The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 20, March 25, 1897

VariousProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.6

Word count: 80K words
Chapters: 8

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.The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 20, March 25, 1897Author: Various,Language: English, Class: D: History: General and Eastern Hemisphere, Release Date: Mar 21, 2005

Editor's review

This is an electronic edition of a single weekly issue published on March 25, 1897, Volume 1, No. 20 of The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It. Its value lies not in literary quality but in historical documentation: readers can see directly how the late nineteenth-century English-speaking world presented current events to young readers, including news arrangement, tone, and methods of popularizing knowledge. As an early public-domain text released by Project Gutenberg, it preserves the original publication's column structure and period vocabulary, making it a raw sample for readers studying the history of children's periodicals, the evolution of news style, or the international situation at the turn of the century. There is no need to read it straight through; treat it as a time capsule, dip into columns that interest you, and notice how the editor explains complex international events to young readers. As a nineteenth-century text, some expressions carry obvious period prejudice and colonial perspectives and should be read critically.

Who it's for

A good fit for

History enthusiasts studying late nineteenth-century children's periodicals and news style
Digital humanities readers interested in the development of public-domain ebooks
English learners who want to understand how international news was narrated around 1897
General readers interested in late Victorian popular science and social reading materials

Not a good fit for

Readers expecting a complete, coherent narrative or a literary reading experience
Readers unfamiliar with English who are unwilling to use tools to look up old-fashioned expressions
Readers seeking contemporary-perspective analysis of current events

Reading tips

Start with the table of contents and column headings, then choose current-events items that interest you for close reading; there is no need to read page by page.
When you encounter unfamiliar names or places, do a brief background search first, then return to the text; understanding will be smoother.
Note expressions that carry period prejudice and compare them with similar reporting today to train critical reading.
If using it for research, consult other periodicals from the same period to build a cross-referential historical sample.

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.

FAQ

Is this text a complete book?

No. It is a single issue of The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It published on March 25, 1897, Volume 1, No. 20; it is a collection of several current-events columns and short pieces, not a complete work.

Can I read it if my English is not good?

You can try, but it takes patience. The text is late nineteenth-century English, with sentence patterns and wording that differ from modern English. It is advisable to read with a dictionary and background searches, or start with short column entries and gradually get used to the old-fashioned expressions.

Is it suitable for learning about the history of 1897?

It can serve as a primary historical source, but it should not be treated as a systematic history textbook. It reflects how editors of the time presented the world to young readers and carries period positions and limitations; it is best used alongside other historical sources.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Various Author

Various is not a real person but a collective attribution used in book cataloging and databases for works with multiple authors, commonly applied to anthologies, compilations, or publications with too many contributors to list individually. On this Chinese book site, this attribution covers as many as 3,387 titles, spanning encyclopedic entries, historical documents, and trial records. Representative works include several volumes of the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the record of the trial of the major war criminals before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Available public information is limited: nationality, birth and death dates, and common categories are not clearly recorded, making it difficult to summarize a unified writing style or personal biography. Readers should understand it as a cataloging convention rather than a single author.