Here are 100 books that European Approaches to North America, 1450-1640 fans have personally recommended if you like
European Approaches to North America, 1450-1640.
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I am an experienced entrepreneur and venture capitalist and a voracious reader. My reading, particularly of non-business books, is motivated not just by a natural curiosity, but is also driven by a continuous search for metaphors and lessons from outside the traditional business genre that I can apply to situations and decisions in the business arena. My appreciation of the crossover benefit of non-business narratives to business contexts has motivated me to write my own Business Fiction works to “enlighten and entertain.”
If you read this book about the early cross-Atlantic explorers and substitute today’s technology entrepreneurs, the metaphors fit cleanly.
They sold exuberant, sometimes-fulfilled, and often-failed stories to profit-seeking backers, took inordinate risks, and results were often winner-take-all.
As Mark Twain, another famous explorer, once said, “History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.”
The late Samuel Eliot Morison, a former U.S. Navy admiral, was also one of America's premier historians. Combining a first-hand knowledge of the sea and transatlantic travel with a brilliantly readable narrative style, he produced what has become nothing less than the definitive account of the great age of European exploration. In his riveting and richly illustrated saga, Morison offers a comprehensive account of all the known voyages by Europeans to the New World from 500 A.D. to the seventeenth century. Together, the two volumes of The European Discovery of America tell the compelling stories of the many intrepid explorers…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
Of all the books I have ever written, this one most allowed me to make it possible to see how the full story adds to the history we know – the vital importance of context. For example, that Cabot set sail just as Bristol was defending itself against the approaching rebel army led by Perkin Warbeck. Or that the Pope at the time, ruling over the church and the world, was the Borgia Pope Alexander VI. I loved researching it and I still feel part of it. My father lives in Spain, which helped enormously.
Every European nation has its own conspiracy theory about discovering America. This is the best and most readable evocation of the British conspiracy theory – that, far from being called after Amerigo Vespucci, the new world was called after John Cabot’s backer Richard Ameryk – who, bizarrely, had the stars and stripes as his family crest.
Casts a new light on the conventional story of America's discovery by showing how a chain of clues point towards Bristol mariners reaching America before Columbus. The author has also written "The Turin Shroud" and other bestselling investigative works.
Of all the books I have ever written, this one most allowed me to make it possible to see how the full story adds to the history we know – the vital importance of context. For example, that Cabot set sail just as Bristol was defending itself against the approaching rebel army led by Perkin Warbeck. Or that the Pope at the time, ruling over the church and the world, was the Borgia Pope Alexander VI. I loved researching it and I still feel part of it. My father lives in Spain, which helped enormously.
In 1507, the cartographer Martin Waldseemuller published a world map with a new continent on it which he called ‘America', after the explorer and navigator Amerigo Vespucci. The map was a huge success and when Mercator's 1538 world map extended the name to the northern hemisphere of the continent, the new name was secure, though Waldseemuller himself soon realised he had picked the wrong man. This is the story of how one side of the world came to be named not after its discoverer Christopher Columbus, but after his friend and rival. A fabulous historical detective story.
In Amerigo, the award-winning scholar Felipe Fernández-Armesto answers the question “What’s in a name?” by delivering a rousing flesh-and-blood narrative of the life and times of Amerigo Vespucci. Here we meet Amerigo as he really was: a rogue and raconteur who counted Christopher Columbus among his friends and rivals; an amateur sorcerer who attained fame and honor through a series of disastrous failures and equally grand self-reinventions. Filled with well-informed insights and amazing anecdotes, this magisterial and compulsively readable account sweeps readers from Medicean Florence to the Sevillian court of Ferdinand and Isabella, then across the Atlantic of Columbus to…
"She plunged her blade into his chest, feeling it grind along his ribs..."
Outcast swordfighter, Kyer Halidan, was abandoned in a cornfield at age three. Now, twenty years on, she’s searching for answers: Who left her there? And why?
Kyer doesn’t suffer fools, and when she kills a man in…
Of all the books I have ever written, this one most allowed me to make it possible to see how the full story adds to the history we know – the vital importance of context. For example, that Cabot set sail just as Bristol was defending itself against the approaching rebel army led by Perkin Warbeck. Or that the Pope at the time, ruling over the church and the world, was the Borgia Pope Alexander VI. I loved researching it and I still feel part of it. My father lives in Spain, which helped enormously.
On 24 June 1497, John Cabot landed somewhere on the eastern coast of what is now Canada, yet even today, 500 years later, nobody knows quite where. Once this was an issue that lay behind diplomatic negotiations over who controlled the continent – more recently, they have played a role in different stages of Canadian nationalism. This book is a fascinating description of the various theories and their implications – right up to today.
