Napoleon 
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SOURCE: National Interest
5/24/2021
How Napoleon’s Legacy Explains the Middle East’s Conflicts
by Yoav Tenembaum
An international relations scholar argues that the Middle East can be explained through the division of "revolutionary" and "status quo" interests that dates to Napoleon's challenges to the European imperial order. How other nations respond to the conflict will follow whether they favor the status quo.
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SOURCE: Blue Book Diaries
5/10/2021
“Essentially an Evil Thing”
by Jonathan Wilson
Recent European controversies over the veneration of historical figures have considered war consequentially, as a means of achieving national ends. It's time to think of war, as the Nuremberg judges did, as an intrinsic evil.
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SOURCE: New York Times
5/5/2021
France Battles Over Whether to "Cancel" or Celebrate Napoleon
French President Macron will place a wreath on the former Emperor's tomb to commemorate the bicentennial of his death, as French citizens debate his legacy including his contempt for Republicanism both in independent Haiti and in France itself.
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SOURCE: New York Times
3/18/2021
Napoleon Isn’t a Hero to Celebrate
by Marlene Daut
The veneration of Napoleon on the 200th anniversary of his death reflects a systemic problem in French education, which touts the color-blind universality of French republicanism (which Napoleon destroyed) without acknowedging his policy of attempted genocide in the effort to retake control of Haiti.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
10-9-18
How Americans Described Evil Before Hitler
by Gavriel Rosenfeld
Commentators compared the Nazi leader to Napoleon, Philip of Macedon, and Nebuchadnezzar.
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SOURCE: Smithsonian
9-5-18
Can Napoleon’s Defeat at Waterloo Be Traced to a Volcanic Eruption in Indonesia?
A new study posits that an 1815 eruption caused inclement weather that, according to some theories, led to Napoleon’s defeat.
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SOURCE: NYT
6-18-18
Napoleon’s Hat, Dropped at Waterloo, Is Picked Up at Auction for $400,000
The hat is one of about 120 two-cornered military dress hats that Napoleon was said to have worn during his rule between 1799 and 1815. Historians have identified only 19 remaining hats, most of them now in museums.
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SOURCE: The Washington Post
3-20-18
The Rothschilds, a pamphlet by ‘Satan’ and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories tied to a battle 200 years ago
When did this craziness about the Rothschilds begin? A long time ago. Why? The Battle of Waterloo.
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6-18-15
We’re Remembering Napoleon’s Failure at Waterloo this Week. Here’s Another.
by Katherine B. Aaslestad
Unable to defeat Great Britain on the high seas, new research shows that he tried and failed to win by sabotaging Britain’s economy.
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SOURCE: Press Release
6-9-15
Video game maker recreates the Battle of Waterloo
Scourge of War: Waterloo, a Real-time strategic game for PC is the most detailed game about the final battle of the War of the Seventh Coalition. The game boasts 20 historical scenarios (from the French, Prussian and British perspectives).
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6-9-15
Why It’s Time to Remember Waterloo for a Different Reason
by Christine Haynes
The battle deserves to be celebrated not as the end of the first “total war,” but as the beginning of a “total peace.”
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12-28-14
How Napoleon Nearly Became a U.S. Citizen
by Munro Price
One of the greatest “What Ifs” of history is what if he had?
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SOURCE: NYT
11-16-14
Latest fad among the super rich? Buying up Napoleon artifacts
The rising prices have set off a new Napoleonic war of sorts, with private collectors competing aggressively with buyers for public museums.
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SOURCE: Independent (UK)
5-21-14
Why is Napoleon not treated with more respect in France?
French politicians and institutions in particular appear nervous about marking the 200th anniversary of Napoleon's exile.
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SOURCE: New York Times
9-24-13
200 Years After Waterloo, Some Hard Feelings Remain
Every year in Wallonia, fetes are held to honor Napoleon.
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The Egyptian Revolution Goes Napoleon
by Jack Censer
The same disillusionment set in as the French Revolution progressed. In fact, in a superb article in the Chronicle of Higher Education published in 2006, Howard Brown of the University of Binghamton described how events of the Revolution presaged events of 2006. It seems to me that Brown's article actually does even better to foreshadow what has happened in Egypt the last month and especially this week. His article concentrates on the trajectory from constitutionalism to repression under Napoleon. The biggest difference is the incredible speed of the current transformation compared to two centuries ago. It took a month in Egypt for what transpired in France over a decade. This, of course, relates to the same acceleration in the revolutionary process that Alyssa Sepinwall described elsewhere in this blog.
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SOURCE: Telegraph (UK)
8-2-13
Rescuing the farm where Wellington won the battle of Waterloo
In an isolated corner of bucolic Belgium, down a dusty track that cuts through great fields of lettuce and shivering wheat, stands the farm that won Waterloo. Of the 170,000 people who visit the battlefield each year, few find their way to this particular spot. Fat wood pigeons coo undisturbed from the crumbling walls. The view across the miles of rolling fields over which Napoleon launched waves of attacks, is unspoilt by any building. The only sound of modern life is the faint roar of a motorway, hidden by a bank of trees.Hougoumont is largely unchanged from where, on Sunday June 18, 1815, it was the centre of action throughout the Battle of Waterloo. Of the tens of thousands who died that day, 6,500 men were killed, or suffered terrible injuries, at Hougoumont. Many were dumped in a mass grave there to deter thieves....
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SOURCE: BBC News
6-16-13
Napoleon's telegraph changed the world
Napoleonic semaphore was the world's first telegraph network, carrying messages across 18th Century France faster than ever before. Now a group of enthusiastic amateurs are reviving the ingenious system.Before the web, before the computer, before the phone, even before Morse code, there was le systeme Chappe. Not for the first time or for the last, at the end of the 18th Century France made an important technological advance - only to see it overtaken by newer science.In this case, it was the world's first ever system of telegraphy.According to most accounts, the very word "telegraph" - distance writing, in Greek - was coined to describe Claude Chappe's nationwide network of semaphore....
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SOURCE: ABC News
3-24-13
Napoleon and Josephine's engagement ring sells for $949,000
The engagement ring the young Napoleon "must have broken his wallet" to buy for his fiancee Josephine shattered expectations today at the Osenat auction house in France when it sold for close to $1 million, Osenat's expert Jean-Christophe Chataignier said.The winning bidder, who wanted to stay completely anonymous, paid $949,000, almost 50 times the $20,000 Osenat had expected to bring in. Including the buyer's 25 percent commission to Osenat, the total price for the ring was $1.17 million."In my wildest dreams, I did not think we would outsell the estimate by more than 47 times," said Osenat's Emily Villane, who led today's auction. "We based the estimates in our catalog on the actual market value of the ring, minus Napoleon and Josephine provenance. It is not our job to tell bidders how much they should pay for the historical premium."...
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SOURCE: Smithsonian Magazine
3-8-13
Submarine plot to rescue Napoleon
Tom Johnson was one of those extraordinary characters that history throws up in times of crisis. Born in 1772 to Irish parents, he made the most of the opportunities that presented themselves and was earning his own living as a smuggler by the age of 12. At least twice, he made incredible escapes from prison. When the Napoleonic Wars broke out, his well-deserved reputation for extreme daring saw him hired–despite his by then extensive criminal record–to pilot a pair of covert British naval expeditions.
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