New Lands, New Men ― America and the Second Great Age of Discovery

In New Lands, New Men, the third volume in his award-winning Exploration Trilogy, one of America’s leading historians tells the dramatic story of three centuries of exploration that witnessed Europeans exploring the Pacific and Northwest, Americans setting out across their own immense continent, and finally, Americans exploring new worlds: the oceans, Japan, the polar regions.

Spanning the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, the Second Great Age of Discovery was marked by the Enlightenment’s ideals of science and progress. Explorers from James Cook to George Catlin, from Charles Wilkes to Matthew Maury, trained as scientists intent on precise observation and gathered information that would transform natural history and botany into systematic inquiries, place geography and cartography on their modern footing, and launch the newer sciences of geology and oceanography. And the artists accompanying these explorers would have as tremendous an impact, their renditions of spectacular terrains, of customs and costumes of exotic tribes inspiring the birth of Romanticism.

William H. Goetzmann writes in absorbing detail about the remarkable adventures of the explorers and the explosive rise of American science. America was truly exploration’s nation—a culture of endless possibilities, continually looking forward in the direction of the new. New Lands, New Men illuminates America’s rise to cultural and scientific prominence—and transforms our understanding of America’s role in world history.

WILLIAM H. GOETZMANN is the Jack S. Blanton, Sr., Professor of American History at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of many award-winning books and articles, including Exploration and Empire, which won the Pulitzer Prize for American History in 1967, and Army Exploration in the American West (both in print with the Texas State Historical Association).