Three Years in Europe: Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met

William Wells BrownProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.8
Word count
379K words
Chapters
38

Tags

English Originals Travel Human GeographySocial ObservationPortrait GalleryCivic AwarenessDocumentary NarrativeSelf-ReflectionExotic CultureCross-Cultural ViewModern China

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.Three Years in Europe: Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met by BrownAuthor: Brown, William Wells, 1814?-1884,Language: English, Class: DA: History: General and Eastern Hemisphere: Great Britain, Ireland, Central Europe, Release Date: May 15, 2005

Editor's review

This work is the European travelogue of the nineteenth-century African American writer William Wells Brown, recording his observations and encounters over three years in Britain, Ireland, and continental Europe from a first-person perspective. It combines descriptions of famous sights and scenery with accounts of social customs, public life, and the people he met, written in the characteristic tone of nineteenth-century transatlantic travel writing. As a public-domain ebook, its value lies not only in its geographical and cultural record but also in offering a window into how a writer from the abolitionist movement viewed Old World society; it can be read alongside nineteenth-century travel literature and the African American literary tradition. The text is in English and is suitable for extensive reading of the original or for research-oriented selections; readers should keep the historical context in mind to understand its observational perspective and mode of expression.

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Reading tips

  1. Begin with the table of contents and chapter headings, start with chapters related to London and Ireland, then read through the whole book.
  2. Prepare a timeline of nineteenth-century European history and the abolitionist movement, and refer to it for the background of people and events while reading.
  3. Excerpt the author's commentary on people and customs, and compare it laterally with travel writing of the same period.
  4. For the English original, read ten to fifteen pages a day; when encountering long sentences, first identify the main clause, then fill in the modifiers.

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

FAQ

What is this book mainly about? It is William Wells Brown's European travelogue, recording the places he saw and the people he met during three years in Europe, including observations of cityscapes, social customs, and public life; it is a nineteenth-century travel writing and personal documentary text.
What background knowledge is needed to read this book? It is best to have a basic understanding of nineteenth-century European society and the abolitionist movement, and to be familiar with the long-sentence structures of written English. With this background, it is easier to understand the focus and mode of expression of the author's observations.
What are the features of this edition? This edition is a public-domain English ebook released by Project Gutenberg, with the main text in English. It is easy to obtain and search for free, and is suitable for reading the original and for thematic research; it contains no modern annotations or introduction.

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

William Wells Brown Author · American · 1814–1884

William Wells Brown (1814–1884) was an American writer and abolitionist speaker. Born into slavery in Kentucky, he escaped to Ohio in 1834 and gained his freedom. In 1847 he published his autobiography, Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave, exposing the cruelty of slavery through his own experience. Clotel, published in London in 1853, is regarded as the first novel published by an African American and centers on social realities in the Southern states. He also wrote Three Years in Europe, an account of his travels and encounters there, and the first published play by an African American, The Escape. His works draw mainly on slavery, escape, and resistance, blending autobiography, fiction, and reportage, and hold pioneering significance in African American literature and the abolitionist movement.