Miscellany

Finding Napoleon in Southeast Asia

In November, 2012, I took a break from writing about Napoleon to travel in Southeast Asia, visiting Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam.  It was primarily a bicycling trip, and, I assure you, my equipment was higher quality than what you see above in the photo snapped in the picturesque fields of Vietnam. Here’s another method

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Darwin, Tortoises and St Helena

The recent death of the Galapagos Islands’ iconic tortoise, Lonesome George, sent me scrambling for my copy of The Voyage of the HMS Beagle. Sure enough, Charles Darwin, who made the Galapagos famous, had also stopped at St Helena Island. He arrived there on July 8, 1836, five and half years into his six-year trip

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Happy Birthday, Empress Josephine!

Napoleon’s first wife Josephine was born Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de la Pagerie in Martinique on June 23, 1763. If you could ask her, however, she’d probably lie and tell you her birth year was 1767, which was what she wrote on her marriage documents. Napoleon also lied on those documents, saying he, too, had

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Encyclopedia Britannica Goes Fully Digital

The Encyclopedia Britannica has announced that the 2010 publication is its last print edition.  First published in 1768, the year before Napoleon Bonaparte’s birth, this venerable reference source is going totally digital. Although I love hard-copy books, the announcement wouldn’t normally bother me. After all, the internet is a practical way to keep information up-to-date

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Napoleon Portrait Painted by a Woman

Today, I visited the “Royalists to Romantics” exhibit at the National Museum of the Women in the Arts in Washington, DC. The collection of seventy paintings on loan from the Louvre, Versailles, and other French museums were all produced by women between 1750 and 1850, a time when women artists were marginalized. One of the

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Pushcart Prize Nomination

This fall, The Delmarva Review published my short story, “Mrs. Morrisette.” Now, they’ve nominated it for inclusion in the 2012 Pushcart Prize anthology. According to the Pushcart website, “The Pushcart Prize – Best of the Small Presses series, published every year since 1976, is the most honored literary project in America.” Next April, I’ll find

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