The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 42, August 26, 1897

VariousProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.8

Word count: 47K words
Chapters: 5

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. 42, August 26,Author: Various,Language: English, Class: D: History: General and Eastern Hemisphere, Release Date: May 27, 2005

Editor's review

This electronic edition of a single weekly issue has value as a historical document: it belongs to an early current-affairs digest aimed at young readers. Its worth lies not in narrative or literary style but in showing how, at a particular moment, people explained the world to the young. It covers international affairs, science and technology, and social news of the day, rewritten in plain, short pieces. It is a useful sample for understanding late nineteenth-century popular news writing and knowledge books for young people. Read it as historical material, not as today's news, and note the difference between the usage of the time and present-day understanding. It suits readers interested in publishing history, journalism history, and the evolution of children's literature, as well as learners who need short English reading material. Because it is a single bound issue, topics jump widely; readers are advised to choose pieces by interest rather than read straight through.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Readers interested in late nineteenth-century publishing and journalism history and in young people's literature
Learners who need short original English texts for extensive reading practice
Libraries and digital humanities practitioners studying early ebooks and public-domain materials
History and literature enthusiasts who enjoy browsing old periodicals and sensing the tone of the era

Not a good fit for

Readers seeking systematic historical narrative or in-depth analysis
Literary readers looking for coherent plot and character development
Beginners with weak English who need annotations and translation

Reading tips

Skim the headline-style titles first, choose the entries that interest you for close reading, and skim the rest.
Keep a notebook of unfamiliar words and period expressions to compare past and present usage.
Read it alongside other young people's periodicals of the same period to observe differences in topic selection.
Read three to five pieces at a time to avoid losing the thread amid the jumps between topics.

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 book a complete work or a single issue of a periodical?

It is Volume 1, No. 42 of The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, the contents of a single week, not a complete book with a unified structure. The pieces are relatively independent, so readers need not read in order and can choose freely by title.

How difficult is the original English?

The text was written for young readers of the time: sentences are short and wording plain, but it contains late nineteenth-century proper nouns and old-fashioned expressions, so modern readers may need to check place names, personal names, and background events. Overall it suits readers with intermediate English.

What should I keep in mind when using it as historical material?

Treat it as a record from the perspective of its time, not a neutral summary of facts. Its judgments, wording, and selection reflect the era and the editor's standpoint. When citing it, cross-check with other sources from the same period and clearly note the nature of the periodical and its publication date.

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.