Who Discovered the North Pole? (Smithsonian) Reading Response

Content

• What area of the world/universe is being discussed? What other explorations are mentioned (if any)?
  Polar explorations of Peary and Cook. Also Mentioned are prior expeditions of each, And Cook’s mountain climbing
• When did the events happen?
  1908/1909, events regarding reports of the expeditions afterwards.
• What questions do you still have about this expedition after listening to/reading this content?
  Though the notes left by each explorer have not been found, will they be one day? This seems like the only way to know for sure who got to the pole first (or at all)
• What parts of the story were most interesting to you?
  That Peary and Cook were once friends, also the details about the food (pemmican is indeed very greasy, also delicious) Also, though I’m writing this response about the Smithsonian article, Admiral Byrd’s note about storing food at the south pole is really fascinating (I guess before home freezers.)

Form

• What is the form the content is being presented in?
  A side by side narrative (text article)
• What aspects of the form are especially interesting or noteworthy?
  Nothing particularly noteworthy, but very functional.
• What aspects of the form don’t really work?
  The way in which Cook and Peary fought for recognition was a little bit muddled.
• How could this content be made even more interesting or accessible to the general public?
  Nothing really, though in the spirit of this class, I do think that this would translate very well to a podcast.

Additional resources

• Find (at least) one additional scholarly resource that relates to this specific topic or the week’s more general topic. Create a citation and also add the resource to our class Zotero library.
• Find (at least) one additional primary source that relates to this specific topic of the week’s more general topic. Include an explanation of the source and a link to it. (I’d highly recommend using Tropy to keep track of these primary sources!)
• https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433000670632&view=1up&seq=11
  
  Cook’s Book about his journey.