National Museum of the U.S. Navy

Historian Hampton Sides will talk about the voyage of the USS Jeannette, one of the most harrowing adventures of all time and the subject of his New York Times bestselling book, In the Kingdom of Ice. All but forgotten today, the USS Jeannette expedition was America’s first official attempt to go to the North Pole (1879-1882). This tale of a Gilded Age expedition gone very, very wrong, is many things: A relentlessly gripping examination of the human will to survive, a colorful portrait of a young nation pushing its way onto the world stage, a glorious evocation of the power and strangeness of the natural world, even a love story. Above all, In the Kingdom of Ice is a ripping yarn from the Heroic Age of Exploration—a spellbinding and suspenseful tale not only of a journey into the Arctic but into the very nature of man.

About the Author: Narrative historian Hampton Sides is best-known for his gripping, deeply researched adventure stories set in war or depicting epic expeditions of exploration. He’s the author of the bestselling histories Ghost Soldiers, Blood and Thunder, Hellhound on His Trail, In the Kingdom of Ice, and On Desperate Ground. An editor-at-large at Outside magazine and a contributor to such publications as National Geographic, the American Scholar, Smithsonian, the New York Times, and The New Yorker, his journalistic works have been frequently anthologized and have twice been named Finalists at the National Magazine Awards. A native of Memphis and a graduate of Yale, Hampton is a member of the Society of American Historians and was a recent fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. Hampton is now at work on a book about the third and final voyage of Captain James Cook.  He lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico.