Explorations of Asia, Africa, the Americas, Australia and the Arctic Regions from Marco Polo to Captain Cook.

The Age of Exploration, which spanned roughly from 1400 to 1550, was the first time in history that European powers—eyeing new trade routes to the East or seeking to establish empires—began actively looking far past their own borders to gain a better understanding of the world and its many resources. The individuals who set out on behalf of the countries they represented came from a variety of backgrounds, and included master navigators such as Christopher Columbus and Ferdinand Magellan—the latter of whom was the first to circle the globe—as well as the often ruthless conquistadors of the New World such as Francisco Pizarro and Hernan Cortes. The exciting and sometimes tragic lives and journeys of these and many others as well as the battles for empire that arose are chronicled in this engaging volume.

Swashbuckling pirates raiding treasure galleons and dashing explorers traversing the unknown; this is how many perceive the Age of Exploration. The quest to explore beyond the horizon was driven by more than a need to understand the unknown. Great political and financial prospects lured those individuals and nations who dared explore. This compelling volume offers readers an in-depth account of the eccentric characters, cutting-edge technologies, and the exotic locations, real and imagined, that drove exploration of the New World as well as the Old World. Chapters engage pertinent critical discussions including early exploration of trade routes through the Muslim world; Bartolomeu Dias sailing around the southern cape of Africa; Christopher Columbus reaching the Bahamas Islands, Cuba and Hispaniola; Vasco da Gama rounding Africa and reaches the Indian port of Calicut; and many more. The edition also offers readers a timeline, maps, quotations from primary source materials, and a thorough subject index.

Europeans widened their world in a search for goods, land, raw materials, and other objects that created wealth in the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. View documents, maps, art, and the words from the people and events that marked this interaction of world cultures.

In the early twentieth century, Chinese intellectuals came to realize that Westerners surpassed them not only in knowledge of the world, but also in knowledge of China itself. A rising generation of Chinese scientists, engineers, and administrators was eager to address this state of affairs and began to retrace the footsteps of Western explorers who had crisscrossed China during the preceding century. The nine case studies assembled in this book show how a new cohort of professional Chinese explorers traveled, studied, appropriated, and reshaped national space from the 1920s to the 1950s. In some instances, the explorers drew directly from the fieldwork practices of their Western predecessors. In others, they trained compilers to collect and systematize local knowledge that could be passed up the administrative hierarchy to government and national institutions. Their projects helped to claim natural resources, prepare for infrastructural development, and create new institutionalized knowledge and public engagement with textual representations of China’s geobody. This book elucidates the ways in which knowledge production in early twentieth-century China centered on space and contributed to China’s transformation into a modern nation-state.

The story of the European discovery of North America does not end with—in fact it does not really even begin with—Christopher Columbus. This engaging title tells the story of the explorers who became the first Europeans to visit the lands that would later become the United States of America. Readers will learn about the Spanish explorers of the Southwest and the Gulf Coast, the English and Dutch explorers of the Atlantic Coast, and the French explorers of the St. Lawrence River, the Great Lakes, and the Mississippi River. They’ll discover what the goals and motivations behind each expedition were, which native people the explorers encountered, and what sorts of obstacles had to be overcome for each expedition to succeed. A fascinating account of a formational period in American history.

In 1517, the Ottoman Sultan Selim "the Grim" conquered Egypt and brought his empire for the first time in history into direct contact with the trading world of the Indian Ocean. During the decades that followed, the Ottomans became progressively more engaged in the affairs of this vast and previously unfamiliar region, eventually to the point of launching a systematic ideological, military and commercial challenge to the Portuguese Empire, their main rival for control of the lucrative trade routes of maritime Asia. The Ottoman Age of Exploration is the first comprehensive historical account of this century-long struggle for global dominance, a struggle that raged from the shores of the Mediterranean to the Straits of Malacca, and from the interior of Africa to the steppes of Central Asia. Based on extensive research in the archives of Turkey and Portugal, as well as materials written on three continents and in a half dozen languages, it presents an unprecedented picture of the global reach of the Ottoman state during the sixteenth century. It does so through a dramatic recounting of the lives of sultans and viziers, spies, corsairs, soldiers-of-fortune, and women from the imperial harem. Challenging traditional narratives of Western dominance, it argues that the Ottomans were not only active participants in the Age of Exploration, but ultimately bested the Portuguese in the game of global politics by using sea power, dynastic prestige, and commercial savoir faire to create their own imperial dominion throughout the Indian Ocean.

Children will be history detectives as they read to uncover the answers to 20 questions about the Age of Discovery. Readers will learn about who funded many of the expeditions to explore the Americas, who the most famous explorers are and what motivated these voyages. They will also learn what the impact on native people was and much more.

Did people in the Middle Ages really believe the Earth was flat? Was Columbus the first European to reach the New World? Were European explorers really treated like gods by the indigenous peoples they encountered? You probably think you know the answers to these questions, but sometimes textbooks don't tell the whole truth. This book takes a deep dive into the Age of Exploration, separating myth from reality. Grade-appropriate text is supported by full-color photographs, while fact boxes, sidebars, and timelines provide additional information and historical context.

The 16th and 17th centuries in Europe witnessed a significant paradigm shift. Rooted in medieval beliefs and preoccupations, the exploration so characteristic of the period stemmed from religious motives but came to be propelled by commerce and curiosity as Europeans increasingly engaged with the rest of the world. Interiors in both public and private spaces changed to reflect these cultural encounters and, with them, the furniture with which they were populated. Visually, furniture of this period displayed new designs, forms and materials. In its uses, it also mirrored developments in science, technology, government and social relationships as prints became more widely distributed, the Wunderkammer developed and there was religious strife and resistance to absolute monarchical rule. Drawing upon a wealth of visual and textual sources, this volume presents essays that examine key characteristics of the furniture of the period on the themes of Design and Motifs; Makers, Making, and Materials; Types and Uses; The Domestic Setting; The Public Setting; Exhibition and Display; Furniture and Architecture; Visual Representations; and Verbal Representations.