On a mid-November day in 1840, the Argentine intellectual Domingo Faustino Sarmiento found himself in the Zonda Valley, on the eastern slope of the Andes Mountains, amidst the evergreen scrub and dusty, snow-eating wind of that desolate land. Still smarting…

In the summer of A.D. 95, the Greek orator Dio Chrysostom sailed across the Black Sea’s brine-salt waves to the city of Borysthenes, a once-stirring center of trade nestled along the right bank of the River Bug, in what is…

It was in the summer of 1845 that Thomas Eyre Poole parted from his family, picked his way through the jagged lanes of Wapping, and descended to the Thames docks at Shadwell Basin, boarding the fast-sailing brig Soundraporvy, bound for…