The Great Battles of All Nations

The most famous listing of decisive battles may be Edward Creasy's study of 15 battles, from Marathon to Waterloo, which came out in 1851.  The wikipedia listing on the book (which I believe I read) mentions later compendia, including some which considered themselves supplements to Creasy's.  One of those came out in 1898 and adds Gettysburg, Sedan, Santiago, and Manila Bay to it, which may be the one you have.  But it doesn't mention Archibald Wilberforce.  Of course, he might have been the one who got another writer to make those additions and got himself listed as editor or publisher.

I will need your credit card number, two forms of ID, your mother's maiden name, your shoe size, title to the house, and proof that you are Wuhan-Flu-negative. Other than that, it's a piece of cake.

Or I can just send these to you. They'd probably be coming by UPS. I'm going to first take a few moments to look at the engraved pictures and photograph and share a couple here. They really look like quality works. And my guess is that anyone who put that kind of time and expense in the engraving probably etched some pretty good historical prose as well. But these books have your name written all over them. I knew it as soon as I looked at them.

I also have available at the Reviews&Things lending library (although this selection would be for permanent loan) what appears to be a high school or college book (this one has “West High School” stamped on the inside front cover and was definitely a library edition). It looks just like this one at Amazon.

I has a short stories section, a nonfiction section, a poetry section, a drama section, an epic tale section, and lastly the novel section which consists of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations.

Done and done. By the end of the week, I might be able to get both volumes of The Great Battles of all Nations and American Political and Social History into UPS.

One wonders what he would have thought of electronic books. I suspect he'd have a Kindle or two.

I notice that the book takes it up to the surrender of Cronje in South Africa (at Paardeberg).  Is that in fact included?  It was certainly an interesting fight, but it hardly meets any standard of decisiveness in that by the time Cronje was run to ground by Roberts and Kitchener, it was only a matter of time despite the intervention of Christiaan De Wet.  It was lethal to a lot of British troops who got some enteric disease (dysentery, typhoid, whatever) from polluted water.

I searched for Paardeberg, and it did have a readable page giving a brief summary of events from the aftermath of Magersfontein (where the Black Watch got sunburned on the backs of their knees) to Cronje's surrender.  This obviously wasn't a battle description

Still playing with my new iPhone SE 2020 ($350.00 at Consumer Cellular). More about that later. But if you’re looking to upgrade (whether iPhone or Android), I can recommend it at this point.

The first photo of the Marathon engraving was taken by my iPhone’s stock Camera app (made by Apple). This second one was taken by a paid-for third-party camera app called “ProCamera.” It has an exposure lock option. And I have a grey-card target (which is grey on one side and white on the other) which can be used to set white balance.

Basically you aim the camera at the grey-card, let it determine the exposure (especially the “white balance”), and then lock it. Move back to your subject (this book) and take a photo.



MarathonBalancedCam

You can see that the background of the image is not so yellow. But neither is it white, nor should it be. When Mr. 1984 Flu gets these books in the mail he will see that this second image is a better representation of what is in the book. The little speckly splotches at the top are merely a reflection of my one-light-source quicky studio glaring off the paper.

Thank you for this diversion into photography. I’m still gauging the feasibility of replacing a bulky DSLR (or even a compact camera) with a phone camera. The results of my research and experiments have been highly positive so far. Like I said, I’ll probably write more about this elsewhere when I get a chance and give a condensation of my findings.

I think it’s a fair guess that these are meant to be works of art rather than accurate portrayals. Here’s another:



ThermopylæCam