Travel through time learning about great explorers.

This is a fun, informative, chronological guide to the history of world explorers. The book begins with the ancient explorers, such as Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, through to Magellan and Drake, and comes right up to the present day with Ranulph Fiennes. Each page puts an explorer in the context of his or her own time, with details of other important contemporary events and figures, the new inventions which were the springboards for their adventures, and the world regions which were capturing people's imagination at that time. Gillian Clements includes the reasons behind exploration, and how technology and exploration have gone hand-in-hand throughout history. She combines entertaining fact and historical information with eye-catching illustration.

This abridgement of the late Samuel Eliot Morison's magnum opus, The European Discovery of America, which the Journal of Southern History called "an epic work of true grandeur," and the Virginia Quarterly Review considered "a great book by a great historian," preserves the originality, scholarship, and vivid descriptions of the original volumes.

"Travel back in time and meet the explorers! Who was Leif Erikson? What did Christopher Columbus discover? When was the moon landing? Find the answers to these questions and more with interactive flaps that bring history to life. Don't just read about the explorers ... meet them!"--Page 4 of cover

Venture into the unknown with Christopher Columbus, Marco Polo, the Vikings, and other adventurers to discover the fun facts about exploration with word searches, mazes, coloring pages, and other puzzles.

From early mountain men searching for routes through the Rockies to West Point soldier-engineers conducting topographical expeditions, the exploration of the American West mirrored the development of a fledgling nation. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning Exploration and Empire, William H. Goetzmann analyzes the special role the explorer played in shaping the vast region once called "the Great American Desert." According to Goetzmann, the exploration of the West was not a haphazard series of discoveries, but a planned - even programmed - activity in which explorers, often armed with instructions from the federal government, gathered information that would support national goals for the new lands. As national needs and the frontier's image changed, the West itself was rediscovered by successive generations of explorers, a process that in turn helped shape its culture. Nineteenth-century western exploration, Goetzmann writes, can be divided into three stages. The first, beginning with the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1804, was marked by the need to collect practical information, such as the locations of the best transportation routes through the wilderness. Then came the era of settlement and investment - the drive to fulfill the Manifest Destiny of a nation beginning to realize what immense riches lay beyond the Mississippi. The final stage involved a search for knowledge of a different kind, as botanists and paleontologists, ethnographers and engineers hunted intensively for scientific information in the "frontier laboratory." This last phase also saw a rethinking of the West's place in the national scheme; it was a time of nascent conservation movements and public policy discussions aboutthe region's future. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, Goetzmann offers a masterful overview of the opening of the West, as well as a fascinating study of the nature of exploration and its consequences for civilization.

An introduction to the great inventors of the world. Filled with facts both serious and comic, the book describes the lives and work of more than 50 major inventors, with illustrated references to hundreds more. A timeline provides a glimpse into the lives and times of each inventor.

From Pytheas the Greek, who sailed to the Arctic Circle without a compass, to Neil Armstrong landing on the moon, here are 14 extraordinary journeys by land, sea and air - each remarkable for the way it was made, for the technology behind it, and for the inspiration it gave to future generations. Storytelling, fold-out cross sections, detailed maps and technical drawings enable readers to experience the excitement of exploration.

realistic illustrations depict Vikings in Vinland, Columbus's ship Niña, Ponce de León in Florida, others. Captions.