The Explorers by Amanda Bellows is an accessible, easy-to-read book that reexamines the foundations the United States was built on. She looks through the lens of ten explorers that are women, people of color, and/or immigrants to reframe the "American Dream" through explorations we may not have learned about in school.

I really enjoyed my time with this book, reveling in each chapter and walking away feeling like I had learned quite a bit that I didn't know before. While I wish Bellows would have chosen other people to highlight instead of, say, John Muir, who is well-known in his own right and has been recently highlighted for his racist and harmful language, she doesn't shy away from the imperfections of these individuals. I think that's really important when it comes to historical figures because they are so easily and so often idealized over time and put up on pedestals that they would probably have tried to knock themselves off of.

I think this would be an excellent companion book for a high school classroom. I'm thinking particularly as a jumping off point for research papers or general add-ons to lessons when these parts are not covered in textbooks. A good beginning effort, and hopefully a book that history enthusiasts, nature lovers, and nonfiction fans alike will find enjoyable.

Thank you to NetGalley and William Morrow for giving me advanced reader access to this title in exchange for an honest review. This title published on June 4, 2024!

In her first book for a general audience, the historian Amanda Bellows assumes her readers are unusually ignorant. How else could she justify her book, a collection of short biographies of ten explorers, in this way? “For too long, we have focused on adventurers like [Daniel] Boone, whom we elevated to mythical status in our collective imagination. By doing so, we have overlooked other important explorers—male and female, Black and white, Indigenous and immigrant—whose discoveries also helped make the United States the country that it is today.” These other important explorers—the table of contents tells us—include Sacagawea, Laura Ingalls Wilder, John Muir, Amelia Earhart, and Sally Ride. Sacagawea overlooked? Amelia Earhart overlooked? Laura Ingalls Wilder?


Even the less well-known explorers are remembered. James Beckwourth, discoverer of Beckwourth Pass, can be found in histories of the American West. William Sheppard, the Presbyterian missionary who publicized King Leopold’s atrocities in the Congo, dwells in the pages of Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost. The ornithologist Florence Merriam Bailey, who campaigned against the use of birds in women’s fashion, is the subject of a recent children’s book. Polar explorer Matthew Henson is the subject of at least five. Harriet Chalmers Adams, founder of the Society of Women Geographers and the most obscure of the ten explorers, has an entry in the American National Biography. There are one-volume biographies of Beckwourth, Sheppard, and Bailey.


Without this assumption of ignorance, many of Bellows’s claims are but so much cant. By focusing on these “overlooked” explorers, Bellows claims, “we will gain a fuller understanding of the American story—something richer, more complex, and more diverse than we ever imagined.” Who is this we?


The first person plural is typical of Bellows’s style, which often approximates that of an educational film. The prologue announces that “We will cross the frozen Arctic Ocean and descend into the jungles of South America and Africa; we will journey by canoe and horseback, dogsled and steamship, airplane and space shuttle.” The style persists in many a hackneyed flourish. Amelia Earhart, for example, “would become more comfortable with the notion of feminism and showed the world what women were capable of through her own success as a pilot.”


Bellows’s prose lacks control. Idiomatic expressions are misused—Sheppard and a fellow missionary are said to be “mowed down” when they contract and survive malaria—and phrases are thoughtlessly repeated: “Beckwourth honed his hunting skills”; John Muir “honed his climbing skills”; Bailey “would hone her observational skills”; Ride “had honed her skills from mission control”; Adams “honed her athletic abilities.”


Despite this carelessness, Bellows attends carefully to one word: “exploration”: “We have embraced a limited definition of exploration,” she writes, “which emphasizes the acquisition of land and understates the consequences of settlement for Native peoples.” Readers frequently encounter new types of explorers. “Laura Ingalls Wilder represented a new type of explorer.” “Sheppard represented a new kind of American explorer.” These new types turn out to be the familiar ones of settler and humane missionary.


In her attempt at redefinition, Bellows indicates two major themes of The Explorers: violence against Indigenous people and the destruction of the environment. Bellows returns to these themes throughout several chapters, sometimes unexpectedly. She notes that as a child Florence Merriam Bailey lived in upstate New York, “where she was largely sheltered from . . . the violence against Indigenous people that accompanied the settlement of the west.”


Focus on these themes threatens to overwhelm the book. There are major questions—why are Amelia Earhart and Sally Ride included?—and local difficulties. After ten paragraphs narrating the failures of Wilder and her husband Almanzo to make it on the prairie, Bellows confusingly asks, “Why had so many settlers destroyed the native grasses, killed the bison, and driven away the wildlife, only to forsake the land and community where they had so desperately tried to build a life?” Bellows ignores her own case study to remind readers of the environmental consequences of settlement.


Bellows ultimately judges many of the explorers for their responses to violence against Indigenous people and the destruction of the environment. Muir, for one, is docked points:

"In his essays, Muir spilled far more ink on the destruction of the environment than on Native Americans’ forced dislocation from places like Yosemite Valley and other regions of California. When he did record his encounters with people indigenous to the Sierra Nevada, he sometimes described them using insensitive language that reflected his biases and a lack of compassion. In moments like these, the preservationist failed to make the key connection: American settlement had not only ravaged the environment but also violently upended the lives of Native Californians."

These repeated reminders of violence and destruction leave the impression that the book focuses on the wrong people. Perhaps this impression is unavoidable. A past in which colonization and environmental destruction are central cannot be studied by replacing Daniel Boone, insofar as he represents a spirit of conquest, with more benign figures. Daniel Boone is, by The Explorers’ own lights, at the center of history.

