Time Travelers
Time Travelers

Author: Adelene Buckland

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2020-05-15

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 022667682X

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The Victorians, perhaps more than any Britons before them, were diggers and sifters of the past. Though they were not the first to be fascinated by history, the intensity and range of their preoccupations with the past were unprecedented and of lasting importance. The Victorians paved the way for our modern disciplines, discovered the primeval monsters we now call the dinosaurs, and built many of Britain’s most important national museums and galleries. To a large degree, they created the perceptual frameworks through which we continue to understand the past. Out of their discoveries, new histories emerged, giving rise to fresh debates, while seemingly well-known histories were thrown into confusion by novel tools and methods of scrutiny. If in the eighteenth century the study of the past had been the province of a handful of elites, new technologies and economic development in the nineteenth century meant that the past, in all its brilliant detail, was for the first time the property of the many, not the few. Time Travelers is a book about the myriad ways in which Victorians approached the past, offering a vivid picture of the Victorian world and its historical obsessions.

The Founder
The Founder

Author: Robert I. Rotberg

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1990-10-25

Total Pages: 856

ISBN-13: 0195066685

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The definitive biography of one of the most controversial figures of the 19th century captures a life that was complex and fascinating, evil and good. Illustrated.

Robert Baden-Powell
Robert Baden-Powell

Author: Lorraine Gibson

Publisher: Pen and Sword History

Published: 2022-10-21

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13: 1399009311

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Robert Baden-Powell was Britain’s first celebrity. A conflicted character - militarist and pacifist, macho man and drag artist, elitist and socialist - he was one of the 20th century’s most influential and, latterly, controversial Englishmen, finding fame not once, but twice – and for two very different reasons. Before donning his trademark shorts, the man known for inventing the Scouts is hailed a hero of the Second Boer War, the first military conflict covered in great detail by the media. Reports of his unconventional methods of holding a Boer army at bay, despite being woefully outnumbered, at the South African town of Mafeking, make global headlines and when he returns home to England, hordes of adoring fans pack London’s streets, waving flags and declaring him the Hero of Mafeking. The same ingenuity, reconnaissance skills and spectacular eccentricity that win him this military acclaim become the foundations of his second mission, that of saving Victorian boys from poverty and despair, and himself from having to grow up, by teaching them scouting. A youth movement is born which today boasts 54 million members throughout the world. This book examines Baden-Powell’s dual personality, or his ‘two lives’ as he called them, including his difficult childhood with a domineering and unaffectionate mother whom he loved even after she forced him into the army at 19, dashing his dreams of becoming an artist. It looks at his military career and his love of drama and at why protesters wanted to topple his statue on Poole Quay in the pandemic summer of 2020. It also considers a recently-discovered telegraph that adds fuel to the speculation over the nature of his relationship with a fellow-soldier that endured for 30 years - until he married a 22-year-old woman in secret when he was 55. Baden-Powell achieved great prominence, as well as notoriety, in both his military and scouting lives, driven largely by a constant yearning to win his mother’s approval.