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Mountaineering has served as a metaphor for civilization triumphant. A fascinating study of the first ascents of the major Alpine peaks and Mt. Everest, The Summits of Modern Man reveals the significance of our encounters with the world’s most forbidding heights and how difficult it is to imagine nature in terms other than conquest and domination.
Epic adventures, survival and tragedy in New Zealand's own 'Wild West' frontier, the Waiatoto Valley. Deep into the heart of the Waiatoto Valley on the savage West Coast is New Zealand's own Wild West: a place which may never really be ‘won’. Its pioneers, musterers, hunters and pilots of South Westland’s Haast District have had to face isolation, rugged geography and atrocious weather that's sometimes so bad for so long that the hair begins to rot from the backs of live cattle. The folk who’ve lived there for three generations have been shaped by the land. Ranging from mountain exploration to epic two-week cattle droves through dense bush, wild rivers and over dangerous passes; from...
Charlie Douglas ranks as one of the great early European explorers of New Zealand. From 1867 to 1916 the Scottish-born Douglas lived on the west coast of the South Island, spending most of his time exploring, surveying and mapping the coast, the bush and the mountainous inland regions, in hazardous conditions, often for little or no pay. Many years later the noted mountaineer and writer John Pascoe rediscovered and preserved many of Douglas¿s writings and sketches. Pascoe¿s original book Mr Explorer Douglas, a New Zealand classic, has long been out of print, but Charlie Douglas¿s accounts of discovery continue to fascinate. Douglas recorded much of the geography and topography of South We...
Dictionaries of national biography are a long-established and significant genre of biographical and historical writing, existing in many forms across the globe. This book brings together practitioners from around the English‑speaking world to reflect on national biographical dictionary projects’ recent cultural journeys, and the challenges presented to them by such developments as the transition to a digital environment, a new alertness to the need to represent diversity, and the rise of transnationalism. Exploring their paths forward, the chapters of this book collectively make a powerful argument for the continued value and importance of large‑scale collaborative biographical dictionary research.
"History" sounds really official. Like it's all fact. Like it's definitely what happened. But that's not necessarily true. History was crafted by the people who recorded it. And sometimes, those historians were biased against, didn't see, or couldn't even imagine anyone different from themselves. That means that history has often left out the stories of LGBTQIA+ people: men who loved men, women who loved women, people who loved without regard to gender, and people who lived outside gender boundaries. Historians have even censored the lives and loves of some of the world's most famous people, from William Shakespeare and Pharaoh Hatshepsut to Cary Grant and Eleanor Roosevelt. Join author Lee Wind for this fascinating journey through primary sources—poetry, memoir, news clippings, and images of ancient artwork—to explore the hidden (and often surprising) Queer lives and loves of two dozen historical figures.
This book is a collection of essays arising out of the OCyZealandiaOCOs Great WarOCO conference organised by the New Zealand Military History Committee in November 2003. In 32 essays by distinguished military historians from New Zealand and around the world, various aspects of New ZealandOCOs involvement in World War One are discussed. Subjects include the Pioneer Maori Battalion, women who opposed the war, the early years of the RSA, Gallipoli, the infantry on the Somme, New ZealandOCOs involvement in the naval war, prostitution and the New Zealand soldier, the Home Defence, religion in the First World War, and the Armistice. New ZealandOCOs Great War is a fascinating miscellany of informed comment on and insight into the event that did most to shape New Zealand as a nation. Contributors include New ZealandOCOs own Chris Pugsley, Glyn Harper, Terry Kinloch, Monty Soutar, Megan Hutching, Vincent Orange and Bronwyn Dalley, as well as Peter Dennis, Jeffrey Grey, Jennifer Keene, Jenny McLeod, Pierre Purseigle, Peter Stanley and Gary Sheffield from overseas."
New Zealanders love exploring the outdoors, but when things go wrong, why do some people survive and some don't? Carl Walrond uses contemporary and historical accounts of mishaps and adventures to reveal interesting truths about survival. In doing so, he finds that the mind and the tricks it plays can be just as challenging as the wilderness itself.
There is a tradition of “participant history” among historians of the Pacific Islands, unafraid to show their hands on issues of public importance and risking controversy to make their voices heard. This book explores the theme of the participant historian by delving into the lives of J.C. Beaglehole, J.W. Davidson, Richard Gilson, Harry Maude and Brij V. Lal. They lived at the interface of scholarship and practical engagement in such capacities as constitutional advisers, defenders of civil liberties, or upholders of the principles of academic freedom. As well as writing history, they “made” history, and their excursions beyond the ivory tower informed their scholarship. Doug Munro’s sympathetic engagement with these five historians is likewise informed by his own long-term involvement with the sub-discipline of Pacific History.