National Geographic Magazine Vol. 10 - 09. September 1899

September 1899: the world sits on the edge of a new century, and this issue of National Geographic captures the restless, hungry curiosity of an empire reaching outward. Here is America just months after seizing Puerto Rico from Spain, hungry to understand its new possession. Here are explorers dreaming of the North Pole. Here is the great question of the Isthmian Canal that will redraw global trade routes. The Bad Lands of South Dakota get their first serious geological survey. A hurricane devastates the Caribbean, and scientists race to understand atmospheric patterns that could save future lives. O. P. Austin makes the case for Japan's commercial rise. The Wellman Polar Expedition prepares to launch toward the unreachable top of the world. This is National Geographic in its infancy, Volume 10, still flush with the conviction that mapping and measuring the planet is a moral undertaking. For anyone who wonders what the educated American imagination looked like at the precise moment the twentieth century began, these pages offer an answer: confident, expansionist, scientifically devout, and absolutely certain that the next hundred years belonged to them.