Nineteenth Century Europe
From the Archives: The Birth of the Boy Scouts
In the summer of 1899, no one would have pegged Colonel Robert Baden-Powell as a potential military hero. He had spent the first twenty years of his army career in small colonial wars in Afghanistan and Africa, involved more often in map-making and scouting than in battle. When he wasn’t spying, he spent his time…
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Tiny Bubbles…..
Right now I’m thinking about widows–not for personal reasons but in reference to The Book. I’ve been looking at the concept of the widow’s walk to power: think Corazon Aquino or Sirivamo Bandaraniake, who campaigned as the “weeping widow” to become the world’s first female prime minister in 1960 after the assassination of her husband.…
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Napoleon in Egypt, Part 2
Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign was a military disaster,* but the Army of the Orient wasn’t the only army that Napoleon brought with him to Egypt. A commission of some 160 savants–scientists, artists, engineers, and scholars–accompanied the invading army, bringing with them virtually every book on Egypt available, dozens of crates of scientific instruments and a printing…
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