The family was based in the industrial Ruhr, in Essen. Their business was founded in a small way, in 1811, and was unable to expand in any significant…
Ancient gods at these Olympics
I suppose we are about half way through the London Olympics of 2012 – sad for some, radiant news for others. I suppose I will be accused of…
Laurence of Arabia (article revised 2012)
Thomas Edward Laurence was born in 1888, the son of Thomas Chapman, a member of a distinguished Anglo-Irish family. Thomas had eloped with his daughter’s governess, and settled…
The Marquis who survived the French Revolution
Marie-Joseph, Marquis de LaFayette, was born in 1757, into a firmly established aristocratic family in a large European country whose people had been spoiling for a rebellion since…
Important American Moneybags: Astor, Mellon & Vanderbilt
JOHN JACOB ASTOR was born a century before our other subjects in this series ((1763). He emigrated from Germany in 1779 when he was sixteen, to work with…
Important American Moneybags: Andrew Carnegie & Henry Ford
Carnegie was born in 1835, the son of a Scots weaving hand-loom operator. The family left Scotland and emigrated to the United States of America in 1848. Young…
Important American Moneybags: John P. Morgan & J.D. Rockefeller
The 19th and 20th centuries were the twenty decades during which men (and some women) astonished the world by making uncountable fortunes in the vast territories of the…
Figures in a Revolution: Jacques-René Hébert & the Sans-Culottes
This French journalist and revolutionary was born in 1757, just thirty-two years before the French Revolution exploded on an astonished and cowed world. Hébert was not just a…
What was the Committee of Public Safety?
The term is self-contradictory, but the committee’s founders could hardly call it the ‘Committee of Public Danger’. It lasted only from 1793 to 1795 but greatly damaged France’s…
The Fall of France: “for you, the war (of 42 days) is over!”
For many, if not all, of our seasoned history-lovers, the fact that the Second World War might have been over by the middle of 1940 is unknown. But…