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 ...

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 ...

When Alexander von Humboldt (right) traveled to England in 1790, he met a young chemist named James Smithson, the founder of the Smithsonian. Humboldt's influence still resonates throughout the ...

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, ...

Alexander von Humboldt was born on September 14, 1769. In his day, he was a globetrotting, convention-defying hero — one of the first recorded individuals to raise environmental concerns. To make him ...

A scene from Andrea Wulf’s new book “The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt,” which depicts how Alexander von Humboldt was able to obtain electric eels to study their leaping attack behavior.

The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt Andrea Wulf and Lillian Melcher Pantheon (2019) Four years ago, the historian Andrea Wulf rescued Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) from ...

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 ...

Portrait of Alexander von Humboldt, by Julius Schrader, 1859. Behind Humboldt are the mountains of Chimborazo and Cotopaxi in Ecuador. Humboldt’s exploration of these peaks shaped his view of nature ...