Before 1900

Before 1900, Books, Pictures

The doom of the great city

The degree to which science fiction accurately predicts the future is not really the point; its value is more as an exploration of what people might do and what society might look like if you change things in a few fundamental ways. (And for my purposes, it’s the assumptions underlying a given exploration which are

Before 1900, Blogging, tweeting and podcasting

1688 and all that

Military History Carnival Edition Four has clearly been timed to catch me in transition from the southern to the northern hemisphere, so I’m a couple of days late in posting about it. For me, the most interesting post was Philobiblon’s on the suggestion that the so-called Glorious Revolution was successful because the Dutch ships were

1920s, Before 1900, Other, Periodicals

Bad memes

Chain letters are a kind of meme, but not a good kind — inane, threatening, pointless. They are surprisingly venerable and ubiqitous, however. Many past cultures had some form of chain letter, generally claimed to be communications from a god. In medieval and early modern Europe, these “messages from heaven” seem to have been fairly

1900s, 1910s, Before 1900, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Pictures, Rumours

The Scareship Age

On the night of 23 March 1909, a police constable named Kettle saw a most unusual thing: ‘a strange, cigar-shaped craft passing over the city’1 of Peterborough, Cambridgeshire. His friends were sceptical, but his story was corroborated, to an extent, by Mr Banyard and Mrs Day, both of nearby March, who separately saw something similar

1900s, Before 1900

Q. When is an island not an island?

A. Just about all the time, it seems, if it’s Britain: Lord Palmerston in 1845, on the coming of the steam ship: … the Channel is no longer a barrier. Steam navigation has rendered that which was before impassable by a military force nothing more than a river passable by a steam bridge.Quoted in I.

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