| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture. By Michael F. Robinson. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. xii, 206 pp. $39.00, ISBN 0-226-72184-1.)
For too long, American Arctic history has seemed separated from the narrative of national identity—a list of epic tragedies or an endless controversy surrounding Frederick Cook's and Robert Peary's enduring dual claims for the North Pole. Michael F. Robinson has done an admirable job of placing that history within a cultural framework.	1
This book will be most useful as a means to place Arctic history within the mainstream historical narrative. Robinson pays minimal attention to the actual expeditions of Elisha Kent Kane, Isaac Hayes, Charles Hall, Adolphus Greely, Walter Wellman, Peary, and Cook. Instead, he focuses on each man's home audiences and patrons, and explains why he was popular. Audiences expected different explanations for each Arctic quest, but those were not the only changes over time. Robinson also characterizes the later-nineteenth-century explorers as being at the mercy of an increasingly sensationalized press. And scientific achievement, once the purest mark of American progress, eventually became unnecessary. Scandal and hardship stories maintained the new audiences, and private patronage eliminated the need for explorers to bind themselves to the rigors of cold science.	. . .

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