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Travel and Exploration

Special Collections has a number of materials related to travel and exploration.  The three largest holdings consist of around 400 travelogues and other published accounts of travel throughout Europe, approximately 100 of which focus on travel within Great Britain; around 150 titles related to travel in North and South America, including emigrants’ guides, sea expeditions, and published accounts of western expansion; and a collection of maps and atlases dating from the 16th century to the present.

How to Use the Collection

With a few exceptions, the collections can be accessed and requested through the library catalog. Finding aids for individual collections are linked on this website. Materials are available for use in the Special Collections Reading Room (room 401) during regular hours. Materials do not circulate. 

MU Library Catalog

Finding Aids for Travel and Exploration

Gary E. and Janet J. Venable Antiquarian Atlas & Map Collection

The Venable Collection documents the history of cartography, geography, and exploration from the sixteenth through the early twentieth century.…

John G. Neihardt Collection.

Biographical Sketch John Gneisenau Neihardt (1881-1973) accepted a position at the University of Missouri-Columbia's Department of English in 1949…

Martin and Margaret Hiller Collection of Audiovisual Materials on China, 1945-1948.

Scope and Contents The Hiller Collection documents cities, industries, farming, and everyday life in China during the second phase of the Chinese…

Rare Books

The Rare Books Collection is the default designation for materials in Special Collections that are acquired as individual items. Like Special…

War Poster Collection.

Scope and Contents The collection consists of posters from both World War I and World War II with tourist and other miscellaneous posters from the…

William Least Heat-Moon Papers.

Scope and Contents Material by Wililam Least Heat-Moon (b. 1939). Manuscripts and additional materials from the following books: PrairyErth (A…

Related Exhibits

Hiller Collection

The Hiller Collection documents cities, industries, farming, and everyday life in China during the second phase of the Chinese Civil...

Leaders and Heroes 2: The Arts

This exhibit was born out of a desire to showcase materials within Special Collections at the University of Missouri that...

Places in the World: Treasures from the Venable Collection

Maps tell us where we are. The most obvious way they do this is geographical, but there is also a...

Selected Items

Venice and the Lido

Venice and the Lido travel poster offered by MU digital Libraries Ellis

Map Illustrating the Plan of the Defences of the Western and North Western Frontier, as Proposed by Charles Gratiot in his report of Oct. 31, 1837.

Shows the lands of the Omaha, Pawnee, Shawnee, Delaware, Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw and other Native American tribes west of Missouri, Arkansas and…

This is Russia / by George Earle Raiguel and William Kistler Huff ; with illustrations from photographs ; decorations by Harold E. Snyder.

xiv, 13-432 pages, 46 unnumbered leaves of plates : illustrations (some color), portraits ; 24 cm
"The first edition of 1500 copies of this book has…

Impressions of South America / translated by H.H. Hemming & Doris Hemming; drawings by Ione Robinson.

viii, 191 pages, 1 unnumbered page : illustrations, map, plates; 21 cm
"A series of diary letters."--Translators' note.
Author's holograph note to…

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