Great journeys

As Marco Polo (1254-1324) returned home across the Indian Ocean, after years in the service of Genghis Khan, he picked up a fabulous array of stories from sailors and merchants, about the peoples of the region, some reliable, some wholly implausible, but all fascinating. Great Journeys allows readers to travel both around the planet and back through the centuries – but also back into ideas and worlds frightening, ruthless and cruel in different ways from our own. Few reading experiences can begin to match that of engaging with writers who saw astounding things: Great civilisations, walls of ice, violent and implacable jungles, deserts and mountains, multitudes of birds and flowers new to science. Reading these books is to see the world afresh, to rediscover a time when many cultures were quite strange to each other, where legends and stories were treated as facts and in which so much was still to be discovered.

Recounts how the Cherokees, after fighting to keep their land in the nineteenth century, were forced to leave and travel 1,200 miles to a new settlement in Oklahoma, a terrible journey known as the Trail of Tears.

Harry Turtledove's rousing saga of a fantastic world at war, which began in Into the Darkness and continued through Darkness Descending, Through the Darkness, Rulers of the Darkness, and Jaws of Darkness, draws to its climactic conclusion in Out of the Darkness. As the Derlavaian War rages into its last and greatest battles, allied nations maneuver for positions against each other in a postwar world. But before that time can come, the forces of Algarve, Unkerlant, and their allies must clash a final time, countering army with army and battle magic with ever-more-powerful battle magic. In the midst of it all, the people the war has battered and reshaped must struggle to face their greatest individual challenges, as loves are shattered and found, terrible crimes avenged ... and some journeys end forever. And the end of the war may not bring peace.

Describes the history and practice of slavery, particularly the African slave trade--its origins, growth, and demise from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries.

An account of the competition between explorers to reach the South Pole with emphasis on the events of the rival expeditions led by the Norwegian Roald Amundsen and the British Robert Scott between 1910 and 1913.

An account of the first two voyages of Christopher Columbus by which he reached the unknown continents of the Americas, the "New World."

Describes the economic and environmental conditions that led to the Great Depression and the horrific dust storms that drove people from their homes westward during the 1930s.