The Cold, Cold War
Throughout the 19th century, rival nations battled to conquer the poles. One explorer set out to establish an Arctic colony – or to get rich trying.
Travel
Dire Straits
The duplicitous, disloyal, callous and cruel Ferdinand Magellan.
How Poland Found Itself in the Mountains
In the decades before the First World War, Polish mountaineering became a form of nationalism for a lowland people.
The Road less Travelled
Female explorers of the 19th century demolished Victorian notions of stay-at-home women. But why were they so vehemently anti-feminist? The case of Mary Wollstonecraft may hold the answer.
The New Tourists
The visitors’ books of 19th-century hotels, pubs and inns show Victorians on holiday, revealing them to be irreverent pleasure seekers, capable of highfalutin pomposity and touristic wrath.
Amelia Earhart goes Missing
The aviator’s plane disappeared on a circumnavigation of the world on 2 July 1937.
Here be Dragomans
For wealthy tourists travelling to the Middle East in the 19th century, the services of a dragoman were an essential purchase. Yet the often difficult lives of these local agents and guides remain elusive.
East Africa’s Tourist War
A newly independent Tanganyika hoped to capture part of the lucrative European market for African tourism. But its rivalry with neighbouring Kenya proved an obstacle.
Pilgrims Processed
Muslims from Asia who wished to travel to Mecca on the Hajj were exploited by a trade in human cargo that grew with the opening of the Suez Canal.
Switzerland’s Nation of Hoteliers
At the turn of the 20th century, Switzerland embraced the Grand Hotel. The First World War brought one golden age of hotels to an end, ushering in a new, more uncertain one.