- Speaker
- Hampton Sides
- Lecture date
- May 13th, 2025
- Time
- 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
- Title
- The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook
Hampton Sides is best known for his gripping nonfiction adventure stories set in war or depicting epic expeditions of discovery and exploration. He is the author of the bestselling histories Ghost Soldiers, Blood and Thunder, Hellhound on His Trail, In the Kingdom of Ice, and On Desperate Ground.
His latest history, The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, was named a Best Book of the Year So Far 2024 by The New York Times Book Review. In his account of Cook’s last journey, Sides both wrestles with Cook’s legacy and provides a thrilling narrative of the titanic efforts and continual danger that characterized exploration in the 1700s.
Born in Memphis, Tennessee, and a Yale graduate, Sides is the 2015 Miller Distinguished Scholar at the Santa Fe Institute and an advisory board member of the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference and the Author’s Guild. He is editor-at-large for Outside and a frequent contributor to National Geographic and other magazines. He is also a partner of Atalaya Productions, an independent film company that develops nonfiction and historical stories for the screen.
A frequent lecturer, Sides divides his time between Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Colorado College, where he teaches narrative nonfiction and serves as Journalist in Residence.