Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa

Hales, A. G. (Alfred Greenwood), 1870-1936Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.7
Word count
387K words
Chapters
39

Tags

English Originals Military South African WarWar PhotographyMilitary CommandersIllustrated GuideWar ChronicleDocumentary NarrativeSocial Observation

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) by A. G. HalesAuthor: Hales, A. G. (Alfred Greenwood), 1870-1936,Language: English, Class: DT: History: General and Eastern Hemisphere: Africa, Release Date: Jun 25, 2005

Editor's review

This book is A. G. Hales's collected on-the-ground reporting of the South African War (the Second Boer War) of 1899–1900, recording his wartime experiences and camp life from a first-hand perspective. Its value lies not in offering a complete military history but in preserving the observational detail, language, and emotional attitudes of the time, allowing readers to sense how war correspondents wrote and the limits of their information. The contents carry clear period stances and colonial perspectives; precisely for this reason, the book can also be read as a historical source for examining how war reporting was narrated and circulated. It is suitable as supplementary reading for those interested in the Boer War, the history of modern war journalism, or British imperial history, and as a primary document for classroom discussion. Read it with a critical eye, compare it with later historical scholarship, and distinguish factual record from personal judgment; its views need not be taken as settled fact.

Who it's for

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Reading tips

  1. Consult a brief chronology of the Boer War first, then read the reports in chronological order to situate events.
  2. Mark stance-laden wording as you read and compare it with later historical accounts.
  3. Select several pieces for close reading to analyze the war correspondent's observational angle and narrative strategies.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39

FAQ

Is this book a complete history of the Boer War? No. It is a collection of the author's war reports from 1899–1900, focusing on first-hand experiences and on-scene description rather than a systematic military history. Read it alongside general histories or scholarly works, treating it as supplementary primary material rather than the sole source for understanding the war as a whole.
Should the book's narrative stance be given special attention? Yes. The book emerged in the context of colonial war and carries the imperial perspective and period prejudices of its time. Readers should distinguish factual record from personal judgment, remain critical of descriptions of the enemy and local residents, and read in comparison with later scholarship.
Can readers with only basic English manage it? The book is in old-style English newspaper prose, with sentence patterns and vocabulary characteristic of its era. Readers with basic English can work through it piece by piece with a dictionary, or start with the introduction and background materials; those seeking only a general understanding of the war should first choose Chinese general histories.

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About the author

Hales, A. G. (Alfred Greenwood), 1870-1936 Author · Australian · 1870–1936

A. G. Hales (Alfred Greenwood Hales, 1870–1936) was an Australian journalist and writer who reported for many years on Pacific and Asian affairs. Active as a war correspondent in several conflicts, he turned firsthand observation into narrative aimed at ordinary readers. His representative work, Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa, takes the South African War as its subject, recording marches, battles and colonial society in a documentary style that combines journalistic immediacy with a strong sense of literary presence. His writing is direct and rich in detail, emphasizing individual experience and the depiction of unfamiliar settings, and it offered contemporary readers a vivid window onto distant wars. Only one of his works is held in this collection, and public information is limited; his biography and the full range of his writings remain to be studied further, yet on the evidence of the known work he left a noteworthy page in documentary and war reporting.