Apollo's Eye

This award-winning science history explores our evolving image of the globe—and how it has shifted our relationship to the world.

Long before we had the ability to photograph the earth from space—to see our planet as it would be seen by the Greek god Apollo—images of the earth as a globe had captured popular imagination. In Apollo’s Eye, geographer Denis Cosgrove examines the historical implications for the West of conceiving and representing the earth as a globe: a unified, spherical body.

Cosgrove traces how ideas of globalism and globalization have shifted historically in relation to changing images of the earth, from antiquity to the Space Age. He connects the evolving image of a unified globe to politically powerful conceptions of human unity.

Winner of the Association of American Publishers Professional and Scholarly Publishing Award in Geography & Earth Sciences