Identifying gaps in knowledge is the first duty of any historian who sets out to understand the past. It is impossible fully to understand our forebears without some idea of what they did not know: the history of ignorance is an indispensable part of history itself. Here Alain Corbin focuses on our planet, exploring its… Read More Alain Corbin (2022): Terra Incognita: A History of Ignorance in the 18th and 19th Centuries. Polity Press: Cambridge.

The book analyses from a comparative perspective the exploration of territories, the histories of their inhabitants, and local natural environments during the long eighteenth century. The eleven chapters look at European science at home and abroad as well as at global scientific practices and the involvement of a great variety of local actors in the… Read More Simona Boscani Leoni, Sarah Baumgartner, Meike Knittel (eds.) (2022): Connecting territories: exploring people and nature, 1700-1850. Brill: Boston, Leiden.

Geographies of Nationhood examines the meteoric rise of ethnographic mapmaking in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a form of visual and material culture that gave expression to territorialised visions of nationhood. In the Russian Empire’s Baltic provinces, the development of ethnographic cartography, as part of the broader field of statistical data visualisation, progressively… Read More Catherine Gibson (2022): Geographies of Nationhood. Cartography, Science, and Society in the Russian Imperial Baltic (= Oxford Studies in Modern European History). Oxford University Press: Oxford

In the mid-nineteenth century, thirty-six expeditions set out for the Northwest Passage in search of Sir John Franklin’s missing expedition. The array of visual and textual material produced on these voyages was to have a profound impact on the idea of the Arctic in the Victorian imaginary. Eavan O’Dochartaigh closely examines neglected archival sources to… Read More Eavan O’Dochartaigh (2022): Visual Culture and Arctic Voyages Personal and Public Art and Literature of the Franklin Search Expeditions. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

In this study of the making of Arctic science, Nanna Katrine Lüders Kaalund’s originality lies in her attention to Greenland as well as the Canadian archipelago and the shores of the Arctic Ocean; the role of narratives in shaping knowledge; and the role of the Inuit, who have too often been ignored by historians. She… Read More Nanna Katrine Lüders Kaalund (2021): Explorations in the Icy North. How Travel Narratives Shaped Arctic Science in the Nineteenth Century. University of Pittsburgh Press: Pittsburgh.