sail

This book is a reprint of the original, so many of the black-and-white images are fuzzy. Nevertheless, it is a very exciting read. Many people assume that the prospectors who participated in the California Gold Rush traveled there overland from the eastern states. But it was actually a worldwide gold rush, with many prospectors traveling by sea. Even prospectors from Maine often traveled by sea. Because the Panama Canal had not yet been built, travelers to California had to sail around Cape Horn.

How fast could you write a 300 page book? Sensationalist journalist Jay Henry Mowbray turned out this edition of Sinking of The "Titanic" (complete with illustrations and ready for sale) by May 11, 1912, less than one month after the ship struck that infamous iceberg. Speed puts this book into a curious genre—the “instant book.” The instant book narrates a contemporaneous event through a collage of sources, like government hearings or embellished descriptions, coalesced by journalists, then sold door-to-door as soon as possible. But why the need for speed?

The British National Antarctic Expedition (1901 – 1904), commonly called the Discovery Expedition, was a trailblazer of British exploration of the South Pole.  It launched the careers of leading figures of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, including Ernest Shackleton, who competed with Roald Amundsen to be the first person to reach the South Pole and died in a later Antarctic exploration in 1921.  This volume contains information discovered on that expedition, including tidal, pendulum, and magnetic observations; earthquakes and other geological movements; and aurorae.  Signif