Terra Incognita
eBook - ePub

Terra Incognita

A History of Ignorance in the 18th and 19th Centuries

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Terra Incognita

A History of Ignorance in the 18th and 19th Centuries

About this book

Identifying gaps in knowledge is the first duty of any historian who sets out to understand the past. It is impossible fully to understand our forebears without some idea of what they did not know: the history of ignorance is an indispensable part of history itself.

Here Alain Corbin focuses on our planet, exploring its mysteries past and present, and the intensity and eventual decline of the modes of terror and wonder it aroused. For thousands of years, humans knew nearly nothing about the earth. Certain locations on the map simply read 'Terra Incognita'. Corbin recounts the many errors and uncertainties that littered the paths we followed in the attempt to discover the secrets of our blue planet, with a particular focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when the mysteries of volcanoes, the polar regions, glaciers, the stratosphere and the oceans began to be uncovered. While ignorance stimulated our ancestors' imagination, Corbin's history of ignorance reawakens our thirst for knowledge and changes our view of the world.

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Yes, you can access Terra Incognita by Alain Corbin, Susan Pickford in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & World History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Edition
1
Topic
History
Index
History

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Acknowledgements
  5. Epigraph
  6. A Comprehensive History Implies the Study of Ignorance
  7. Part I Gaps in Enlightenment Knowledge of the Earth
  8. Part II A Gradual Decline in Ignorance (1800–1850)
  9. Part III Shrinking the Boundaries of Ignorance (1860–1900)
  10. Index
  11. End User License Agreement