In 1799, Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland set out to determine whether the Orinoco River connected with the Amazon. But what started as a trip to investigate a relatively minor geographical controversy became the basis of a five-year exploration throughout South America, Mexico, and Cuba. The discoveries amassed by Humboldt and Bonpland were staggering, and much of today’s knowledge of tropical zoology, botany, geography, and geology can be traced back to Humboldt’s numerous records of these expeditions. One of these accounts, Views of the Cordilleras and Monuments of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, firmly established Alexander von Humboldt as the founder of Mesoamerican studies. In Views of the Cordilleras—first published in French between 1810 and 1813—Humboldt weaves together magnificently engraved drawings and detailed texts to achieve multifaceted views of cultures and landscapes across the Americas. In doing so, he offers an alternative perspective on the New World, combating presumptions of its belatedness and inferiority by arguing that the “old” and the “new” world are of the same geological age. This critical edition of Views of the Cordilleras—the second volume in the Alexander von Humboldt in English series—contains a new, unabridged English translation of Humboldt’s French text, as well as annotations, a bibliography, and all sixty-nine plates from the original edition, many of them in color.

Gender, Science, and Authority in Women’s Travel Writing: Literary Perspectives on the Discourse of Natural History analyzes the interrelations among authority, gender and the scientific discipline of natural history in the works of transatlantic women travelers from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Michelle Medeiros sheds new light on our understanding of the literary perspectives of the discourse of natural history and how these viewpoints had a surprising impact in areas that went beyond scientific fields. This book advances the study of travel writing and gender in new directions by bringing together Latin American, European, and American women travelers who actively engaged in natural history discussions in their writings. By demonstrating how these women were only able to participate in intellectual enterprises by embarking on transatlantic voyages, this book discloses how the work produced by these travelers challenged and reshaped dominant discourses, bringing a new point of view to nineteenth and twentieth-centuries studies in Latin American history, literature, cultural studies, and history of science. Moreover, this book analyzes to what extent the approaches employed by female travel writers who wanted to engage in the production of knowledge has evolved in that time period, and to what degree such changes could be considered positive and more productive.

Volume 1 of this critical edition includes a note on the text from the Humboldt in English team, an introduction by editors Vera M. Kutzinski and Ottmar Ette, a preface to the first edition by Alexander von Humboldt, and the translation of Volumes 1 and 2 of Humboldt’s Essai politique sur le royaume de de Nouvelle Espagne from 1825 to 1827. Alexander von Humboldt was the most celebrated modern chronicler of North and South America and the Caribbean, and this translation of his essay on New Spain—the first modern regional economic and political geography—covers his travels across today’s Mexico in 1803–1804. The work canvases natural-scientific and cultural-scientific objects alike, combining the results of fieldwork with archival research and expert testimony. To show how people, plants, animals, goods, and ideas moved across the globe, Humboldt wrote in a variety of styles, bending and reshaping familiar writerly conventions to keep readers attentive to new inputs. Above all, he wanted his readers to be open-minded when confronted with cultural and other differences in the Americas. Fueled by his comparative global perspective on politics, economics, and science, he used his writing to support Latin American independence and condemn slavery and other forms of colonial exploitation. It is these voluminous and innovative writings on the New World that made Humboldt the undisputed father of modern geography, early American studies, transatlantic cultural history, and environmental studies. This two-volume critical edition—the third installment in the Alexander von Humboldt in English series—is based on the full text, including all footnotes, tables, and maps, of the second, revised French edition of Essai politique sur le royaume de de Nouvelle Espagne from 1825 to 1827, which has never been translated into English before. Extensive annotations and full-color atlases are available on the series website.

This book offers a new and insightful look at the interconnections between the United States, Brazil and Mexico during the nineteenth century. Gerassi-Navarro brings together U.S. and Latin American Studies with her analysis of the travel narratives of Frances Calderón de la Barca and Elizabeth Cary Agassiz. Inspired by the writings of Alexander von Humboldt these women, in their travels, expand his views on the tropics to include a social dimension to their observations on nature, culture, race, and progress in Brazil and Mexico. Highlighting the role of women as a new kind of observer as well as the complexity of connections between the United States and Latin America, Gerassi-Navarro interweaves science, politics, and aesthetics in new transnational frameworks.

The Age of the Discovery of the Americas was concurrent with the Age of Discovery in science. In The Alchemy of Conquest, Ralph Bauer explores the historical relationship between the two, focusing on the connections between religion and science in the Spanish, English, and French literatures about the Americas during the early modern period. As sailors, conquerors, travelers, and missionaries were exploring "new worlds," and claiming ownership of them, early modern men of science redefined what it means to "discover" something. Bauer explores the role that the verbal, conceptual, and visual language of alchemy played in the literature of the discovery of the Americas and in the rise of an early modern paradigm of discovery in both science and international law. The book traces the intellectual and spiritual legacies of late medieval alchemists such as Roger Bacon, Arnald of Villanova, and Ramon Llull in the early modern literature of the conquest of America in texts written by authors such as Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, José de Acosta, Nicolás Monardes, Walter Raleigh, Thomas Harriot, Francis Bacon, and Alexander von Humboldt.

