Discovery History

A historical exploration book set along the Colorado River in the American West during the 16th to 19th centuries. Embark on an unforgettable journey through "Colorado River Chronicle," where the fierce waters of the Colorado River become a steep barrier to discovery for early European explorers. This captivating narrative uncovers the epic quests of brave conquistadors, who dared to conquer the treacherous terrains shaped by this mighty river. With tales of heroism, tragedy, and relentless ambition, the book unravels the challenges faced by those who navigated this formidable landscape in ...

The saga of the Vikings rises and falls on the banks of history, ebbing and flowing with popular opinion and whimsical anecdotes. The Vikings are routinely typecast and labeled anywhere from bloodthirsty tyrants to valiant heroes. They have been condemned as pirates and praised as explorers. We have all heard the stories of the fierce warriors with long ships and horned helmets storming onto the shores of medieval Europe - but who were these men really?

A historical adventure book set in the American wilderness during the early 19th century. This gripping narrative captures the triumphs and tribulations of early American explorers. "Frontier Footsteps" unfolds the awe-inspiring journeys of Lieutenant Pike and Governor Cass as they traverse the unexplored American wilderness in the early 1800s. From the icy treachery of the Mississippi River to the dense, enigmatic forests of the Chippewa territory, this book vividly recounts the relentless pursuit of knowledge and discovery. Join these intrepid explorers as they map uncharted territories, ...

Peter Frankopan, number one best-selling author and historian, explores the connections made by people, trade, disease, war, religion, adventure, science and technology in this extraordinary book about how the East married the West with a remarkable voyage at its heart - the journey along the Silk Roads.

During the height of the roaring '20s, Jessie Miller longs for adventure. Fleeing a passionless marriage in the backwaters of Australia, 23-year-old Jessie arrives in London and promptly falls in with the Bright Young Things, those gin-soaked boho-chic intellectuals draped in suits, flapper dresses, and pearls. At a party Jessie meets Captain William Lancaster, married himself and fresh from the Royal Air Force, with a scheme in his head to become as famous as Charles Lindbergh, who has just crossed the Atlantic. Lancaster will do Lindy one better: fly from London to Melbourne, and in Jessie Miller he’s found the perfect co-pilot.

The relationship between man and horse on the Eurasian steppe gave rise to a succession of rich nomadic cultures. Among them were the Mongols of the 13th century - a small tribe, which, under the charismatic leadership of Genghis Khan, created the largest contiguous land empire in history. Inspired by the extraordinary life nomads lead, Tim Cope embarked on a journey that hadn’t been successfully completed since those times.

For more than 200 years, the wreck of the Whydah (and the riches that went down with it) eluded treasure seekers, until the ship was finally found in 1984 by marine archaeologists. The artifacts brought up from the ocean floor are priceless, both in value and in the picture they reveal of life in that much-mythologized era, changing much of what we know about pirates.

In 2014, the wreck of HMS Erebus, the flagship of Sir John Franklin’s lost expedition to find the Northwest Passage, was discovered. Finding Franklin outlines the larger story and the cast of detectives that led to the discovery, solving one of the Arctic’s greatest mysteries. In compelling and accessible prose, Russell Potter details his decades of work alongside key figures in the era of modern searches for the expedition and elucidates how shared research and ideas have led to a fuller understanding of the Franklin crew’s final months.

When twenty-two-year-old aspiring geologist Charles Darwin boarded HMS Beagle in 1831 with his microscopes and specimen bottles—invited by ship’s captain Robert FitzRoy who wanted a travel companion at least as much as a ship’s naturalist—he hardly thought he was embarking on what would become perhaps the most important and epoch-changing voyage in scientific history.

