To Discover New Frontiers Trivia Quiz

Answer: Mount Sinai

Egeria spent three years traveling to Egypt, Israel and Syria during the years AD 381-384. She wrote of these adventures in a long letter for her spiritual sisters back home. A partial manuscript of this has been found and copied. The first part of her missives detail her travel to and around Mt. Sinai where she tried to find all she could relating to the Biblical book "Exodus".

After a lengthy stay in Jerusalem, she made her way to other Biblical sites and described them, as well as writing accounts of worship practices.

This woman's frontiers included geographical areas, language evolution, and theological theories.

Answer: Vikings

Gudrid was the daughter of an Icelandic chieftain and was born around AD 980. She traveled at a young age, with her father, to places like Greenland and Norway. According to the sagas by Eric the Red, Gudrid married Leif Eriksson's brother and joined him on his expeditions to find Vinland.

After her husband died, she married a merchant and they sailed to Vinland and lived in a small encampment for almost three years. They had a son there, who is the first European to be born in the Western Hemisphere. Gudrid returned to Europe, traveled some more, and ended her life a nun.

This woman found both a New World and a new frontier.

Answer: First woman to circumnavigate the globe

Jeanne Baret was born in 1740 in France. She learned about plants growing up, and went to work as a housekeeper (and lover) to Philibert Commerson, who studied medicine and botany. She helped him with his work. He was asked to join an exploratory expedition in 1766 and Jeanne snuck on with him as a valet.

They stopped in many new places around the world where she collected plant specimens, including the bougainvillea which she named for the expedition leader. Her identity was discovered on an island stop, so she stayed on board during future excursions.

She lived abroad until 1775 when she returned to France. This made her the first woman to circumnavigate the globe. She died at the age of 67, having reached several frontiers.

Answer: Isabella Bird

Isabella Bird was born in 1831 in Yorkshire, England. She was very fragile and sickly and her doctor recommended travel. She began journeying to North America in 1854 and over the next decade visited places like Hawaii (where she lived among the natives) and the Rocky Mountains.

She wrote non-fiction books to teach other about her explorations. Bird visited Japan where she stayed with the Ainu tribe. In 1888 she left for India and established two hospitals in the area and preached reform back to the government in England.

Her last trip was to Morocco before she died in 1904.

Answer: Insane asylum

Nellie was born Elizabeth Cochran in 1864. After her family lost their money, she helped run a boardinghouse and wrote letters to the local Pittsburgh paper. The editor offered her a job and she changed her name to Nellie Bly. She was looking for serious journalism so in 1886 she pretended to be mentally ill and entered an insane asylum on Blackwell's Island for ten days.

She wrote a series of articles that helped people to focus on the horrible conditions she had encountered. This was a frontier few people had dared to go.

She later traveled around the world in 72 days (attempting to beat Jules Verne's account). She died while still an investigative reporter in 1922.

Answer: False

Because of her experiences and fluency in both Arabic and Persian, Bell was the only woman present at the 1921 Conference in Cairo, which helped determine the boundaries of Iraq.

Gertrude Bell was born in 1868 in England and grew up wealthy. She graduated with honors from Oxford and began traveling, focusing most of her efforts in the Middle East. She wrote books, worked with Red Cross, and collaborated with T.E. Lawrence in Iraq. She remained in Baghdad and after 1921 she funded and constructed an archaeological museum there. This woman who crossed multiple frontiers (and created some) died of suicide in 1926.

Answer: National Geographic

Harriet Chalmers was born in 1875 in California and quickly learned multiple languages and picked up the urge to travel from her father. In 1899, she and her husband (Franklin Adams) set out on a three year voyage of South America. They traveled by train, boat, and horse.

She wrote about these discoveries and shared them with National Geographic, who she would collaborate with for years to come. Adams set out to visit every country that had been part of Spain. She spent years exploring, living with natives, and writing about all of it.

She was only the third American woman to join the Royal Geographical Society. Harriet Adams passed away in 1937 and left a legacy behind including the strong urging of other women "to go wherever a man goes".

Answer: Arctic seas

Louise Boyd was born in 1887 in California to a wealthy family. She was an ardent follower of explorers, especially Roald Amundsen. When she was 32, both her brothers had died and she suddenly was an orphan. Louise used her inheritance to explore the Arctic in 1926.

In 1928, instead of going for pleasure, she changed her plans and spent 10 weeks in the Arctic looking for Amundsen who had disappeared. Although he was never found, she was addicted to the area. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, she led multiple expeditions in the Arctic and around Greenland.

She was recognized as a key scientist in photogrammetry, or the science of taking picture to create maps in difficult places. She died in 1972, at age 84, and asked her ashes be scattered near the glaciers she loved so much.

Answer: Aviation

Bessie Coleman grew up in Texas in the early 1900s. African Americans were barred from many daily activities and she walked four miles every day to school. When she was 23 she moved to Chicago with a brother to change her life and learn to fly. When the discrimination continued there, she scraped up money and moved to France.

There, although the only colored student in the class, she achieved her goal of learning to fly a biplane. Over the next several years, Coleman flew in air shows and, in her spare time, encouraged other African Americans to reach for their dreams. Tragically, she died in an airplane accident in 1926 in Florida. Pilots continue to annually fly over her grave in Chicago in a show of respect.

Answer: Space

Valentina Tereshkova was born in 1937 in Russia to a peasant family. She made a parachute jump at age 18 and was intrigued with skydiving and space. This caught the attention of the Soviet space program and she was selected, in 1962, to begin cosmonaut training.

A year later, she was chosen to take part in the Vostok space program. In 1963 she was launched into space and spent three days guided by automatic controls. On June 19, she reentered the atmosphere and successfully parachuted to safety. Valentina spent years doing goodwill trips, spreading the word of space exploration, and joining the USSR parliament.

She did not enter space again, having broached that "final frontier".