This panel works to rethink the performers, goals, and meanings of exploration in North America. Thus rather than presenting case studies that reveal new details about the expeditions and discoveries of well-known explorers, we aim to interrogate both the category of exploration itself and its place in larger histories. The panel takes a broad lens to accomplish this broad goal: it investigates Indigenous, black, and white explorers; it covers over three-hundred years; it examines spaces from the Pacific to the Arctic Oceans; and it engages with many of the broader topics—including imperial, environmental, and global histories—that make exploration matter. Far from being a niche field, this panel argues that the history of exploration offers a critical path to rediscovering North America and its connections with the wider world.

This panel will have a hybrid format, somewhere between a traditional three-paper panel and a roundtable. So, each of the three panelists will give a paper, but we will endeavor to make these engaging by introducing some innovations: the papers will be shorter than typical—only ten minutes each—and, as much as possible, the panelists will base their talks on images or notes rather than reading papers aloud. This format has several advantages. For one, shorter presentations force each talk to focus on bigger themes instead of getting bogged down in details that audiences tend to tune out. More importantly, this style of panel ensures plenty of time for both audience participation and roundtable-style discussion among the panelists, commentator, and chair. After all, a key goal of the panel is to ponder what a “new history of exploration” might look like, and while the individual papers will serve as a launch-point for these discussions, the meat of the panel will be as much about the conversation the papers inspire as the papers themselves.

We hope that both the topic and format of this panel will encourage conversations about public engagement. This is because—thanks to popular works of nonfiction, feature films, museum exhibits, and, especially, public school curricula—the history of exploration is already a topic of immense interest among the American public. The field thus offers a rare opportunity to build on preexisting public curiosity and use it to begin introducing new stories that eschew the triumphant narratives of Euro-American progress embedded in popular conceptions of exploration and science. Reviving nuanced discussions of exploration can, we believe, not only open new paths for researchers but also make emerging scholarship on North America’s peoples, environments, and global connections relevant and accessible beyond the academy.