A common image of American individualism is of the rugged individual(s) who explored and conquered the frontier. Amanda Bellows The Explorers: A New History of America in Ten Expeditions subverts this image, instead Bellows biographies ten individuals who made their own paths but have mostly fallen out of popular memory due to their race, gender or the passage of time. Across the book, Bellow also notes the linkages between the individuals showing that we are all connected in some way.

The book is separated in two parts. The first is focused on the exploration of the Americas. Part two looks at explorations out of the country or world, beginning with the 20th century. Half of the featured people should be recognizable, at least by name: John Muir, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Sally Ride, Sacagawea and Amelia Earhart.

It is in the other half that Bellows re-introduces 'lost' figures like African American polar explorer William Sheppard, 'mountain man' James Beckwourth or the Andean explorer Harriet Chalmers Adams.

For each of the chapters Bellows combines primary and secondary sources to provide a description of each person's family life, education or formative experiences their key accomplishment(s) and their legacy.

Recommended to readers of American history, popular culture, biographies or a fuller understanding of the past.

I liked the premise of this book very much in that you don't often hear about non-white, non-male explorers. I agree with other reviewers in that the chapters are a bit of a gloss over the deep history that many of these individuals left behind. There are space and attention constraints, but it can get frustrating if you know anything about any of the people featured. I think it would have been better to focus on lesser known people so as to inspire readers to continue learning about them.

I received a copy of this book in exchange for a review, but all opinions are my own.

Being an explorer sounds absolutely exhausting. I want nothing to do with it, but luckily Amanda Bellows takes a look at people much more motivated than me in her book The Explorers.

Bellows does a chapter on a wide variety of people who either were from America or became famous here. There are some very well known folks like Amelia Earhart and Sacagawea to less well known explorers like James Beckwourth. The format is like many books you see nowadays where it's "The history of the world in..." things like shipwrecks or art. Bellows is a good writer and each chapter is engaging.

The problem you may run into is if you know a lot about any of the subjects. I have read a lot about Arctic exploration and space operations recently so the chapters on Matthew Henson and Sally Ride read as very high level overviews. Specifically with the Henson chapter, I felt it was missing a lot of nuance. This isn't a criticism so much as a warning for people who read a lot of history. Check the names of the people Bellows covers in this book. If you know most of them then this book is not targeted at you. If you are not a full-on history nerd like myself, this is a wonderful way to dip your toe into this side of the pool without reading a full biography on one person.

(This book was provided as an advance copy by Netgalley and William Morrow.)

I thought this was really well written and I look forward to reading more from this author in the future. I think it will find readers at our library, so we will definitely be purchasing for the collection.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher William Morrow for an advance copy of this book that looks at American and world history through the travels and adventures of a group of diverse people who all shared a gift of not being able stay in one spot, always wondering what was waiting in the beyond.

Exploration is part of human nature. Babies explore their new world, finding stairs to fall down, dog beds to sleep in, even expensive items to make toys of. People quit jobs to explore new options, sometimes even quite a comfortable lifestyle to explore the world out there. Humans need to know things. From the physical to the metaphysical from around the corner to what lies in the stars. America has a habit though of making our explorers bigger than life, and predominantly white males, omitted from history the tales of many who came before, came along, or lead the way, be they black, women free from bondage, or just free thinkers. The Explorers: A New History of America in Ten Expeditions by Amanda Bellows, looks at a group of explorers some famous, some just known, some unknown, whose tales and achievements changed history, and brought new ways of thinking, many of which are still being discussed today.

The book is broken into ten essays with an introduction and a conclusion detailing many lost or misunderstood people, who should be deemed explorers in the grandest sense. Bellows discusses that in America most explorers are thought of as Daniel Boone types, rugged individualists who keep pushing the limits of frontiers whenever they would see the smoke of their neighbors houses. However there have always been others who went to the frontiers to see what was there for different reasons, To escape the life expected of them, the life that was forced on them, or to find a life that could be explored without exception. And this is who Bellows is discussing. Sacagawea, stolen from her home, who grew up a slave, traded into marriage, and yet without her the Lewis and Clark expedition of America might have ended in failure, or death. And yet Sacagawea was not rewarded for her work, and even her life and death after is unknown. James Beckworth, a mixed race mountain man, who traveled all over America, making a fortune outfitting prospectors in California, losing a fortune after making a road for settlers to cross. Along with these Bellows looks at the life of John Muir, Amelia Earhart, and Matthew Henson.

A history book that shows the grit that people have to do things that they have set their mind to, no matter the consequences. Bellows describes the lifes of these people, showing hardships, problems, and in one or two a lot of questionable behavior, but who excepted no limitations on their explorations. For women, for black men to travel, to set up businesses, in Henson's case go to the North Pole, is just extraordinary. As is the way there were all treated, even Muir in some cases by the press as crazy, as not acting like their kind should. And yet the persisted. Bellows has done a very good job of making all these characters from Sacagawea to Sally Ride come to life, and shares there stories and achievements quite well. Every page has a fact, a nugget of information that was new, or in some cases just a new way of thinking. Bellows has a nice style, and ability to describe boat travels on rivers, shuttle launches, even sleeping with llamas at high altitude with a sense of expertise and excitement. A really interesting history book, and one I really enjoyed.

There has been a trend in recent years of episodic books, or those books that break periods of history down into manageable, almost stand-alone pieces, that together make an entire narrative. This book does that by focusing on ten different expedition throught America's history. You could read these ten in any order, and at any time, which I believe is a strength of this book. It's well written and worth picking up.

I enjoyed this collection of stories of American exploration from the beginning of European settlement to space exploration. Each chapter tells a unique story, and overall this book gives a nice taste of history from a variety of people. I would have liked to see a little less details on the early childhood of the explorers, and a little more detail on their explorations and how they paved the way for the next explorer. Overall I enjoyed the book, and am thankful to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC in return for my review.