Charles W. J Withers Books

An accessible, enjoyable, attractive and browsable history of Edinburgh as seen through maps, that will appeal to all those with an interest in Edinburgh and Scottish history.

This book offers the first full length biography of legendary explorer Mungo Park for over forty years. Tracing the expeditions who followed him it documents how and why he was commemorated long after his death. This is not simply one of the great stories of world exploration but a rich and varied account of Africa and its cultures at the time.

Charles Withers explains how the choice of Greenwich to mark 0° longitude solved problems of global measurement that had engaged geographers, astronomers, and mariners since ancient times. This history is a testament to the power of maps, the challenges of global measurement, and the role of scientific authority in creating the modern world.

Winner of the Saltire Society Scottish Research Book of the Year award 2012

Using as its central example the British Association for the Advancement of Science this is the first book-length treatment of this leading body for the promotion of science for more than 25 years and the first ever of British geography's civic history. -- .

This book, originally published in 1988, examines the Highlands and Islands of Scotland over several centuries and charts their cultural transformation from a separate region into one where the processes of anglicisation have largely succeeded. It analyses the many aspects of change including the policies of successive governments, the decline of the Gaelic language, the depressing of much of the population into peasantry and the clearances.

A sumptuous book featuring magnificent maps from the National Library of Scotland and text from three eminent specialists