History

Charles Mann's history of the pre-Columbian Americas dismantles every assumption you learned in school. The hemisphere before 1492 was more populous, more urban, and more ecologically managed than anyone imagined. A book that redraws the map of human civilization.

The former editor of Surfer magazine has become the sport's greatest historian. With a wry vision and crackling wit, Matt Warshaw created the Encyclopedia of Surfing online. Nothing like it exists for any sport, anywhere. is just that—a dipping of the toe into his fine and tubular waters.

Richard Olsen's photographic history of surfing's most creative era — the shortboard revolution, the North Shore, the counterculture years when surfing was both a sport and a philosophy. The images alone justify the book.

Andrés Reséndez reconstructs the journey of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, who was shipwrecked on the Texas coast in 1528 and spent eight years walking across the continent. A survival story so improbable it reads like fiction — except every detail is documented.

Huw Lewis-Jones presents the photographs from Wally Herbert's 1968-69 crossing of the Arctic Ocean by dog sled — the last great journey of polar exploration. The images of ice, light, and endurance are extraordinary.

David Roberts tells the story of Douglas Mawson's 1912 Antarctic expedition, in which Mawson lost both his companions, most of his supplies, and the soles of his feet — then walked 100 miles back to base camp alone. It may actually be the greatest survival story in the history of exploration.

David Stuart's archaeological study of the Ancestral Puebloan civilization of the American Southwest. Stuart argues that Chaco Canyon was the center of a complex, interconnected society that collapsed when its resources ran out — a parable with obvious modern parallels.

Following the success of the Lewis and Clark expedition, President Thomas Jefferson shifted his focus from exploration to the most American of American pursuits—making money. Enter millionaire John Jacob Astor and his wildly ambitious scheme to create a global trade network, using Lewis and Clark’s newly established route as a primary artery of commerce. Astoria is the tale of this often-overlooked chapter in American history, one with no shortage of adventure, egos, and wild uncharted landscapes.

Stegner's biography of John Wesley Powell — the one-armed Civil War veteran who ran the Colorado River and tried to tell Washington that the arid West couldn't support the settlement patterns of the East. Nobody listened. Everything Powell predicted came true.

Hampton Sides follows Kit Carson across the nineteenth-century West — from the fur trade to the Mexican-American War to the brutal subjugation of the Navajo. It's a page-turner built on a tragedy, and Sides never lets the adventure obscure the violence.

Mark Scott-Nash documents the accidents, rescues, and deaths on Colorado's fourteen-thousand-foot peaks. Sobering, instructive, and a reminder that mountains this accessible can still kill you.

Peter Cherici investigates Frederick Cook's fraudulent claim to have climbed Denali in 1906. A detective story about lies, ego, and the early days of American mountaineering, when the summit was less important than the story you told about it.

Mark Spence's history of how America's national parks were created by removing the indigenous people who lived in them. Yellowstone, Yosemite, Glacier — each park was somebody's home before it was nobody's. Essential and uncomfortable.

Edward Dolnick's account of John Wesley Powell's 1869 expedition down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon — ten men, four wooden boats, no maps. A ripping adventure narrative built on meticulous historical research.

Alfred Lansing's account of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition is the gold standard of survival literature. When Shackleton's ship Endurance was crushed by pack ice in 1915, he kept 27 men alive through an Antarctic winter, an open-boat crossing of the Southern Ocean, and a traverse of South Georgia Island that had never been attempted. Lansing tells it in prose as spare and relentless as the ice itself.

Mick Conefrey's account of the expedition that put Hillary and Tenzing on the summit — told with fresh research and attention to the politics, personalities, and national rivalries that made the climb possible. The backstory is as dramatic as the summit day.

Harriet Tuckey's biography of Griffith Pugh, the physiologist whose research on oxygen, hydration, and altitude acclimatization made the 1953 Everest expedition possible. The scientist behind the summit — overlooked for decades, finally given his due.

Leni and Peter Gillman's account of the 1966 race between American and German teams to climb the Eiger Nordwand by its direct line. Two teams, two styles, one wall, and a death that changed everything.

Messner retells the story of Edward Whymper's first ascent of the Matterhorn in 1865, adding his own mountaineer's understanding to the most famous disaster in climbing history. Four men fell to their deaths on the descent. The rope may or may not have been cut.