On 24 June 1497 John Cabot landed somewhere on the eastern seaboard of what is now Canada, yet even today, five hundred years later, no one knows precisely where. Once an issue in diplomatic negotiations over title to a continent, Cabot's landfall has also been the subject, especially in centennial years, of competing attempts to appropriate the meaning of the event.Beginning with the historical context of Cabot's journey, Pope traces the various landfall theories which have placed his landing in locations from the Strait of Belle Isle to Cape Breton. The very uncertainty of our knowledge, he argues, has allowed…
I am a writer of historical fiction. When I was in my teens, my family embarked on a project to trace our ancestry and identify our living relatives. Through church records in Sweden and Norway, we found that Harald Fairhair (Harfagr), the first king of Norway is one of our ancestors. Those explorations gave me the seeds of my first novel of Viking-Age Norway, The Half-Drowned King, and the subsequent books in the trilogy.
One of the best ways to envision a historical period is to see its artifacts. Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga is a companion to a Smithsonian exhibit of the same name and contains a rich trove of images and descriptions of viking physical culture, along with essays about the archeology of their discovery, and how they were used in the exploration of the North Atlantic, and the eventual journey to the New World.
Replete with color photographs, drawings, and maps of Viking sites, artifacts, and landscapes, this book celebrates and explores the Viking saga from the combined perspectives of history, archaeology, oral tradition, literature, and natural science. The book's contributors chart the spread of marauders and traders in Europe as well as the expansion of farmers and explorers throughout the North Atlantic and into the New World. They show that Norse contacts with Native American groups were more extensive than has previously been believed, but that the outnumbered Europeans never established more than temporary settlements in North America.
I am a historian fascinated with maps and geography, I have produced historical atlases on the world, Britain, war, cities, naval history, fortifications, and World War Two, as well as books on geopolitics and maps. I am an Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Exeter and a Senior Fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute and of Policy Exchange.
An excellent example of the British Library’s History … in 100 Maps series, this book, by an expert, on the American geopolitical imagination, combines a first-rate text with instructive maps. Handsomely produced, it is good value.
Throughout its history, America has been defined through maps. Whether made for military strategy or urban reform, to encourage settlement or to investigate disease, maps invest information with meaning by translating it into visual form. They capture what people knew, what they thought they knew, what they hoped for, and what they feared. As such they offer unrivaled windows onto the past.
In this book Susan Schulten uses maps to explore five centuries of American history, from the voyages of European discovery to the digital age. With stunning visual clarity, A History of America in 100 Maps showcases the…
A mysterious stranger traps teen siblings in a precarious game where each must overcome their embittered past for the other to survive.
This suspenseful, yet winsome novel explores the power of family and forgiveness. But take heed. The truth can cut like shards of glass, especially for those who’d rather…
As a historian of feminism, I have been trying for decades to understand how gender, race, class, and nationality are knotted together in ways that are not always obvious or trackable in our personal experience. The books I recommend here have served as brilliant lanterns for me—not simply pointing out the flawed history of western feminism but instead explaining the complicated effects of whiteness and imperialism in the development of today’s feminist identities, ideologies, and consciousness. For me, these histories offer intersectional keys decoding the map of the world we’ve been dropped into and offering a path leading to a more justly feminist future….I hope they do for you too!
This slim but explosively dramatic book makes everything you were ever told about the history of polar exploration seem like nothing more than random trivia. Lisa Bloom takes those stories you think you know and offers up the hidden realities of them in ways that explain the race, gender, and sexual politics of not just polar exploration but the idea of “modernity” itself as a crutch for justifying the “penetration” of people and spaces existing at the “ends of the earth.”
In this work, the author focuses on the conquest of the North Pole as she reveals how popular print and visual media, including photography and video, defined and shaped American national ideologies from the early 20th century to the present. She goes on to analyze gendered and racial constructions and idioms of American identity by examining the powerful and continuing cultural investment in the legacy of the so-called discovery of the North Pole in 1909, and the ongoing celebration of white explorers, such as Robert Peary, as "heroes". Her analysis of the polar expedition opens up contemporary questions in cultural…
Journeys of discovery are my favorite kind of story and my favorite vehicle for (mental) travel. From Gilgamesh to last week’s bestseller, they embody how we live and learn: we go somewhere, and something happens. We come home changed and tell the tale. The tales I love most take me where the learning is richest, perhaps to distant, exotic places—like Darwin’s Galapagos—perhaps deep into the interior of a completely original mind—like Henry Thoreau’s. I cannot live without such books. Amid the heartbreak of war, greed, disease, and all the rest, they remind me in a most essential way of humanity’s redemptive capacity for understanding and wonder.
