The National Geographic Magazine, Vol. I., No. 3, July, 1889

VariousProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.0
Word count
210K words
Chapters
22

Tags

Other Historical GeographyEnglish Originals Human GeographyMagazine FoundingScience EnlightenmentNature ObservationIllustrated GuideGeography ScienceEclectic Reading

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 National Geographic Magazine, Vol. I., No. 3, July, 1889 by VariousAuthor: Various,Language: English, Class: G: Geography, Anthropology, Recreation, Release Date: Nov 4, 2015

Editor's review

This is a public-domain electronic reproduction of the third issue from the early years of the American magazine National Geographic, collecting expedition records and observational articles in geography, anthropology, and natural history from the late nineteenth century. Reading it is more like leafing through primary documents from a discipline's formative period: the prose carries the tone of explorers and scholars of that era, offering both firsthand descriptions of distant places and the perspectives and limitations of Western intellectual circles at the time. For readers studying the format of early geographical journals, the evolution of popular-science writing styles, or the history of scientific communication in the late nineteenth century, this material has irreplaceable documentary value. It is not long and suits use as a supplementary text for specialized research or as comparative reading against today's popular-science writing. Be advised that some expressions bear the marks of their era; read with a critical eye toward the historical source rather than as a reliable source of accurate geographical facts.

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Reading tips

  1. Read the table of contents and opening pages first to identify each article's theme, then choose chapters relevant to your research for close reading.
  2. Note expressions reflecting period bias as you read, using them as practice material for source criticism.
  3. Read alongside modern National Geographic articles to observe a century of change in popular-science style.
  4. For the English original, keep a dictionary at hand and read slowly paragraph by paragraph; there is no need to finish it in one sitting.

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
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  11. 11
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FAQ

Does this magazine still have reading value today? Yes, but chiefly as a historical source. It records the original state of late nineteenth-century geographical exploration and popular-science writing and can be used to study disciplinary history, journal history, and modes of scientific communication; for accurate geographical knowledge, consult modern sources.
How difficult is the English, and is it suitable for English learners? The text is nineteenth-century written English with longer sentences and rather formal diction, harder than modern journalistic English. Readers with some English foundation and an interest in historical texts can read it slowly; beginners are advised to use annotations or read selected short pieces.
What should I keep in mind while reading? Be aware of expressions and perspectives limited by their era and do not accept them directly as objective fact. Treat it as a historical document and read it against modern research and background materials.

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.