front cover of The Anthropology of Expeditions
The Anthropology of Expeditions
Travel, Visualities, Afterlives
Edited by Joshua A. Bell and Erin L. Hasinoff
Bard Graduate Center, 2015
In the West at the turn of the twentieth century, public understanding of science and the world was shaped in part by expeditions to Asia, North America, and the Pacific. The Anthropology of Expeditions draws together contributions from anthropologists and historians of science to explore the role of these journeys in natural history and anthropology between approximately 1890 and 1930. By examining collected materials as well as museum and archive records, the contributors to this volume shed light on the complex social life and intimate work practices of the researchers involved in these expeditions. At the same time, the contributors also demonstrate the methodological challenges and rewards of studying these legacies and provide new insights for the history of collecting, history of anthropology, and histories of expeditions. Offering fascinating insights into the nature of expeditions and the human relationships that shaped them, The Anthropology of Expeditions sets a new standard for the field.
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Exploring Desert Stone
John N. Macomb's 1859 Expedition to the Canyonlands of the Colorado
Steven K. Madsen
Utah State University Press, 2022
The confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers, now in Canyonlands National Park, near popular tourist destination Moab, still cannot be reached or viewed easily. Much of the surrounding region remained remote and rarely visited for decades after settlement of other parts of the West. The first U.S. government expedition to explore the canyon country and the Four Corners area was led by John Macomb of the army's topographical engineers.

The soldiers and scientists followed in part the Old Spanish Trail, whose location they documented and verified. Seeking to find the confluence of the Colorado and the Green and looking for alternative routes into Utah, which was of particular interest in the wake of the Utah War, they produced a substantial documentary record, most of which is published for the first time in this volume. Theirs is also the first detailed map of the region, and it is published in Exploring Desert Stone, as well.
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Into the Night
Tales of Nocturnal Wildlife Expeditions
Rick Adams
University Press of Colorado, 2013
This entertaining collection of essays from professional scientists and naturalists provides an enlightening look at the lives of field biologists with a passion for the hidden world of nocturnal wildlife. Into the Night explores the harrowing, fascinating, amusing, and largely unheard personal experiences of scientists willing to forsake the safety of daylight to document the natural history of these uniquely adapted animals.

Contributors tell of confronting North American bears, cougars, and rattlesnakes; suffering red ctenid spider bites in the tropical rain forest; swimming through layers of feeding-frenzied hammerhead sharks in the Galapagos; evading the wrath of African bull elephants in South Africa; and delighting in the curious and gentle nature of foxes and unconditional acceptance by a family of owls. They describe “fire in the sky” across a treeless tundra, a sea ablaze with bioluminescent algae, nighttime earthquakes on the Pacific Rim, and hurricanes and erupting volcanoes on a Caribbean island.

Into the Night reveals rare and unexpected insights into nocturnal field research, illuminating experiences, discoveries, and challenges faced by intrepid biologists studying nature’s nightly marvels across the globe. This volume will be of interest to scientists and general readers alike.

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Measuring the New World
Enlightenment Science and South America
Neil Safier
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Prior to 1735, South America was terra incognita to many Europeans. But that year, the Paris Academy of Sciences sent a mission to the Spanish American province of Quito (in present-day Ecuador) to study the curvature of the earth at the Equator. Equipped with quadrants and telescopes, the mission’s participants referred to the transfer of scientific knowledge from Europe to the Andes as a “sacred fire” passing mysteriously through European astronomical instruments to observers in South America.
By taking an innovative interdisciplinary look at the traces of this expedition, Measuring the New World examines the transatlantic flow of knowledge from West to East. Through ephemeral monuments and geographical maps, this book explores how the social and cultural worlds of South America contributed to the production of European scientific knowledge during the Enlightenment. Neil Safier uses the notebooks of traveling philosophers, as well as specimens from the expedition, to place this particular scientific endeavor in the larger context of early modern print culture and the emerging intellectual category of scientist as author. 
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Mountains of Fire
The Menace, Meaning, and Magic of Volcanoes
Clive Oppenheimer
University of Chicago Press, 2023
Meeting with volcanoes around the world, a volcanologist interprets their messages for humankind.
 
In Mountains of Fire, Clive Oppenheimer invites readers to stand with him in the shadow of an active volcano. Whether he is scaling majestic summits, listening to hissing lava at the crater’s edge, or hunting for the far-flung ashes from Earth’s greatest eruptions, Oppenheimer is an ideal guide, offering readers the chance to tag along on the daring, seemingly-impossible journeys of a volcanologist.

In his eventful career as a volcanologist and filmmaker, Oppenheimer has studied volcanoes around the world. He has worked with scientists in North Korea to study Mount Paektu, a volcano name sung in national anthems on both sides of the Demilitarized Zone. He has crossed the Sahara to reach the fabled Tiéroko volcano in the Tibesti Mountains of Chad. He spent months camped atop Antarctica’s most active volcano, Mount Erebus, to record the pulse of its lava lake.

