Modern History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Modern History’
In 1928, a train service linking London and Edinburgh became the world’s longest non-stop run.
LNER A3 No. 4472 ‘Flying Scotsman’ won a place in the history books and in the hearts of millions worldwide when in 1934 she clocked 100 mph and set a world speed record for steam. But history had already been made when in 1928, the train service from which she took her name completed the world’s longest non-stop run.
David Livingstone relives the historic moment when he became the first European to see the Victoria Falls.
In 1852-56, David Livingstone mapped the course of the Zambesi, hoping that agricultural trade along the river would crush the horrible trade in slaves (recently outlawed in the British Empire). On November 16, 1855, he was transported by canoe to a magnificent cataract named Mosi-oa-Tunya, ‘the smoke that thunders’, so becoming the first European to see the Victoria Falls.
Four years before the bloody American civil war, Dr David Livingstone proposed a peaceful way to rid the world of slavery.
In 1861-65, America went to bloody civil war over (among other things) the issue of slavery in the South’s cotton and sugar plantations, and upwards of a million people died. A few years earlier, Scotsman David Livingstone proposed a far less destructive answer: establish cotton and sugar farms in Africa, employ local labourers on good wages, and strangle slavery by the cords of the free market.
Welsh journalist Henry Stanley is despatched by head office in New York to find a missing British explorer.
In 1865 explorer David Livingstone went in search of the sources of the Nile. Three years passed with no word of his fate, so Welsh journalist Henry Stanley of the New York Herald was despatched to track him down. By the Autumn of 1871 the errand seemed hopeless, but then word came of a white man in Ujiji, on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika.
Human beings should not be frantic cogs spinning away in the Government’s factory of Progress.
John Buchan contrasted his view of society, as a delicate ecosystem of living plants suited to a particular climate and soil, with the economic abstractions of political experts in Germany and the Soviet Union, for whom people were mere cogs and pistons in the pounding machine of Government.
On his travels through China and Tibet, Roman Catholic missionary Évariste Huc came across a novel way of telling the time.
Évariste Régis Huc was a Roman Catholic missionary who wrote of his travels through China, Tartary and Tibet at a time when such travels were rare for Europeans. The following anecdote tells how his party was momentarily stumped by a Chinese boy’s ability to tell the time by examining a cat.