It's high adventure in this thrilling addition to the Renaissance World series. Learn all about the Age of Exploration, where brave Europeans sailed around the world in search of sea routes to Asia and India-and found much more than anticipated.

For all of fur's contentious position in American culture today, historian Eric Jay Dolin shows its centrality in our nation's ever-surprising history. He argues that the trade in animal skins turned colonial America into a tumultuous frontier where global powers battled for control. From the seventeenth century right on up to the Gilded Age, the developed world's appetite for fur made the new continent, with its wealth of fur-bearing wildlife, a...