An interdisciplinary cultural history of exploration and mountaineering in the nineteenth century

European forays to mountain summits began in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with the search for plants and minerals and the study of geology and glaciers. Yet scientists were soon captivated by the enterprise of climbing itself, enthralled with the views and the prospect of “conquering” alpine summits. Inspired by Romantic notions of nature, early mountaineers idealized their endeavors as sublime experiences, all the while deliberately measuring what they saw. As increased leisure time and advances in infrastructure and equipment opened up once formidable mountain regions to those seeking adventure and sport, new models of masculinity emerged that were fraught with tensions. This book examines how written and artistic depictions of nineteenth-century exploration and mountaineering in the Andes, the Alps, and the Sierra Nevada shaped cultural understandings of nature and wilderness in the Anthropocene.

VISIT THE PUBLISHER → 

“By bringing new perspectives to foundational texts about mountain experiences from the mid-eighteenth century until World War I, Schaumann offers a new, more ambiguous history of elite mountaineering culture that contains lessons for our current age of human-induced environmental change, the Anthropocene.”

Marc Landry, Austrian History Yearbook (2023)

“I love this book because it does two things that needed to be done: it transforms these ephemeral characters into living, breathing, complicated people, and it transforms their narratives into sophisticated, layered, and challenging literary texts. Why they went to the mountains and what they did when they got there—what they felt, saw, and imagined—does indeed help us to imagine why we need to go the mountains, and what we need to do once we return.”

Michael Reidy, Agricultural History 96.3 (2022)

“Schaumann’s second monograph, Peak Pursuits, could not come soon enough. Not only does she provide a transnational lens with which to view the role of mountains and mountain exploration within the cultural, scientific, and political preoccupations of nineteenth-century Europe (and farther), she also makes impressive use of the literary and artistic expressions that emerged during an age that saw a rush toward mountain ascents.”

Carmel Heeley, Monatshefte 114.3 (2022)

“Schaumann has an elegant, enjoyable flow in her writing—perhaps paralleling her flow in climbing? In any case, she has much to say about the material, physical, and corporeal dimensions of mountaineering history, the relations among body, mind, mountain, and wilderness.”

Jon Mathieu, Central European History 54.2 (2021) 

“The most stimulating contribution to current scholarship in mountain studies lies in this book’s exposure of the dimly illuminated spots in the great show that is nineteenth-century mountaineering. Peak Pursuits takes interest in the fallen alpinists, the tragedies, the futile climbs, and their social struggles, weakened bodies, and failed marriages.”

Eva-Maria Müller, Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies 2.2 (2021)

“Mountaineers like Alexander von Humboldt, Louis Agassiz, and Clarence King were important participants in debates within geology, glaciology, and atmospheric sciences, leaving intellectual legacies that continue to be relevant in the context of the climate crisis. The book also explores other key problems that intersect with mountaineering: gender and sexuality, race, colonialism, and media history are all bound up in its history. Schaumann is a literary scholar by training, and her history is built largely out of close readings of important nineteenth-century mountaineers’ published and unpublished writings, which she reads with both sympathy and sharpness.”

Alexander Phillips, The German Quarterly 94.3 (2021)

“Caroline Schaumann is a professor of German Studies who approaches her topic through insights drawn partly from literary analysis and criticism, but also in a strongly inter-disciplinary way, studying the liminal mountain world through perspectives that range across cultural history, art history, sociology, tourism, gender, philosophy, and geography. Her book is not a standard history of rock climbing but rather a transnational view of the nineteenth-century emergence of mountaineering via the writings and artistic and photographic depictions associated with eleven richly–diverse individuals drawn from Britain, Europe and North America, in a subtle and highly nuanced way.”

Mike Huggins, Cultural and Social History 18.4 (2021)

“Lyrical and incisive, haunting and urgent, Caroline Schaumann’s Peak Pursuits provides an essential reexamination of the history of mountaineering and the resonance of its legacy in our Anthropocene Age.”

Katie Ives, editor-in-chief of Alpinist

“A brilliant and beautifully written contribution to the new cultural history of mountaineering. A climber herself, Schaumann takes us from the Alps to the Andes with sensitivity and verve and puts her fascinating cast of characters from Humboldt to Muir in the many varied contexts in which they belong. Here finally is a climbing history for the Anthropocene.”

Stewart Weaver, co-author of Fallen Giants: A History of Himalayan Mountaineering from the Age of Empire to the Age of Extremes

“Peak Pursuits raises critical questions and is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of mountaineering.”

Peter Hansen, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

“Schaumann offers important new insights into well-studied subjects, and intervenes into ongoing, vibrant debates about the mountains and human-environment interactions writ large.”

Andrew Denning, University of Kansas

“Peak Pursuits significantly enhances our understanding of man’s scientific, aesthetic, and material interaction with mountains during the long nineteenth century from a transnational perspective. A major achievement in mountain studies.”

Harald Höbusch, author of Mountain of Destiny: Nanga Parbat and its Path into the German Imagination

“Peak Pursuits provides us with a panoramic perspective on motions and emotions, the history and breath-taking histories of mountaineering in Europe and the Americas: a brilliant book.”

Ottmar Ette, Universität Potsdam