Dane Kennedy is the Elmer Louis Kayser Professor of History and International Affairs at George Washington University. He is the author of numerous books, including The Last Blank Spaces: Exploring Africa and Australia.

• Contents ; Contributors ; Introduction Reinterpreting Exploration ; Dane Kennedy ; Part One Themes ; Chapter 1 Science and Exploration ; Michael F. Robinson ; Chapter 2 A Half Century of Shifting Narrative Perspectives on Encounters ; Harry Liebersohn ; Chapter 3 Exploration and Enlightenment ; Philip J. Stern ; Chapter 4 Exploration in Print: From the Miscellany to the Newspaper ; Clare Pettitt ; Chapter 5 The Making of British and French Legends of Exploration ; Berny Sebe ; Part Two Territories ; Chapter 6 Exploration in Imperial Russia ; Willard Sunderland ; Chapter 7 Exploring the Pacific World ; Jane Samson ; Chapter 8 Decentering Exploration in East Africa ; Stephen J. Rockel ; Chapter 9 The Exploration of Central Asia ; Gordon Stewart ; Chapter 10 The Historiography of Antarctic Exploration ; Stephanie Barczewski

This important book critically re-evaluates what Western exploration was and did - its intellectual contours and its enduring consequences -and wonderfully illuminates exploration's multiple histories, diverse geographies, and material forms. Regional essays on Russia, the Pacific, Eastern Africa, Central Asia, and Antarctica are paralleled by thematic attention to exploration and science, commerce, Enlightenment, print culture, and empire. Elegantly replacing unwarranted hagiography with critical historiography, national narratives with cross-cultural perspectives, the essays in Reinterpreting Exploration at once demythologize and reinvigorate debates on the West's role in the world and the world's impact upon the West.