Von Humboldt Alexander. Views of the Cordilleras and Monuments of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas: A Critical Edition

Edited by Vera M. Kutzinski, Ottmar Ette. — University of Chicago Press, 2013. — 618 p.In 1799, Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland set out to determine whether the Orinoco River connected with the Amazon. But what started as a trip to investigate a relatively minor geographical controversy became the basis of a five-year exploration throughout South America, Mexico, and Cuba. The discoveries amassed by Humboldt and Bonpland were staggering, and much of today’s knowledge of tropical zoology, botany, geography, and geology can be traced back to Humboldt’s numerous records of these expeditions.One of these accounts, Views of the Cordilleras and Monuments of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, firmly established Alexander von Humboldt as the founder of Mesoamerican studies. In Views of the Cordilleras - first published in French between 1810 and 1813 - Humboldt weaves together magnificently engraved drawings and detailed texts to achieve multifaceted views of cultures and landscapes across the Americas. In doing so, he offers an alternative perspective on the New World, combating presumptions of its belatedness and inferiority by arguing that the “old” and the “new” world are of the same geological age.This critical edition of Views of the Cordilleras - the second volume in the Alexander von Humboldt in English series—contains a new, unabridged English translation of Humboldt’s French text, as well as annotations, a bibliography, and all sixty-nine plates from the original edition, many of them in color.Vera M. Kutzinski is the Martha Rivers Ingram Professor of English, professor of comparative literature, and director of the Alexander von Humboldt in English project at Vanderbilt University. Ottmar Ette is chair of Romance literature at the University of Potsdam, Germany, and the author of many books on von Humboldt. Together, they are the editors of Alexander von Humboldt’s Political Essay on the Island of Cuba: A Critical Edition, also published by the University of Chicago Press.