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Smithsonian Associates: River Expeditions

May 13, 2017 @ 9:30 am - 12:30 pm

Andy will be giving three talks on United States river expeditions.

Salt Water, the 1848 US Navy Expedition to the Dead Sea and the Search for Sodom and Gomorrah.  Join Lieutenant William Lynch and his party of volunteer navy men in 1848 on the first and only American expedition of exploration to the Dead Sea.  Defying Bedouin threats and epidemic disease, the expedition rowed in two special purpose metal boats across the Sea of Galilee, down the River Jordan, and onto the Dead Sea for weeks of scientific investigation, making history with every mile.
 
Congo, the Miserable Expeditions and Dreadful Death of Lt. Emory Taunt, US Navy.  

Lieutenant Taunt traveled up Africa’s fever-infested Congo River alone in mid-summer 1885 under orders from the secretary of the navy.  He returned twice to Equatorial Africa—a region made famous by Henry Morton Stanley, the intrepid explorer—as a civilian, seeking wealth, distinction, and to salvage a reputation destroyed by alcoholism.  Taunt died alongside the river in 1891 while serving as the first resident American diplomat in what had become King Leopold II’s private estate.

“Colonel” Teddy Roosevelt and the River of Doubt.  

Former President Theodore Roosevelt’s small expedition on the mysterious Amazon tributary, “the River of Doubt,” after his failed attempt at re-election, almost killed him.  Travel with Roosevelt through the political history of the United States in the first decades of the 20th century, and through Amazonia, then one of the last great unexplored regions of the world.

 

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Details

Date:
May 13, 2017
Time:
9:30 am - 12:30 pm

Venue

Smithsonian S. Dillon Ripley Center
1100 Jefferson Drive, SW
Washington, DC United States + Google Map