Jacques Balmat

Author : Peter H. Hansen
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674074556
Total Pages : 371 pages
Book Rating : 4.52/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Summits of Modern Man written by Peter H. Hansen and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-14 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of mountaineering has long served as a metaphor for civilization triumphant. Once upon a time, the Alps were an inaccessible habitat of specters and dragons, until heroic men—pioneers of enlightenment—scaled their summits, classified their strata and flora, and banished the phantoms forever. A fascinating interdisciplinary study of the first ascents of the major Alpine peaks and Mount Everest, The Summits of Modern Man surveys the far-ranging significance of our encounters with the world’s most alluring and forbidding heights. Our obsession with “who got to the top first” may have begun in 1786, the year Jacques Balmat and Michel-Gabriel Paccard climbed Mont Blanc and inaugurated an era in which Romantic notions of the sublime spurred climbers’ aspirations. In the following decades, climbing lost its revolutionary cachet as it became associated instead with bourgeois outdoor leisure. Still, the mythic stories of mountaineers, threaded through with themes of imperialism, masculinity, and ascendant Western science and culture, seized the imagination of artists and historians well into the twentieth century, providing grist for stage shows, poetry, films, and landscape paintings. Today, we live on the threshold of a hot planet, where melting glaciers and rising sea levels create ambivalence about the conquest of nature. Long after Hillary and Tenzing’s ascent of Everest, though, the image of modern man supreme on the mountaintop retains its currency. Peter Hansen’s exploration of these persistent images indicates how difficult it is to imagine our relationship with nature in terms other than domination.

Author : T. Louis Oxley
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 48 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Jacques Balmat written by T. Louis Oxley and published by . This book was released on 1881 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Alan Weber
Publisher : Taylor Trade Publications
ISBN 13 : 1461661706
Total Pages : 496 pages
Book Rating : 4.02/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Because It's There written by Alan Weber and published by Taylor Trade Publications. This book was released on 2003-04-09 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mountains have long inspired the wit and daring of the world's most fascinating explorers. In this definitive collection of mountain lore, Alan Weber exhibits forty-three essays by artists and adventurers to whom climbing was more a mission than a sport. Beginning with the fabled tale of Hannibal's Roman invasion-men, horses, and elephants in tow-through the hitherto impassable Alps, the accounts progress to recent descriptions of high-peaks mountain climbing in Mount Everest and the formidable K-2. Included among the earlier pieces are Petrarcha's introspective journey to the Windy Mount; William Windham's exploration of Montenvers and the "Sea of Ice" in 1741; and English artist-critic John Ruskin's essay on mountain climate and culture. Literary masters portray the idyllic and imperfect aspects of mountain life: the restoration poet Andrew Marvell offers a hymn to the Barrow hills, while poems from Shelley, Lord Byron, and Matthew Arnold praise the natural beauty and fresh air of the mountain crags. Because It's There pays homage to the spiritual introspection and respect for nature engendered by the looming mountain ranges that have demarcated territories, protecting villages and cities from invasion. The explorations these mountains have inspired have tested human endurance and mental strength. Alan Weber is a research fellow of the Institute for European Studies at Cornell University and a CEMERS Associate Fellow at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He is the editor and author of Nineteenth Century Science: A Selection of Original Texts, and Women Almanac Writers (Forthcoming). A long-time member of the Penn State Outing and Cornell Outing Clubs, he has rock and ice-climbed in the Adirondacks, Green and Shawangunk Mountains, and Mount Rainier.

Author : Francis Henry Gribble
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 460 pages
Book Rating : 4.93/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Early Mountaineers written by Francis Henry Gribble and published by . This book was released on 1899 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 334 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Pictorial Sport and Adventure written by and published by . This book was released on 1898 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Fergus Fleming
Publisher : Atlantic Monthly Press
ISBN 13 : 9780802138675
Total Pages : 436 pages
Book Rating : 4.75/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Killing Dragons written by Fergus Fleming and published by Atlantic Monthly Press. This book was released on 2002-02-04 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a riveting narrative of daredevils and eccentrics, Fergus Fleming gives us the breathtaking story of some of history's greatest explorers as they conquer the soaring peaks of the Alps. Fleming recounts the incredible exploits of the men whose centuries-old fear of the mountain range turned quickly to curiosity, then to obsession, as they explored Europe's frozen wilderness. In the late eighteenth century French and Swiss scientists became interested in the Alps as a research destination, but in the 1850s the focus changed: the icy mountains now offered an all-out competition for British climbers who wanted to conquer ever higher and more impossible heights, and explorers fought each other on the peaks and in the press, entertaining a vast public smitten with their bravery, delighted by their personal animosities, and horrified by the disasters that befell them. "...excellent popular history, with its proper share of mad dogs and Englishmen....Fleming's rendition is dramatic and masterful." -- Anthony Brandt, National Geographic Adventure

Author : Charles Edward Mathews
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 470 pages
Book Rating : 4.45/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Annals of Mont Blanc written by Charles Edward Mathews and published by . This book was released on 1900 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Alan Wexler
Publisher : Infobase Holdings, Inc
ISBN 13 : 1438182155
Total Pages : 910 pages
Book Rating : 4.55/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Biographical Dictionary of Explorers written by Alan Wexler and published by Infobase Holdings, Inc. This book was released on 2019-06-01 with total page 910 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An informative, fascinating resource suitable for students, researchers, and general readers, this biographical dictionary is a "who was who" of world and space explorers, giving readers a sense of the human drama—the achievements and the challenges—that those who go where few or none have gone before must face. The explorers covered include Jacques Cousteau, Sir Vivian Fuchs, John Glenn Jr., Aleksei Leonov, Annie Peck, Valentina Tereshkova, and many more.

Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 952 pages
Book Rating : 4.22/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art written by and published by . This book was released on 1892 with total page 952 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : James Silk Buckingham
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 944 pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Athenaeum and Literary Chronicle written by James Silk Buckingham and published by . This book was released on 1860 with total page 944 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: