One of the largest comets of the 19th century suddenly appears just weeks before the Battle of Bull Run. Stonewall Jackson's sword mysteriously falls only hours before his fatal wounding at Chancellorsville. As a boy, Ulysses S. Grant has his head examined at a county fair and is told that he will someday become president of the United States. A soldier carves his headstone as a joke, only to be killed hours later. Colonel Warren Akin of Georgia dreams of his son lying unconscious and bleeding?two days later, his son is thrown from a horse and dies. Are all of these happenings mere...

Between 1838 and 1852, the leading Chartist newspaper, the Northern Star, published over 1000 poems written by more than 350 poets - as the readership of the Northern Star numbered hundreds of thousands, these poems were amongst the most widely read of the Victorian era. This book offers a complete record of all the poems published. It asks a simple question: why did the writing and reading of poetry play such an important role in Chartism's struggle to secure fundamental democratic rights? It answers this question by analysing the interplay between politics, aesthetics and history in the...