Mungo Park's Ghost with Dane Kennedy
Thu, Feb 22
|Mungo Park's Ghost
Join NACBS to celebrate the publication of Dane Kennedy’s new book Mungo Park’s Ghost: The Haunted Hubris of British Explorers in Nineteenth-Century Africa.
Time & Location
Feb 22, 2024, 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EST
Mungo Park's Ghost
About the event
Join NACBS to celebrate the publication of Dane Kennedy’s new book Mungo Park’s Ghost: The Haunted Hubris of British Explorers in Nineteenth-Century Africa. Stephanie Barczewski will join Dane Kennedy to discuss the work.
February 22, 2024
9am PT/ 12pm ET/ 5pm GMT
“In 1816 the British sent two large, ambitious expeditions to Africa, one to follow the Niger River to its outlet, the other to trace the Congo River to its source. Their shared goal was to complete the unfinished mission of Mungo Park, who had disappeared during a journey to determine whether the Niger and the Congo were the same river. Both quests ended disastrously and were soon forgotten. Telling the full story of these failed expeditions for the first time, Dane Kennedy argues that they provide fresh insight into British ambitions in Africa. He places them in the contexts of the imperial rivalry with France, the slave trade and the abolition campaign, and the independent power wielded by African states and peoples. He also shows that they were haunted by the same sense of hubris that would afflict many of the expeditions that followed. This hubris was Mungo Park's ghost.”
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Dane Kennedy is an emeritus professor of history at George Washington University. He has written eight books and edited or co-edited three others on various aspects of imperial history. In addition to Mungo Park's Ghost, his most recent publications are The Imperial History Wars: Debating the British Empire (2018), Decolonization: A Very Short Introduction (2016), and How Empire Shaped Us, co-edited with Antoinette Burton (2016). He is a past president of the North American Conference of British Studies.
Stephanie Barczewski is Professor of History and Carol K. Brown Scholar in the Humanities at Clemson University. Her latest books are How the Country House Became English (Reaktion/University of Chicago, 2023) and Heroic Failure and the British (Yale University Press, 2016). Her current research focuses on the peculiarities of the British “natural” environment.