A01=Jared Orsi
Author_Jared Orsi
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DNBH
Category=JWT
Category=NHK
Category=NHW
Category=NL-BG
Category=NL-HB
Category=NL-JW
COP=United States
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Format=BC
HMM=235
IMPN=Oxford University Press Inc
ISBN13=9780190674144
Language_English
PA=Available
PD=20170330
POP=New York
Price=€20 to €50
PS=Active
PUB=Oxford University Press Inc
SMM=23
Subject=Biography: General
Subject=History
Subject=Warfare & Defence
WG=566
WMM=155
Product details
- ISBN 9780190674144
- Weight: 544g
- Dimensions: 152 x 231 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 18 May 2017
- Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc
- Publication City/Country: New York, US
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
It was November 1806. The explorers had gone without food for one day, then two. Their leader, not yet thirty, drove on, determined to ascend the great mountain. Waist deep in snow, he reluctantly turned back. But Zebulon Pike had not been defeated. His name remained on the unclimbed peak-and new adventures lay ahead of him and his republic.
In Citizen Explorer, historian Jared Orsi provides the first modern biography of this soldier and explorer, who rivaled contemporaries Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Born in 1779, Pike joined the army and served in frontier posts in the Ohio River valley before embarking on a series of astonishing expeditions. He sought the headwaters of the Mississippi and later the sources of the Arkansas and Red Rivers, which led him to Pike's Peak and capture by Spanish forces. Along the way, he met Aaron Burr and General James Wilkinson; Auguste and Pierre Couteau, patriarchs of St. Louis's most powerful fur-trading family, who sought to make themselves indispensible to Jefferson's administration; as well as British fur-traders, Native Americans, and officers of the Spanish empire, all of whom resisted the expansion of the United States. Through Pike's life, Orsi examines how American nationalism thinned as it stretched west, from the Jeffersonian idealism on the Atlantic to a practical, materialist sensibility on the frontier. Surveying and gathering data, Pike sought to incorporate these distant territories into the republic, to overlay the west with the American map grid; yet he became increasingly dependent for survival on people who had no attachment to the nation he served. He eventually died in that service, in a victorious battle in the War of 1812.
Written from an environmental perspective, rich in cultural and political context, Citizen Explorer is a state-of-the-art biography of a remarkable man.
Jared Orsi is Associate Professor of History at Colorado State University. He is the author of the prizing-winning Hazardous Metropolis: Flooding and Urban Ecology in Los Angeles.
