Expeditions & Discoveries

For millennia the location of the Nile River’s headwaters was shrouded in mystery. In the 19th century, there was  a frenzy of interest in ancient Egypt. At the same time, European powers sent off waves of explorations intended to map the unknown corners of the globe....

The River of Doubt brings alive extraordinary events in a powerful nonfiction narrative thriller that happens to feature one of the most famous Americans who ever lived....

Meriwether Lewis and his partner, William Clark, endured incredible hardships and witnessed astounding sights on their 1803 cross-country trip to unexplored West....

The Viking Age - from 750 to 1050 saw an unprecedented expansion of the Scandinavian peoples into the wider world. As traders and raiders, explorers and colonists, they ranged from eastern North America to the Asian steppe....

In 1528, a mission set out from Spain to colonize Florida. But the expedition went horribly wrong. Of the 300 men who had embarked on the journey, only four survived....

The true survival story of an early polar expedition that went terribly awry—with the ship frozen in ice and the crew trapped inside for the entire sunless, Antarctic winter....

In their own words, recorded in the famous journals of Lewis and Clark, the members of the Corps of Discovery tell their story with an immediacy and power missing from secondhand accounts....

The Lost City of Z is a blockbuster adventure narrative about what lies beneath the impenetrable jungle canopy of the Amazon....

In 1810, John Jacob Astor sent out two advance parties to settle the wild, unclaimed western coast of North America....

New York Times bestselling author Hampton Sides returns with a white-knuckle tale of polar exploration and survival in the Gilded Age....

More than 200 million years ago, geological forces split apart the continents. Isolated from each other, the two halves of the world developed totally different suites of plants and animals....

This gripping story of courage and achievement is the account of Robert Falcon Scott's last fateful expedition to the Antarctic, as told by surviving expedition member Apsley Cherry-Garrard....

A thrilling, intellectual detective story that looks deep into the past to uncover who first settled the islands of the remote Pacific, where they came from, how they got there, and how we know....

A thrilling new adventure of danger and deep-sea diving, historic mystery and suspense, by the author of the New York Times best seller Shadow Divers....

Everywhere hailed as a masterpiece of historical adventure, this enthralling narrative recounts the experiences of 12 American sailors who were shipwrecked off the coast of Africa in 1815....

The story begins in 1629, when the pride of the Dutch East India Company, the Batavia, is on its maiden voyage en route from Amsterdam to the Dutch East Indies, laden down with the greatest treasure to leave Holland....

In February 1959, a group of nine experienced hikers in the Russian Ural Mountains died mysteriously on an elevation known as Dead Mountain....

On May 24, 1869 a one-armed Civil War veteran, John Wesley Powell, and a ragtag band of nine mountain men embarked on the last great quest in the American West. The Grand Canyon, not explored before, was as mysterious as Atlantis - and as perilous....

Pulitzer Prize winner Wallace Stegner recounts the remarkable career of Major John Wesley Powell....

Without calculus, we wouldn't have cell phones, TV, GPS, or ultrasound. We wouldn't have unraveled DNA or discovered Neptune or figured out how to put 5,000 songs in your pocket....   

The 18th-century story of the world's largest, longest, and best-financed scientific expedition of all time, triumphantly successful, gruesomely tragic, and never before fully told....

In 1804, John Colter set out with Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on the first US expedition to traverse the North American continent. During the 28-month ordeal, Colter served as a hunter and scout, and honed his survival skills on the western frontier....

Within a short time span, a tiny country whose population did not exceed a million created a maritime empire that stretched from Brazil to Nagasaki....

The riveting inside story of three heroic astronauts who took on the challenge of mankind's historic first mission to the moon, from the best-selling author of Shadow Divers....

Henry Morgan challenged the greatest empire on earth with a ragtag bunch of renegades and brought it to its knees. This is the real story of the pirates of the Caribbean....

The combination of mining, maritime, and lumbering history created a culture in the U.P. that is unique to the Midwest. Discover true stories of the rough and dangerous times of the Upper Peninsula frontier that are as enjoyable as they are educational. You'll find no conventional romantic or whitewashed history here. Instead, you will be astonished by the true hardships and facets of trying to settle a frontier sandwiched between the three Great Lakes. These minutes are populated by Native Americans and European immigrants, looking for their personal promised land.

Historian William Sheehan and astronomer and planetary scientist Jim Bell combine their talents to tell a unique story of what we've learned by studying Mars through evolving technologies. What the eye sees as a mysterious red dot wandering through the sky becomes a blurry mirage of apparent seas, continents, and canals as viewed through Earth-based telescopes. 

A mysterious scientist by the name of David Anderson made an eventful trip to Romania in 1999. Dr. Anderson, who is credited by the U.S. government as having developed advanced time-warp field technology, established diplomatic connections on this trip to Romania where he also set up an advanced research facility dedicated to studying the mathematics of time travel. 

Contained in this book are short summaries of the stories of the great visionaries and great minds of humanity that changed the game and changed the world. Rather than information overload like regular history textbooks (focused on dates, facts, and place names), this book series tells the unique stories of the characters. The adversities and setbacks they faced. The moments of inspiration. Rare characteristics and not-so-well-known facts. See these stories from a different angle in a new, exciting way, with their most inspirational quotes.

Don't think that because it is such a small country with only about 17 million people, it should be neglected. The Netherlands has a long history, with a high influence on our cultures, trading routes, the stock market, business, and art. The Dutch were all over the world. They "owned" and colonized a big portion of what was then the known world. They were among the first settlers, had the biggest haven, and biggest fleet for some time. The Dutch East-Indian Trading Company, or VOC, is probably the biggest or at least one of the biggest companies that has ever existed.