Around the World in 72 Days

On November 14, 1889, two years after her spectacular exposé of the abuses in a New York mental institution, "Ten Days in the Insane Asylum," star journalist Nellie Bly sets out to circumnavigate the globe in record time. The 25-year-old is equipped only with a tailored travel dress, a coat and a handbag. Nellie Bly deviates from her route just once, to meet the novelist Jules Verne in Amiens, France, whose fictitious record she will beat by eight days. Bly's journey around the world in 72 days becomes the journalistic coup of the year and the highlight of her career. Her report, published in New York in 1890, provides a rare insight into the early history of globalized tourism and the technical development of the world, but is also a testimony to colonial megalomania.