The Island of Cuba by Alexander Von Humboldt

The Island of Cuba by Alexander Von Humboldt

The research Alexander von Humboldt amassed during his five-year trek through the Americas in the early nineteenth-century proved foundational to the fields of botany, geography, and geology. But his visit to Cuba during this time yielded observations that extended far beyond the natural world. Political Essay on the Island of Cuba is a physical and cultural study of the island nation. In it, Humboldt denounces colonial slavery on both moral and economic grounds and stresses the vital importance of improving intercultural relations throughout the Americas.

Humboldt's most controversial book, Political Essay on the Island of Cuba was banned, censored, and willfully mistranslated to suppress Humboldt's strong antislavery sentiments. It reemerges here, newly translated from the original two volume French edition, to introduce a new generation of readers to Humboldt's astonishing multiplicity of scientific and philosophical perspectives. In their critical introduction, Vera Kutzinski and Ottmar Ette emphasize Humboldt's rare ability to combine scientific rigor with a cosmopolitan consciousness and a deeply felt philosophical humanism. The result is a work on Cuba of historical import that will attract historians of science as well as cultural historians, political scientists, and literary scholars.

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT (1769-1859) was a German polymath and explorer whose expeditions, ranging from the highest peaks in the Andes to the steppes of Siberia, laid the groundwork for the field of biogeography.

ANDREA WULF was born in India and moved to Germany as a child. She lives in London, where she trained as a design historian at the Royal College of Art. She is the author of The Invention of Nature, Chasing Venus, Founding Gardeners, and The Brother Gardeners, which was long-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize and awarded the American Horticultural Society Book Award. She has written for The New York Times, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times. She appears regularly on radio and TV, and in 2014 copresented British Gardens in Time, a four-part series on BBC television.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781558762435
ISBN 10	1558762434
Title	The Island of Cuba
Author	Alexander Von Humboldt
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Markus Wiener Publishing Inc
Year published	2001-07-31
Number of pages	360
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable