ABOUT THIS BOOK

From Sir John Franklin's doomed 1845 search for the Northwest Passage to early twentieth-century sprints to the South Pole, polar expeditions produced an extravagant archive of documents that are as varied as they are engaging. As the polar ice sheets melt, fragments of this archive are newly emergent. In The News at the Ends of the Earth Hester Blum examines the rich, offbeat collection of printed ephemera created by polar explorers. Ranging from ship newspapers and messages left in bottles to menus and playbills, polar writing reveals the seamen wrestling with questions of time, space, community, and the environment. Whether chronicling weather patterns or satirically reporting on penguin mischief, this writing provided expedition members with a set of practices to help them survive the perpetual darkness and harshness of polar winters. The extreme climates these explorers experienced is continuous with climate change today. Polar exploration writing, Blum contends, offers strategies for confronting and reckoning with the extreme environment of the present.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Hester Blum is Associate Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, author of The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives, and editor of Turns of Event: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies in Motion and Horrors of Slavery: Or, The American Tars in Tripoli.

REVIEWS

"The News at the Ends of the Earth is a fine-grained register of the ebb and flow of a printophilic century, from Ross to Shackleton. While mindful of the minor variations over the decades, Blum marvelously conveys that fantastic, phantasmatically preserved shipbound conversation, a dilated and heterogeneous house party."

-- John Plotz Public Books

"An intricately layered, richly illustrated examination of shipboard newspapers (printed and handwritten), playbills, and other media produced by expeditions to the Antarctic and Arctic regions between 1818 and 1914. . . . The book speaks to the human imperative to communicate, even under extremely hostile conditions. . . . Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty."

-- J. Bekken Choice

"Superb. . . . As the Anthropocene continues to develop, Blum’s concern with the media and narratives we might use to represent the planet’s predicament is of interest not only to scholars of printing and the polar regions, but also to a general reader."

-- Nancy Campbell TLS

"Blum’s book is a lively and enjoyable account of a fascinating historical period and its practices—but it is also vitally relevant for our current moment."

-- Carie Lyn Schneider Edge Effects

"[Blum] offers a fascinating history of onboard polar publication and provides a detailed analysis of the various textual materials produced during voyages of Arctic and Antarctic exploration. It also strives to unpick the intriguing motivations that lay behind their production. ... An invaluable contribution to several branches of scholarship, and readers interested in polar exploration, literary studies, and histories of printing culture will gain much from reading this interesting and insightful book."

-- Peter R. Martin Nineteenth Century Studies

"The News at the Ends of the Earth makes a significant contribution to the growing push to incorporate the polar regions into world histories. It would be of immense value to historians with an interest in oceanic spaces, the polar regions, histories of printed media, or histories of ephemera, and would be a useful starting point for scholars looking to think about how the Arctic and Antarctic fit into the scope of world history."

-- Rohan Howitt Journal of World History

"The News at the Ends of the Earth is exciting, both for what it definitively argues and for the questions it incites."

-- Devin M. Garofalo Journal of American Studies

"The News at the Ends of the Earth offers a fascinating, finely textured portrait of life aboard ship in the most extreme environments of the world."

-- Michael Robinson Journal of American History

“The News at the Ends of the Earth succeeds in its assertion that the practices of historical polar expeditions are important in comprehending the current climate crisis. The reader is left with an overwhelming sense of how crucial the enterprise of creating these collective outlets of communication was, and still is, in understanding one’s place in the environment and the necessity of self-expression in climatic extremes.”

-- Eavan O’Dochartaigh Journal for Maritime Research

“Hester Blum’s The News at the Ends of the Earth is deeply detailed and richly illustrated in order to create a book that is at once informative and culturally important.”

-- Emily Ennis Victoriographies

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations vii
Chronology xi
Preface: Books on Ice xv
Acknowledgments xxi
Introduction. Polar Ecomedia 1
1. Extreme Printing 43
2. Arctic News 91
3. Antarctic Imprints 138
4. Dead Letter Reckoning 177
5. Inuit Knowledge and Charles Francis Hall 209
Conclusion. Matters of Life and Death 231
Notes 237
Bibliography 273
Index 291

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