Category: Age of Discovery
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (2011) by Charles C. Mann
In 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (2011), Charles C. Mann examines how the voyages of Columbus set in motion one of the most transformative events in human history – the creation of the Homogocene, a truly globalized, borderless world. Building on the foundation of his earlier work 1491 (2005) and Arthur Crosby’s seminal…
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Hernando De Soto: A Savage Quest in the Americas (1997) by David Ewing Duncan
Few figures from the Age of Discovery embody both ambition and brutality as starkly as Hernando de Soto (1500-1542), the conquistador who carved a bloody path through the southeast of North America in search of gold and glory. In Hernando de Soto: A Savage Quest in the Americas (1997), David Ewing Duncan strips away the…
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The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook (2024) by Hampton Sides
It’s rare for serious nonfiction about the late eighteenth century to appear on The New York Times’ list of the Ten Best Books of the Year – but that’s exactly what Hampton Sides achieved in 2024 with The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact, and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook. In…
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The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake: 1577-1580 (2003) by Samuel Bawlf
“The name Sir Francis Drake is emblazoned in history as one of England’s greatest heroes.” So writes author Samuel Bawlf in the prologue to his 2003 biography The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake: 1577–1580. Drake’s reputation on the other side of the pond has become decidedly more mixed as of late. He is one…
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Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World (2024) by Roger Crowley
Roger Crowley is a faithfully entertaining and informative popular historian. His latest effort – Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World (2024) – is not everything I hoped it would be, but it was certainly a worthwhile and enjoyable read. Spice chronicles the six-decade struggle between Spain and Portugal – and later Britain…
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The Last Days of the Incas (2006) by Kim MacQuarrie
Kim MacQuarrie’s The Last Days of the Incas (2006) is a riveting account of conquest and discovery. The book recounts the almost unimaginable story of how Francisco Pizarro subdued a native empire of some ten million people with just 168 conquistadors and a handful of horses. Equally fascinating is MacQuarrie’s chronicle of the twentieth-century rediscovery…
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1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (2005) by Charles C. Mann
When Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning history “Guns, Germs and Steel” came out in 1997 it made quite a splash. “1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus” by Charles Mann appeared less than a decade later in 2005. Diamond’s and Mann’s core arguments partly support each other – both stress that Old World diseases decimated…
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The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe (2022) by James Belich
“The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe” (2022), by New Zealand historian James Belich – co-founder of Oxford’s Centre for Global History – is a bold, sweeping, and revisionist exploration of how a medieval catastrophe transformed the fate of an entire continent. In nearly 500 pages, Belich’s argument ranges…
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The Crime of Galileo (1962) by Giorgio De Santillana
In 2015, it was reported that the Large Hadron Collider could disprove the Big Bang Theory. Imagine what that could mean to the tenured professors of physics and astronomy at MIT and CalTech who have made their professional careers espousing the Big Bang Theory?! Decades of research, countless peer-reviewed articles, dozens of major conference presentations,…
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