I can’t stop going back to this book, which I have read in various translations under various titles. No book I know better documents the transformation of a human being. Abandoned, shipwrecked, and enslaved, Cabeza de Baca, a conquistador in the model of Cortez, begins a barefoot trek across the American Southwest as one kind of man and ends it as the opposite of the man who started out.
His memoir has the shape and structure of an adventure novel, and, truly, this narrative is where American literature begins. He leaves me in awe of his will to survive, his capacity for adaptation, and his compassion and love for the native world that he had come to the continent’s shores to subjugate.
This enthralling story of survival is the first major narrative of the exploration of North America by Europeans (1528-36). The author of "Castaways (Naufragios)", Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, was a fortune-seeking nobleman and the treasurer of an expedition to claim for Spain a vast area that includes today's Florida, Louisiana, and Texas. A shipwreck forced him and a handful of men to make the long westward journey on foot to meet up with Hernan Cortes. In order to survive, Cabeza de Vaca joined native people along the way, learning their languages and practices and serving them as a slave…
I am a historical fiction writer living in a landlocked village in the Chilterns, UK. I became obsessed with long sea voyages while researching my debut novel, On Wilder Seas, which is inspired by the true story of Maria, the only woman aboard the Golden Hind during Francis Drake’s circumnavigation voyage in 1577-1580. I immersed myself in the literature of the sea, in early modern sailors’ accounts of their terrifying voyages, in their wills and diaries, in maps and sea-logs. A ship is the perfect setting for a novel: the confined space, the impossibility of escape, the ever-present danger – and the hostile, unforgiving sea is the ultimate antagonist.
The ‘sea-fiction’ literary canon is very male-focused. But in the real world, women put to sea too, and were sometimes at the forefront of exploration. Maria, the heroine of my novel, was the first non-native woman to set foot on the northwest coast of America, when she arrived with Francis Drake during his circumnavigation voyage in the summer of 1579. Five hundred years earlier, on the other side of the continent, another female pioneer, Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir, explored and settled the Newfoundland coast.
Gudrid, the ‘Far Travelled’ of Icelandic sagas, is brought to life in this beautifully written and vividly imagined novel. Rich in historical detail and steeped in the mythology and worldview of the Vikings, it’s a thoroughly convincing portrait of an extraordinary woman at the edge of the known world.
A haunting, compelling historical novel, The Sea Road is a daring re-telling of the 11th-century Viking exploration of the North Atlantic from the viewpoint of one extraordinary woman. Gudrid lives at the remote edge of the known world, in a starkly beautiful landscape where the sea is the only connection to the shores beyond. It is a world where the old Norse gods are still invoked, even as Christianity gains favour, where the spirits of the dead roam the vast northern ice-fields, tormenting the living, and Viking explorers plunder foreign shores.
Taking the accidental discovery of North America as its…
In Renaissance Venice, the deadliest weapon isn’t a blade… it’s a secret.
Angelo Mascari is a master swordsman whose greatest battle isn’t fought for crown or country, but for love. When treachery strikes and the Republic turns against him, Angelo is forced into a desperate flight that leads him across…
Like everybody else, I discovered Columbus as a child; I fully accepted the heroic figure that was presented to me in the 1970s. But by the time I received a PhD in Latin American History—in the very same year as the Quincentennial of Columbus’s First Voyage—I had learned how much more complicated was his life and the evolution of his posthumous reputation. For decades, as I wrote books and taught college classes on various topics adjacent to that of Columbus, I sought to make sense of the complicated cluster of stories that comprise what I call “Columbiana.” I am still enjoying that journey!
I think Felipe Fernández-Armesto is one of the most original and brilliant historians writing in English today, and I love how his erudite, yet witty and engaging writing style is on full display here. He has written several Columbus books, but this remains the most readable.
And—as a historian of Columbus myself—I am impressed by and grateful for Fernández-Armesto’s unwavering commitment to evidence and its rational appraisal. He is not trying to sell some treasured belief or solve some imagined mystery but simply telling a story as objectively but engagingly as possible.
At times, there is a hint of eccentricity to how he writes, but that only adds to the unique pleasure of this book.
This introductory study assesses Columbus' life and achievements in the context of the great era of European overseas exploration. A Genoese cartographer, Columbus was convinced that the existence of a Western route to Asia would prove that the world was round. The book traces his attempts to persuade Ferdinand and Isabella to fund his expedition, the events of his momentous 1492 voyage and the reaction to his discovery of the New World. It also considers his disappointing subsequent career as explorer and colonial administrator, his religious obsessions and his death as a forgotten pauper.
