1935 Central Park, New York;
1858 Professor Ganz's library in Berlin;
1902 Shalten's flat on the Left Bank;
1894 the streets of London.
In 1894:
Grover Cleveland is President of the United States;
Victoria is Queen of England;
Kipling is writing;
the last American Indian uprisings are still ahead.
Time Patrol offices for 1850-2000 are in London, Moscow and Peiping, 1890-1910. In 1894, the London office must prevent a German from 1917 from assassinating Queen Victoria and must also cope with the Balkan Question and the Chinese opium trade.
Also in, or overlapping with, the 1850-1900 period, although not mentioned by Poul Anderson, were:
1837-1901 the reign of Queen Victoria
1838-1857 the Chartist movement
1845-1852 the Irish Potato Famine
1859 publication of The Origin of Species
1861-1865 the American Civil War
1865-1909 the reign of Leopold II of Belgium
1867 the Manchester Outrages by the Irish Republican Brotherhood
1870-1871 the Franco-Prussian War
1871 the Paris Commune
1879 the birth of Einstein
1883 the death of Marx
- and blog readers will be able to add other details. The Time Patrol would have been kept very busy.
6 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Other persons of note who could have been included in the 1850-1900 time period list would have been Francis Joseph of Austria-Hungary (reigned 1848-1916), Pope Pius IX (reigned 1846-1878), the Taiping civil war in China (1850-1864), the abolition of Serfdom in Tsarist Russia (1862). Many other persons or incidents could be added, but I think this is enough for now.
Sean
Sean,
It is indeed. Thank you for adding more.
Paul.
Paul and Sean:
There're also the actions of the person for whom S.M. Stirling named one of his villains: William Walker, described by Wikipedia as "an American physician, lawyer, journalist and mercenary who organized several private military expeditions into Latin America, with the intention of establishing English-speaking slave colonies under his personal control, an enterprise then known as "filibustering"."
Born in 1824, Walker began these depredations in 1853, but in 1860 one of the governments he tried to overthrow put him up against a wall and shot him. (The Royal Navy, regarding Walker as a threat to British interests in the region, had captured him and handed him over to this government.)
"Despite his intelligence and personal charm, Walker consistently proved to be a limited military and political leader. Unlike men of similar ambition, such as Cecil Rhodes, Walker's grandiose scheming ultimately failed against the union of Central American people."
Thanks to Walker and others of his stripe, Central Americans didn't think very highly of Norteamericanos. Thanks to United Fruit in later decades, they've had little reason to change that opinion.
Kaor, DAVID!
I had some what vaguely heard of this William Walker, and his attempts at carving out a kingdom for himself. And I certainly understand how and why he ended up against that wall. Besides Cecil Rhodes, a more successful and LASTING example of such filibustering would be the Brooke rajahs of Sarawak.
Still, I would rate Stirling's William Walker more highly than the real Walker. Because the fictional Walker seems to have been smarter and more competent than the real Walker. His ultimately fatal mistake was trying to found his kingdom in a part of the world accessible to his Nantucketer enemies.
Sean
Actually, Walker probably would have won if he hadn't lethally pissed off Vanderbilt by confiscating one of his ships. It was Vanderbilt who financed and organized the opposition.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I noticed that, when I looked up the real William Walker, and of how he had infuriated Cornelius Vanderbilt. Even so, I'm still inclined to think Walker lost for several reasons: (1) he was trying to advance, in however twisted a way, the interests of the US rather than HIS OWN interests. If Walker had acted solely in his own self interest, he would have tried harder to win LOCAL support and hence legitimacy, trying to govern in ways that would not fatally alienate the locals. So, a combination of Vanderbilt and all the Central American enemies he made pretty clearly explains why Walker failed.
Sean
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