Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland at the foot of the Chimborazo volcano, painting by Friedrich Georg Weitsch (1810).

Between the 1820s and 1850s Alexander von Humboldt was one of the most widely admired public figures in the world. In the U.S., the name of this international renowned scholar has vanished from the ...

His contemporaries considered Alexander von Humboldt the most famous man in the world after Napoleon, and Thomas Jefferson called him “one of the greatest ornaments of the age.” There are more plants, ...

The father of nature writing, intrepid explorer, friend to revolutionaries and US presidents, Alexander von Humboldt was the original scholar adventurer. Fearlessly footloose and boundlessly curious, ...

Frederic Edwin Church, The Natural Bridge, Virginia, 1852, oil on canvas, 28 x 23 in. The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia, Gift of Thomas Fortune Ryan. “Alexander von Humboldt and ...

We have all read about famous scientists who helped to shape and steer our knowledge of the world. Back in the 19th century, there were the likes of Charles Darwin, Louis Pasteur, Thomas Edison, ...

Atlas Obscura on Slate is a blog about the world’s hidden wonders. Like us on Facebook and Tumblr, or follow us on Twitter. Today, in search of a way through a constantly expanding morass of ...

Discover how one teacher is inspired by the world of Alexander von Humboldt Carol Wilson SAAM's Senior Curator Eleanor Jones Harvey and Dean Howarth take a closer look at mastodon bones in the ...

On September 14, 1869, 25,000 people marched through New York to celebrate the centennial of the birth of German scientist Alexander von Humboldt. Manhattan’s cobbled streets were lined with flags and ...

There should have been a proper welcome-home party for the enormous mastodon skeleton, which hadn’t been seen in the United States for more than 170 years. When it was unearthed in 1801, during the ...

The history seems barely credible. A Prussian aristocrat, born in 1769, works for five years as a mine inspector. After his mother’s death, he uses a good chunk of the family fortune on a five-year ...