The Summits of Modern Man : Mountaineering after the Enlightenment / Peter H. Hansen.
Hansen, Peter H., author.
2013
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Title The Summits of Modern Man : Mountaineering after the Enlightenment / Peter H. Hansen.
Author Hansen, Peter H., author.
ISBN 9780674074521
DOI https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674074521
Published Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, [2013]
Copyright ©2013
Language English
Language Note In English.
Description 1 online resource (392 p.) : 24 halftones, 2 maps
Other Standard Identifiers 10.4159/harvard.9780674074521 doi
Dewey Decimal Classification 796.522
Summary The history of mountaineering has long served as a metaphor for civilization triumphant. Once upon a time, the Alps were an inaccessible habitat of specters and dragons, until heroic men-pioneers of enlightenment-scaled their summits, classified their strata and flora, and banished the phantoms forever. A fascinating interdisciplinary study of the first ascents of the major Alpine peaks and Mount Everest, The Summits of Modern Man surveys the far-ranging significance of our encounters with the world's most alluring and forbidding heights. Our obsession with "who got to the top first" may have begun in 1786, the year Jacques Balmat and Michel-Gabriel Paccard climbed Mont Blanc and inaugurated an era in which Romantic notions of the sublime spurred climbers' aspirations. In the following decades, climbing lost its revolutionary cachet as it became associated instead with bourgeois outdoor leisure. Still, the mythic stories of mountaineers, threaded through with themes of imperialism, masculinity, and ascendant Western science and culture, seized the imagination of artists and historians well into the twentieth century, providing grist for stage shows, poetry, films, and landscape paintings. Today, we live on the threshold of a hot planet, where melting glaciers and rising sea levels create ambivalence about the conquest of nature. Long after Hillary and Tenzing's ascent of Everest, though, the image of modern man supreme on the mountaintop retains its currency. Peter Hansen's exploration of these persistent images indicates how difficult it is to imagine our relationship with nature in terms other than domination.
Access Note Access limited to authorized users.
System Details Note Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
Digital File Characteristics text file PDF
Source of Description Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 30. Aug 2021)
In E-BOOK GESAMTPAKET / COMPLETE PACKAGE 2013
E-BOOK PACKAGE HISTORY, POLITICAL SCIENCE, SOCIOLOGY 2013
E-BOOK PAKET GESCHICHTE, POLITIKWISS., SOZIOLOGIE 2013
HUP eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013 (Canada)
Harvard University Press eBook Package Backlist 2000-2013
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Frontmatter
Contents
Illustrations
CHAPTER ONE Beginnings
CHAPTER TWO Discovery of the Glacières
CHAPTER THREE Ascent and Enfranchisement
CHAPTER FOUR Who Was First?
CHAPTER FIVE Temple of Nature
CHAPTER SIX Social Climbers
CHAPTER SEVEN Age of Conquest
CHAPTER EIGHT History Detectives
CHAPTER NINE Almost Together
CHAPTER TEN Bodies of Ice
Abbreviations
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index

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