Bernadette McDonald's history of Polish mountaineering during the Cold War. Behind the Iron Curtain, Polish climbers developed an approach to the Himalaya — winter ascents, new routes, alpine style — that was bolder than anything the West was doing. Many of them died. This book is their monument.

The disputed history of who first climbed the Grand Teton — a controversy that has simmered since the 1890s. Surveyor's claims, rival parties, and the politics of first ascents in the American West.

Searching for a Northeast polar passage from Europe to China, sixteenth century Dutch navigator William Barents and his crew of sixteen made a few attempts to sail through the Arctic, going farther than any Europeans had before. Proving that the third time is not always the charm, in the winter of 1596 they became stranded, stuck hard in the sea ice off of Nova Zembla, two hundred miles north of Siberia. Barents and his men built a cabin from their boat’s salvaged lumber—ominously, their sole carpenter perished before construction had even begun—and hunkered down for a year of desperate survival, keeping the constant threats of polar bears, frostbite, hunger, and one another at bay. Journalist Andrea Pitzer ventured to the Arctic more than once to track this story, studying Barents’ ship log and other direct accounts from his crew. Icebound is an engrossing, bone-chilling history, an open porthole into the dreams and nightmares of the great Age of Exploration.

Huw Lewis-Jones on the visual culture of Arctic exploration — the paintings, photographs, maps, and illustrations that shaped how the world imagined the north. A history of seeing ice.

Huw Lewis-Jones's visual history of Antarctic exploration — the maps, photographs, paintings, and artifacts of the heroic age and beyond.

Leave it to Hampton Sides to resurrect the almost-forgotten tale of the USS Jeannette, a harrowing story that details Captain George De Long’s ill-fated 1887 voyage to the North Pole. Wrongly convinced by several of the world’s leading scientists of an unfrozen, open-polar sea, De Long and crew sailed into directly into a disaster of their own making that included an ice-crushed vessel, heavy casualties, and permanent relegation to the “failures” chapter of maritime history.

Nathaniel Philbrick's account of the Essex, the Nantucket whaling ship rammed and sunk by a sperm whale in 1820 — the event that inspired Moby-Dick. The crew's subsequent ordeal in open boats is one of the most harrowing survival stories in maritime history.

Wade Davis's monumental history of the British Everest expeditions of the 1920s — and the World War I trauma that drove them. The climbers who went to Everest were survivors of the trenches. The mountain was where they went to feel something other than horror. The definitive book on early Everest.

David Roberts's history of climbing on the world's most dangerous mountain — every major expedition, every disaster, every attempt on the savage mountain. Roberts is the most reliable chronicler in mountaineering literature.

Andrew Kauffman and William Putnam's account of the 1939 American K2 expedition that ended with the death of Dudley Wolfe and three Sherpas. The first serious attempt on K2, and a disaster that foreshadowed the mountain's lethal reputation.

Lino Lacedelli's long-delayed account of the first ascent of K2 in 1954 — finally setting the record straight about who reached the summit and what really happened with the oxygen. Italian mountaineering politics at their most bitter.

Buddy Levy's account of the 1881 Greely expedition to the Arctic — 25 men went north, 6 came back. Starvation, mutiny, cannibalism, and one of the most controversial rescue operations in American history.

Lesley Poling-Kempes profiles the women — archaeologists, writers, artists — who explored the canyonlands of the Southwest in the early twentieth century. Women who did the work, rarely got the credit, and left records that are only now being recognized.

Terris Moore's history of the early attempts on Denali — from Cook's fraud to the first true ascent. Authoritative and well-researched.

Despite his well-document track record of pushing beyond his physical limits and emerging from life-threatening situations mostly unscathed, Theodore Roosevelt’s journey through uncharted regions of the Amazon almost broke him. What started as a comically arrogant march through the jungle ended with TR contracting malaria, gravely injuring himself, and begging his son to leave him for dead. The book offers a revealing peek into the life and psyche of one the most spirited U.S. Presidents.

A history of mountaineering in Colorado — from the survey era to modern climbing. The fourteeners and the people who first stood on them.

