Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia with Some Account of the Late Emperor the

Blanc, Henry, 1831-1911Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.7
Word count
580K words
Chapters
59

Tags

English Originals Documentary Literature Portrait GalleryPower OppressionGeography ScienceDocumentary NarrativeExotic Culture

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.Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia with Some Account of the Late Emperor theAuthor: Blanc, Henry, 1831-1911,Language: English, Class: DT: History: General and Eastern Hemisphere: Africa, Release Date: Sep 1, 2005

Editor's review

This is a nineteenth-century memoir-narrative of captivity in Abyssinia, valuable both as personal testimony and historical observation. Writing as an eyewitness, the author describes life in captivity, the people he encountered, and the ruler and society of Ethiopia at the time, giving readers a first-hand sense of political change and cross-cultural contact in the Horn of Africa in the nineteenth century. As a public-domain ebook, it suits readers interested in modern African history and in travel and captivity narrative as a genre. Readers should note the narrator's standpoint and the limitations of his era and should not take his judgments as objective historical fact. It is best read alongside relevant historical background, attending both to the story and to how the narrator selects and explains what he saw.

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Reading tips

  1. Before reading, learn the basic historical background of nineteenth-century Abyssinia to place the people and events.
  2. As you read, distinguish the narrator's personal judgments from verifiable facts and make brief notes.
  3. Trace the key points of the captivity experience in chronological order to build your own timeline of events.
  4. After finishing, compare the account with other relevant sources or research overviews to test its descriptions and standpoint.

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

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FAQ

What period does this book describe? It recounts the author's experiences in captivity in Abyssinia in the nineteenth century, including the local ruler and social conditions of the time. Specific events and chronology should be understood by comparing the narrative with relevant historical materials rather than inferred from the title alone.
Can the account be used as reliable historical source material? It is a valuable first-hand narrative, but it carries personal standpoint, memory bias, and the prejudices of its era. It is best used as one source among others and compared with other records and studies, not taken as objective fact.
Can I read this book without a background in African history? Yes, but it is advisable to first learn the basic background of nineteenth-century Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa; otherwise names, places, and political relationships may be confusing. Read introductory material first, then the original text, for smoother understanding.

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About the author

Blanc, Henry, 1831-1911 Author

Henry Blanc (1831–1911) was a nineteenth-century author about whose life little further information is publicly available. The two works held in the collection show that he wrote chiefly about his own experience of captivity in Abyssinia (present-day Ethiopia): an English Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia with Some Account of the Late Emperor the, and a French Ma captivité en Abyssinie ...sous l'empereur Théodoros. Both recount his imprisonment under Emperor Tewodros II and include observations of the ruler and those around him. As first-hand European accounts of the Horn of Africa in the nineteenth century, they combine personal memoir with historical record and offer some insight into the political situation in Ethiopia at the time and the position of Europeans there.