Pratt intriguingly explores European travel and exploration writing. In a study of genre and as a critique of ideology, Imperial Eyes examines how travel books by Europeans create the domestic subject of European imperialism.

In the past fifty years, the study of indigenous and pre-Columbian art has evolved from a groundbreaking area of inquiry in the mid-1960s to an established field of research. This period also spans the career of art historian Esther Pasztory. Few scholars have made such a broad and lasting impact as Pasztory, both in terms of our understanding of specific facets of ancient American art as well as in our appreciation of the evolving analytical tendencies related to the broader field of study as it developed and matured. The essays collected in this volume reflect scholarly rigor and new perspectives on ancient American art and are contributed by many of Pasztory’s former students and colleagues. A testament to the sheer breadth of Pasztory's accomplishments, Visual Culture of the Ancient Americas covers a wide range of topics, from Aztec picture-writing to nineteenth-century European scientific illustration of Andean sites in Peru. The essays, written by both established and rising scholars from across the field, focus on three areas: the ancient Andes, including its representation by European explorers and scholars of the nineteenth century; Classic period Mesoamerica and its uses within the cultural heritage debate of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; and Postclassic Mesoamerica, particularly the deeper and heretofore often hidden meanings of its cultural production. Figures, maps, and color plates demonstrate the vibrancy and continued allure of indigenous artworks from the ancient Americas. “Pre-Columbian art can give more,” Pasztory declares, and the scholars featured here make a compelling case for its incorporation into art theory as a whole. The result is a collection of essays that celebrates Pasztory’s central role in the development of the field of Ancient American visual studies, even as it looks toward the future of the discipline.

During the nineteenth century, gridding, graphing, and surveying proliferated as never before as nations and empires expanded into hitherto "unknown" territories. Though nominally geared toward justifying territorial claims and collecting scientific data, expeditions also produced vast troves of visual and artistic material. This book considers the explosion of expeditionary mapping and its links to visual culture across the Americas, arguing that acts of measurement are also aesthetic acts. Such visual interventions intersect with new technologies, with sociopolitical power and conflict, and with shifting public tastes and consumption practices. Several key questions shape this examination: What kinds of nineteenth-century visual practices and technologies of seeing do these materials engage? How does scientific knowledge get translated into the visual and disseminated to the public? What are the commonalities and distinctions in mapping strategies between North and South America? How does the constitution of expeditionary lines reorder space and the natural landscape itself? The volume represents the first transnational and hemispheric analysis of nineteenth-century cartographic aesthetics, and features the multi-disciplinary perspective of historians, geographers, and art historians.

The Invention of Humboldt is a game-changing volume of essays by leading scholars of the Hispanic world that explodes many myths about Alexander von Humboldt and his world. Rather than ‘follow in Humboldt’s footsteps,’ this book outlines the new critical horizon of post-Humboldtian Humboldt studies: the archaeology of all that lies buried under the Baron’s epistemological footprint. Contrary to the popular image of Humboldt as a solitary ‘adventurer’ and ‘hero of science’ surrounded by New World nature, The Invention of Humboldt demonstrates that the Baron’s opus and practice was largely derivative of the knowledge communities and archives of the Hispanic world. Although Humboldtian writing has invented a powerful cult that has served to erase the sources of his knowledge and practice, in truth Humboldt did not ‘invent nature,’ nor did he pioneer global science: he was the beneficiary of Iberian natural science and globalization. Nor was Humboldt a pioneering, ‘postcolonial’ cultural relativist. Instead, his anthropological views of the Americas were Orientalist and historicist and, in most ways, were less enlightened than those of his Creole contemporaries. This book will reshape the landscape of Humboldt scholarship. It is essential reading for all those interested in Alexander von Humboldt, the Hispanic American enlightenment, and the global history of science and knowledge.

This book examines geographical names, place-names, and toponymy from philosophical and cultural evolutionary perspectives. Geographical name-tracking-networks (Geo-NTNs) are posited as tools for tracking names through time and across space, and for making sense of how names evolve both temporally and spatially. Examples from North and South American indigenous groups, the Canadian arctic, Wales, England, and the Middle East are brought into a theoretical framework for making sense of aspects of place-naming practices, beliefs, and systems. New geographical tools such as geographic information systems (GIS) and global positioning systems (GPS) are demonstrated to be important in the production and maintenance of robust networks for keeping names and their associated meanings viable in a rapidly changing world where place-naming is being taken up increasingly in social media and other new mapping platforms. The Geography of Names makes the case that geographical names are transmitted memetically (i.e. as cultural units, or memes) through what Saul Kripke called communication chains. Combining insights from Kripke with views of later Wittgenstein on language and names as being inherently spatial, the present work advances theories of both these thinkers into an explicitly geographical inquiry that advances philosophical and practical aspects of naming, language, and mapping.