In the spring of 1598 William Adams and a small band of skilled English mariners, including his brother, arrived at the port of Rotterdam to join a Dutch expedition intending to sail for the Spice Islands and Japan. The five ships that set sail were well-armed, for the plan was to emulate the voyage of Sir Francis Drake - to pass through the treacherous Magellan Strait, and then raid Spanish townships on the coast of Chile. Events turned out badly from the outset, however, as the fleet headed for disaster. Bad luck, sickness, and poor decision-making forced the fleet to over-winter in the ...

Little more than 100 years ago, maps of the world still boasted white space: places where no human had ever trod. Within a few short decades the most hostile of the world's environments had all been conquered. Likewise, in the 20th century, medicine transformed human life. Doctors took what was routinely fatal and made it survivable. As modernity brought us ever more into different kinds of extremes, doctors pushed the bounds of medical advances and human endurance. Extreme exploration challenged the body in ways that only the vanguard of science could answer.

Huge international companies and corporations are a normal part of our everyday lives today. For most, their unimaginable wealth and power, rivaling even some of the smaller countries of the world, is something we take for granted. And we see them as the living embodiment of the capitalist system, regardless if we take it as a good or a bad omen. However, this wasn’t always the case.

Human flight is one of the last great challenges on Earth. Not like how the Wright brothers flew, but how we fly in our dreams. This is the goal of the Wingsuit Landing Project: to soar through the sky at speeds up to one hundred miles per hour and to land without the aid of a parachute. This project is the creation of 37-year-old Jeb Corliss, Jr., a Southern Californian who seeks to emulate a mode of flight more like a flying squirrel than bird or plane.

To solve one of the great mathematical problems of his day, Alan Turing proposed an imaginary computer. Then, attempting to break a Nazi code during World War II, he successfully designed and built one, thus ensuring the Allied victory. Turing became a champion of artificial intelligence, but his work was cut short. As an openly gay man at a time when homosexuality was illegal in England, he was convicted and forced to undergo a humiliating "treatment" that may have led to his suicide.

Nearly two centuries before Meriwether Lewis and William Clark began their epic trek to the Pacific coast, a group of three Spanish noblemen and an African survived shipwreck, famine, Indian attack, and disease to make the first crossing of North America in recorded history. Drawing on contemporary accounts and long-lost records, Robert Goodwin tells the amazing story of their odyssey through the American South.

Acclaimed South African writer Darrel Bristow-Bovey has a deeply personal relationship with the story of Endurance and in this lyrical, loving journey into past and present, into humanity and the natural world, above and below the Antarctic ice, he revisits the famous story from a contemporary perspective, wondering why it seems to mean more today than ever before, and exploring our changing relationship with ourselves and the ice, and with our shared story of survival.

At once an incredible adventure narrative and a penetrating biographical portrait, The River of Doubt is the true story of Theodore Roosevelt's harrowing exploration of one of the most dangerous rivers on earth.

True Raiders tells the untold true story of Monty Parker, a British rogue nobleman who, after being dared to do so by Ava Astor, the so-called “most beautiful woman in the world,” headed a secret 1909 expedition to find the fabled Ark of the Covenant. Like a real-life version of Raiders of the Lost Ark, this incredible story of adventure and mystery has almost been completely forgotten today. Using recently uncovered records from the original expedition and several newly translated sources, True Raiders is the first retelling of this group’s adventures.

The ordeal of the whaleship Essex was an event as mythic in the 19th century as the sinking of the Titanic was in the 20th. In 1819, the Essex left Nantucket for the South Pacific with 20 crew members aboard. In the middle of the South Pacific the ship was rammed and sunk by an angry sperm whale. The crew drifted for more than 90 days in three tiny whaleboats, succumbing to weather, hunger, disease, and ultimately turning to drastic measures in the fight for survival.

On November 14, 1889, Nellie Bly, the crusading young female reporter for Joseph Pulitzer’s World newspaper, left New York City by steamship on a quest to break the record for the fastest trip around the world. Also departing from New York that day—and heading in the opposite direction by train—was a young journalist from The Cosmopolitan magazine, Elizabeth Bisland.