Happy New Year everyone!
I’m back at my desk after lots of holiday revels, research trips, and long hours of book revisions. While in DC last weekend I went to the National Gallery in DC. It’s a pretty incredible place… Read More
Napoleon survived many plots against his life. In 1800, a snuffbox was found on his desk that looked very much like his usual box; it contained poison.… Read More
Napoleon Bonaparte (1769 – 1821) was the first Emperor of France, but he spoke French imperfectly. He was from the Italian island of Corsica (eventually sold to France), and Corsican-Italian was his native language.… Read More
My eighth grader’s history textbook allocates half a page to Lewis and Clark. It explains in painfully dull detail how in 1803 President Jefferson sent the expedition to explore the new territory he’d just bought from the French (hello, how… Read More
I was helping my middle schooler study for his big American History test a few days ago, which focused on westward expansion in the early nineteenth century—you know, Manifest Destiny, the Louisiana Purchase, Lewis and Clark, and including events leading… Read More
In the course of writing my insects book, I did a lot of research on Napoleon, as so many of his French troops died from insect-vectored diseases. What a horrid little man he was.
After crowning himself Emperor in 1804,… Read More