The Place of Stone: Introduction

  A Lost Portuguese Explorer’s American Boulder   “Every man will see something different from every other.” —Edward Augustus Kendall, “Account of the Writing-Rock in Taunton River,” in Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1809 “It is easy to imagine as present on the rock almost any desired letter of the alphabet,...

The German Connection: Munzer, Behaim, and the Cabot and Columbus voyages

A key element of my book The Race to the New World is how it integrates two marginalized figures of the late 15th century, Jerome Munzer and Martin Behaim, into the narrative of the early-modern European arrival in the Americas. Neither man is unknown to history, but neither man has been properly placed in the story...