Talk:William Bullock (collector)

Latest comment: 14 years ago by CJLL Wright in topic Other names?

Notes & suggestions edit

This is a good but rather basic article on an important collector who also wore many other hats: traveler, antiquarian, expert taxidermist, first creator of "habitat groups" in museum display, showman, participant in mining boom in Mexico, c. 1825, travel writer, promoter of panoramas, etc. I'm a new user of Wikipedia, and thought I'd help out a bit by adding two recent references to the slim list this piece contains, one an article by Michael Costeloe, the other my book, Informal Empire: Mexico and Central America in Victorian Culture, (University of Minnesota Press, 2005), which has two lengthy chapters on Bullock. Infrog removed the reference to my book without explanation. This was also the case at a couple of other articles where I thought my book would be of use to others on Wikipedia.

I'm an academic researcher and am interested in contributing, but my first experience here leaves me a bit cold. Wiki has been widely critized for containing erroneous information. Here, it's simply out of date and scanty. Having experts who've published in academic forums might help, but simply removing their contributions without explanation will only put them off. Rdaguirre 16:35, 16 March 2007 (UTC)Reply

Other names? edit

William Henry Hall, author of Across Mexico in 1864-5, different guy? —Wiki Wikardo 11:32, 16 October 2009 (UTC)Reply

If you're talking about the cricketer and the author of Across Mexico in 1864-5 (and presumably not the subject of this article, the antiquities collector), then I would say that yes, there is a high probability that the cricketer and the author are one and the same person. Their birthyears are the same, the author is also sometimes indexed as "Hall-Bullock" (also Bullock-Hall), and one of the most notable things about his Mexico travelogue is an account of a game of cricket he saw played there. Contemporary reviews of his book that can be found highlight this and indicate that he (the author) was knowledgeable on the game, (without directly referring to any previous career as a first class cricketer, tho). Some contemporary source that mentions both in the one breath would be a clincher, but I'd say it'd be a reasonable assumption to make. But then again, assumptions can go wrong, might possibly be a remarkable coincidence.

Were you asking for purposes of disambiguating from this Wm Henry Bullock?--cjllw ʘ TALK 06:17, 20 October 2009 (UTC)Reply