing food, and complete isolation.

A remarkable true story of adventure, betrayal, and survival set in one of the world's most inhospitable places. In 1906, from atop a snow-swept hill in the ice fields northwest of Greenland, hundreds of miles from another human being, Commander Robert E. Peary spotted a line of mysterious peaks looming in the distance. He called this unexplored realm "Crocker Land". Scientists and explorers agreed that the world-famous explorer had discovered a new continent rising from the frozen Arctic Ocean.

A few years ago, Mark Adams made a strange discovery: Everything we know about the lost city of Atlantis comes from the work of one man, the Greek philosopher Plato. Then he made a second, stranger discovery: Amateur explorers are still actively searching for this sunken city all around the world, based entirely on the clues Plato left behind.

A century ago, everyone knew that people were fated by their race, sex, and nationality to be more or less intelligent, nurturing, or warlike. But Columbia University professor Franz Boas looked at the data and decided everyone was wrong. Racial categories, he insisted, were biological fictions. Cultures did not come in neat packages labeled "primitive" or "advanced". What counted as a family, a good meal, or even common sense was a product of history and circumstance, not of nature.

Using an infamous deception about a fake mountain range in British Columbia as her jumping-off point, Katie Ives explores the lure of blank spaces on the map and the value of the imagination. In Imaginary Peaks she details the cartographical mystery of the Riesenstein Hoax within the larger context of climbing history and the seemingly endless quest for newly discovered peaks and claims of first ascents. Imaginary Peaks is an evocative, thought-provoking tale, immersed in the literature of exploration, study of maps, and basic human desire.

In this grand and astonishing account, Alec Wilkinson brings us the story of S. A. Andrée, the visionary Swedish aeronaut who, in 1897, during the great age of Arctic endeavor, left to discover the North Pole by flying to it in a hydrogen balloon. Called by a British military officer “the most original and remarkable attempt ever made in Arctic exploration,” Andrée’s expedition was followed by nearly the entire world, and it made him an international legend.

Tom Wolfe, whose legend began in journalism, takes us on an eye-opening journey that is sure to arouse widespread debate. The Kingdom of Speech is a captivating, paradigm-shifting argument that speech - not evolution - is responsible for humanity's complex societies and achievements.

People have been climbing as long as they've existed, and for those who relish the challenge, nothing can top Mount Everest, the tallest mountain on the planet at over 29,000 feet. As Sir Edmund Hillary put it, "It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves."

In 1804, Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and their team set out on an exciting yet challenging expedition into the American West. They faced many difficult choices along the way. Now, the choices are yours.

Historia oculta de la conquista de América pretende rescatar aquellos hechos que tuvieron relevancia para el desarrollo de la conquista de América y para la posterior configuración tanto de las fronteras sudamericanas como de la propia identidad hispanoamericana. Son hechos olvidados por la distancia temporal entre aquellos hombres y nosotros, o también ninguneados por aquellos que pretendieron acrecentar su fama u ocultar sus delitos, no obstante algunos de ellos, como la incidencia de las enfermedades en colonos e indígenas....