A prize-winning historian looks at the impulse to explore, the travels of Pocahontas, Columbus, Sacagawea, and Captain Cook alongside others who rightfully deserve the title of “explorers” including immigrants and fugitive slaves.

People of every background imagine new worlds. The impulse to seek new places is universal to humanity. In Explorers, historian Matthew Lockwood unfurls a tapestry of surprising and historically overlooked figures spanning forty centuries and six continents; he illuminates their lives filled with imagination and wonder, curiosity, connection, and exchange. Join us for this illustrated book talk to learn about such seekers as David Dorr, born into slavery in New Orleans who embarked on a Grand Tour or Europe and Egypt; Viking female voyagers including Gudrid Far-Traveler, who sailed to North America in 1000 AD; and other pioneers’ discoveries and settlements, their trials and tales remaking the world and themselves. American Inspiration series’ producer Margaret Talcott will join him in conversation and share your comments and questions.  

Matthew Lockwood is an associate professor of history at the University of Alabama. He earned his PhD from Yale University and is the author of This Land of Promise: A History of Refugees and Exiles in Britain, To Begin the World Over Again, The Conquest of Death, and To Begin the World Over Again: How the American Revolution Devastated the Globe, which was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and a Financial Times Top 10 Book of the Year.

Presented in partnership with GBH Forum Network