There’s long been a historical fascination associated with the North. My country, Canada, which has been dubbed the Great White North, understands this mythology quite well. “The North focuses our anxieties,” author Margaret Atwood noted in a 1987 essay. “Turning to face north, face the north, we enter our own unconscious. Always, in retrospect, the journey north has the quality of dream.”
Researchers today can follow birds' paths as they fly thousands of miles. But it wasn't always that way. Scroll through more than two centuries of advances in understanding this natural wonder.
When Vicki Szabo, associate professor of history, finished her 2008 book on medieval whaling, she quipped in the acknowledgements she would remember all her WCU colleagues when it was made into a feature film.