Mountains of Fire reveals how volcanic activity is entangled with our climate and environment, as well as our economy, politics, culture, and beliefs. These adventures and investigations make clear the dual purpose of volcanology—both to understand volcanoes for science’s sake and to serve the communities endangered and entranced by these mountains of fire. 
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Old Deseret Live Stock Company
A Stockman's Memoir
W. Dean Frischknecht
Utah State University Press, 2008

In the high country of the northern Wasatch Mountains, lies what is left of one of the West’s largest ranches. Deseret Live Stock Company was reputed at various times to be the largest private landholder in Utah and the single biggest producer of wool in the world. The ranch began as a sheep operation, but as it found success, it also ran cattle. Incorporated in the 1890s by a number of northern Utah ranchers who pooled their resources, the company was at the height of successful operations in the mid-twentieth century when a young Dean Frischknecht, bearing a recent degree in animal science, landed the job of sheep foreman. In his memoir he recounts in detail how Deseret managed huge herds of livestock, vast lands, and rich wildlife and recalls through lively anecdotes how stockmen and their families lived and worked in the Wasatch Mountains and Skull Valley’s desert wintering grounds.

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front cover of Route for the Overland Stage
Route for the Overland Stage
James H. Simpson's 1859 Trail Across the Great Basin
Jesse G. Petersen
Utah State University Press, 2008

The 1859 exploration of the Great Basin by army topographical engineer James Simpson opened up one of the West's most important transportation and communication corridors, a vital link between the Pacific Coast and the rest of the nation. It became the route of the Pony Express and the Overland Mail and Stage, the line of the Pacific telegraph, a major wagon road for freighters and emigrants, and, later, the first transcontinental auto road, the Lincoln Highway, now Highway 50.

No one has accurately tracked or mapped Simpson's original route, until now. Jesse Petersen shows in words, maps, and photos exactly where the explorer went. Sharing his detective-like reasoning as he walked or drove the entire trail west and Simpson's variant route returning east, Petersen takes readers on a mountain and desert trek through some of America's most remote and striking landscapes.

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front cover of Science in an Extreme Environment
Science in an Extreme Environment
The 1963 American Mount Everest Expedition
Philip W. Clements
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017
On February 20, 1963, a team of nineteen Americans embarked on the first expedition that would combine high-altitude climbing with scientific research. The primary objective of the six scientists on the team—who procured funding by appealing to the military and political applications of their work—was to study how severe stress at high altitudes affected human behavior. The expedition would land the first American on the summit of Mount Everest nearly three years after a successful (though widely disputed) Chinese ascent. At the height of the Cold War, this struggle for the Himalaya turned Everest into both a contested political space and a remote, unpredictable laboratory. The US expedition promised to resurrect American heroism, embodied in a show of physical strength and skill that, when combined with scientific expertise, would dominate international rivals on the frontiers of territorial exploration. It propelled mountaineers, scientists, and their test subjects 29,029 feet above sea level, the highest point of Chinese-occupied Tibet. There they faced hostile conditions that challenged and ultimately compromised standard research protocols, yielding results that were too exceptional to be generalized to other environments. With this book, Philip W. Clements offers a nuanced exploration of the impact of extremity on the production of scientific knowledge and the role of masculinity and nationalism in scientific inquiry.
 
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Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire
Edited by Felix Driver and Luciana Martins
University of Chicago Press, 2005
The contrast between the temperate and the tropical is one of the most enduring themes in the history of the Western geographical imagination. Caught between the demands of experience and representation, documentation and fantasy, travelers in the tropics have often treated tropical nature as a foil to the temperate, to all that is civilized, modest, and enlightened. Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire explores images of the tropical world—maps, paintings, botanical drawings, photographs, diagrams, and texts—produced by European and American travelers over the past three centuries.

Bringing together a group of distinguished contributors from disciplines across the arts and humanities, this volume contains eleven beautifully illustrated essays—arranged in three sections devoted to voyages, mappings, and sites—that consider the ways that tropical places were encountered, experienced, and represented in visual form. Covering a wide range of tropical sites in the Pacific, South Asia, West Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America, the book will appeal to a broad readership: scholars of postcolonial studies, art history, literature, imperial history, history of science, geography, and anthropology.
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Visible Empire
Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment
Daniela Bleichmar
University of Chicago Press, 2012

Between 1777 and 1816, botanical expeditions crisscrossed the vast Spanish empire in an ambitious project to survey the flora of much of the Americas, the Caribbean, and the Philippines. While these voyages produced written texts and compiled collections of specimens, they dedicated an overwhelming proportion of their resources and energy to the creation of visual materials. European and American naturalists and artists collaborated to manufacture a staggering total of more than 12,000 botanical illustrations. Yet these images have remained largely overlooked—until now.

In this lavishly illustrated volume, Daniela Bleichmar gives this archive its due, finding in these botanical images a window into the worlds of Enlightenment science, visual culture, and empire. Through innovative interdisciplinary scholarship that bridges the histories of science, visual culture, and the Hispanic world, Bleichmar uses these images to trace two related histories: the little-known history of scientific expeditions in the Hispanic Enlightenment and the history of visual evidence in both science and administration in the early modern Spanish empire. As Bleichmar shows, in the Spanish empire visual epistemology operated not only in scientific contexts but also as part of an imperial apparatus that had a long-established tradition of deploying visual evidence for administrative purposes.

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White Waters and Black
Gordon MacCreagh
University of Chicago Press, 2001
With a wicked eye for absurdities, Gordon MacCreagh recounts his adventures with eight "Eminent Scientificos" as they set out to explore the Amazon in 1923 without any idea of what lies ahead of them: rapids, malaria, monkey stew, and "dangerous savages." A combination of Twain's The Innocents Abroad and a cautionary tale for explorers, this is one of the most honest accounts ever written of a scientific expedition.
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