Category: European History
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The English Novelist Who Dreamed a Nation Into Existence
How George Eliot’s final novel planted the seed of Zionism — twenty years before Theodor Herzl There is a peculiar kind of power that belongs only to fiction: the power to make people believe in a world that does not yet exist, and then go out and build it. George Eliot understood this better than…
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New Book Reveals Arsene Latour’s Adventures
Engineer-mapmaker, War of 1812 historian, architect and erstwhile secret agent Arsene Lacarriere Latour comes vibrantly to life in the new English translation of “A Visionary Adventurer, Arsene Lacarriere Latour 1778-1837, the Unusual Travels of a Frenchman in the Americas” by Jean Garrigoux. Originally printed in French in 1997, the Latour biography was translated by retired…
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The Aurora Editor Snipes at Britain, Post War of 1812
With one of those quill pens he so often had wielded to acidulously attack targets in his Weekly Aurora newspaper at Philadelphia, Editor William Duane reflected at length in March 1815 about the Causes and Character of the Late War with Great Britain, in an exposition that flowed like a river of tiny type and…
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Napoleon’s Son – Napoléon François Joseph Charles Bonaparte
Napoléon François Joseph Charles Bonaparte – Great Expectations With the birth of most children, there are all kinds of exciting possibilities and great expectations of what kind of person this new life will grow up to be. Sometimes a child comes into this world only with expectations upon the part of his parents and immediate family. …