The history and culture of women's surfing — from the Hawaiian queens to the modern shortboard era. Photography, essays, and profiles of the women who refused to sit on the beach.

How have we gone from fearfully inching up gritstone to audacious on-sights of 5.14d, a level of climbing recently seen as humanly impossible? This is the question at the heart of The 9th Grade, an insider’s round-the-world study of the history, culture, and personalities that propelled free climbing from the early days of the Victorian era to the recent and astonishing first free ascent of the Dawn Wall. American climbing fans shouldn’t be put off by its Euro-centric approach—getting outside the echo chamber of Yankee climbing culture will turn you onto faces you should know but might not, like Patrick Edlinger, Catherine Destivelle, and Yuji Hirayama (Sharma, Hill, and Honnold are here, too). With deep-dive anecdotes and more than 350 photographs, it’s a feast for rock-hungry eyes and soul.

If you’ve studied outdoor education, you’ve learned about heuristic traps: human factors like leadership trust or summit fever that affect decision-making. Should you make a move in the storm or wait it out? And if you can only choose one, do you eat your friend’s heart, liver, or brains? Hmmm. Many think of the Donner Party as a distant textbook chapter, but historian Michael Wallis brings new life—and death—to the survival saga. As the 1846-47 winter snowdrifts pile up to twenty-two feet in the eastern Sierra, you’ll feel like you’re there, shivering under wool blankets, eating through the rations until it’s live mice on the menu, then shoe leather, then pet dogs, then…Samuel Shoemaker’s arm. Out of the eighty-seven migrants who started, only forty-six survived. Would you have done anything differently? With maps, photos, and diary excerpts, this full-bodied chronicle invites you to jump on the wagon train and consider the question for yourself.

The 1953 expedition in photographs — the images that defined Everest in the public imagination. Hillary, Tenzing, the South Col, and the summit ridge as they looked when no one had been there before.

Belmore Browne's account of three attempts on Denali in the early 1900s — including the expedition that came within 200 feet of the summit before a storm turned them back. The heartbreak of almost.

Photographs from the 1958 Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition — the crossing Shackleton died trying to complete. Hillary drove tractors to the South Pole; Fuchs crossed the continent. The images of ice and machinery are surreal.

Powell's own account of the 1869 first descent of the Colorado through the Grand Canyon — ten men, four boats, no maps, one arm. The expedition that opened the last blank space on the American map.

If sports could wish, every sport wishes it could be treated with the depth, breadth, love, and wit that Matt Warshaw has given surfing. The former editor of Surfer magazine, Warshaw is the preeminent chronicler of surfing history, and no one else is even close. But if the word “history” sounds musty, fear not: The writing crackles with vitality, the pace moves quickly, and Warshaw is mindful to place surfing’s tides within broader cultural currents, showing how each influenced the other. Surfer or not, this is a book any adventurer will love.

The 1978 American expedition that put four climbers on K2's summit — the first American success on the mountain. Ridgeway's account captures both the achievement and the toll.

The other half of the Endurance expedition — the men who were supposed to lay depots on the opposite side of Antarctica, whose ship blew out to sea, leaving them stranded. Less famous than Shackleton's crossing, equally harrowing.

The true story of the 1913 first ascent of Denali — not from the famous leader's perspective but from Harry Karstens, the frontier guide who actually got the expedition to the summit. A correction to the historical record.

The complete history of Cerro Torre — the most disputed summit claim in mountaineering. Did Maestri reach the top in 1959? Cordes investigates the evidence, the personalities, and the obsession that has consumed climbers for sixty years.

Harrer's history of climbing the Eiger Nordwand — from the first attempts in the 1930s through his own first ascent in 1938. The definitive account of the most famous wall in the Alps.

The forgotten story of the Littledales, a Victorian couple who explored Central Asia more extensively than any Europeans of their era — across the Gobi, the Pamirs, and Tibet. Adventure as marriage.

The Lewis and Clark expedition, told with narrative momentum and deep research. Ambrose follows the Corps of Discovery from St. Louis to the Pacific, through a continent that was anything but empty.

A history of Himalayan mountaineering's golden age — the 1950s and '60s, when the great peaks fell one by one. Braham was there for some of it, and his perspective is both participant and historian.