Northward Course of Empire

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Arctic was universally regarded as a frozen hellscape, a place where human civilization could not take root. Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the famed explorer who spent years living among Inuit communities, refused to accept this conventional wisdom. Drawing from his direct experience in the far north, he mounts a systematic assault on every myth that has kept humanity from expanding into these frozen territories. The land is not perpetually frozen, he argues. The coastline of the Canadian Arctic can actually be warmer than the interior of the United States. The resources beneath that ice represent wealth beyond current imagination. Stefansson wrote this book to dismantle the excuses that have held back empire and industry, to argue that the next great frontier of human expansion lies not in the west but in the north. A visionary, often controversial work that challenged the geographical assumptions of an era and asked a radical question: what if we've been wrong about who can live where?