The Blitz (02/11)
Following Hitler's invasion of Poland in September 1939, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany. After Poland and France surrendered, German intelligence sources believed that the British, too, were close to capitulation after their retreat from Dunkirk in battle between the Allies and Germany, and that a strategy similar to the...
The 1974 Ethiopian Revolution (01/11)
Ethiopia was a monarchy until 1974, ruled by a dynasty that can be documented back to the 13th century, and claimed by oral tradition to trace its lineage to King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Emperor Haile Selassie I, born in 1892, was the country's last emperor, beginning his rule as regent in 1916 and officially becoming emperor in ...
Trotsky in Mexico (09/10)
Kingsolver's fictional protagonist, Harrison Shepherd, spends much of his life brushing up against the lives of real people, including the Mexican artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera who played host to Leon Trotsky in the 1930s. Undoubtedly, you know of Trotsky, Bolshevik revolutionary and Marxist theorist, but did you know that he spent...
The Two Faces of France During WWII (04/10)
What happens when part of a country's population embraces the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity while the rest abandon those principles in favor of work, family, fatherland, and a heavy dose of anti-Semitism? Moreover, what if that ideological split divides not only the country's people, but its leadership as well? If that ...
You Don't Have To Go It Alone - Female Adventurers (04/10)
Not all adventurers seek solitude. In December 2009, seven women from the Commonwealth countries of Cyprus, India, Singapore, Brunei, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, skied together over 800 kilometres across Antarctica to the South Pole 'to demonstrate the potential of greater intercultural understanding and exchange, while at ...
Pullman Porters (02/10)
Clarence King presented himself to Ada Copeland as Pullman porter James Todd with good reason; at the turn of the 20th twentieth century, only black men were hired as sleeping car porters. Introducing himself as a man of this profession would leave no doubt of his race, regardless of the color of his skin.
(01/10)
China's Cultural Revolution, which Chairman Mao Zedong formally announced in
1966, was a reaction to his earlier attempt, known as 'The Great Leap Forward', to increase China's economic base by moving the country away from its agrarian economy to an industrialized one using the massive supplies of cheap humans rather than expensive ...
A Short Biography of Rasputin (11/09)
Rasputin's role within St. Petersburg's high society is detailed throughout
the first section of Sashenka.
Gregori Yefimovich Rasputin was born in a small village in Siberia in 1864 or
1865. At the age of 18 he was sent to a monastery, possibly as a penance for a
minor theft. He returned a changed man, and embarked on the life ...
The Salem Witch Trials (11/09)
From June through September of 1692, fourteen women and five men were hanged
in Salem Village on charges of witchcraft, and Martha Carrier was among them.
Nearly 150 men, women, and children were imprisoned, and an unknown number
perished while they languished in crowded jails for months until the trials were
brought to an end. ...
Apartheid (11/09)
Apartheid (meaning separateness in Afrikaans*) was a system of legal
racial segregation enforced by the National Party government of South Africa
between 1948 and 1990.
The new system was a way for the white Afrikaner National Party to ensure
their control over both South Africa's economy and social structure. The key was
white ...
The Stanley Internment Camp (11/09)
Although Elizabeth does not talk about her experience in a Japanese internment camp during World War II except to mention that her parents died there, its memory definitely colors her feelings about Hong Kong. While we do not know for sure, it seems likely that the camp she was interned in was the Stanley Civilian Camp - a non-segregated ...
World Expositions (10/09)
Although the first world exposition officially occurred in
1851 in London, enormous get-togethers were nothing new. Expositions
originate from markets in medieval times, where masses of people would converge
at major commercial route city centers. Lyons, Frankfurt, and Leipzig were
particularly noted for their early markets. ...
The Great Molasses Flood (10/09)
Prohibition was about to become the law of the land in 1919, and the Purity
Distilling Company wanted to make a last batch before their product became
illegal. They had a huge tank situated in the North End of Boston, which was
densely populated with Italian immigrants.
The company poured warm molasses into the tank on top of a ...
Afghanistan 1979 - 1994 (10/09)
At the beginning of the novel, Lara, a character reminiscent, in her painful past and gracefulness, of Lara in Dr. Zhivago, arrives on Marcus's doorstep to uncover the fate of her brother Benedikt, who came to Afghanistan with the 1979 Soviet invasion...
The Soviets invaded Afghanistan at the request of the largely unpopular, pro-Soviet...
Real-life Spies (09/09)
The character of Colonel Forbes-James is based in part on the spymaster
Charles Maxwell Knight (1900-1968). After rising through the ranks of the
British Fascisti organization, Knight was recruited by M15 in the mid-1920's, and later headed up B5b, the division responsible for monitoring political subversion. As M15's chief agent runner, ...
The Frank Landslide (07/09)
Most of
The Outlander is fictional, but the slide at Frank, which
catastrophically plagues the closing third of the story, is based on the factual
landslide at Frank, Alberta in 1903.
Frank, Alberta was a small Canadian mining outpost that was inaugurated as a
town in 1901. On April 29, 1903, 74 million tons of limestone
slid ...
The Metis & Louis Riel (05/09)
Louis Riel
Many of the characters featured in
The Plague of Doves
are
Metis. The Metis (historically known as the Bois
Brule) emerged in Canada in the mid-17
th Century
as New World fur traders intermarried with Cree, Ojibwe,
Salteaux and Menominee natives. While mostly French, some of
...
The 1972 Democratic Nomination (05/09)
Senator Henry Bonwiller, the presidential candidate to whom Liam Metarey acts
as closest advisor, is fictional, but the rest of the details of the 1972
Democratic nomination battle are true.
The field was crowded with men—and two women—vying to challenge President
Nixon's re-election effort. Nixon was seen as ...
The Victorian Era (05/09)
Each of Margot Livesey's four key characters relates to a specific author: John Keats, Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens and Virginia Woolf.
Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson) and Charles Dickens were both prominent Victorians, the term used to describe people, things and events during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901). A great source ...
Aleksandar Hemon (05/09)
Aleksandar Hemon's extraordinary life story is more than simply fodder for
book publicists. It informs everything he has written, for his work is
restlessly autobiographical, infused with the urgency of thinking through his
life on paper.
In 1992, Hemon was a young Bosnian writer, just two years out of the
University of ...
The Second Sino-Japanese War (05/09)
Joseph Needham's travels in China took place during the latter half of the
conflict known as the Second Sino-Japanese War - the largest war to take
place in Asia during the 20
th century (
map
of Asia).
The seeds of the conflict were sown during the First Sino-Japanese War
(1894-1895), at the end of which China ceded Taiwan and ...
The Chacapoyas (04/09)
Jackson's search for La Joya (pronounced la hoi-ya) is a search any of us could embark on, but we might find it more expedient to visit one of the easier to locate
Chachapoya sites. The Chachapoyas, the Warriors of the Clouds, lived in the Andes in what is now Northern Peru - and La Joya, one of many ruined Chachapoyan cities, can ...
The Siege of Leningrad (04/09)
The Siege of Leningrad (September 1941 - January 1944) was one of the longest and most destructive in modern history - spanning 900 days and four Russian winters. Though the actual civilian death toll can never be known it is estimated that well over 600,000 of the approximate 3 million population died, with some estimating the death toll...
Little Known Facts About Robert Frost (04/09)
By the end of his long life, Robert Frost was the éminence grise of American letters, a man whose legend preceded him and who often collaborated in promulgating that legend. Yet Brian Hall depicts a Robert Frost who is distinctly more complex than the one most of us encountered in high school, that 'simple rustic,' that plain-spoken ...
Bosnia and the Siege of Sarajevo (04/09)
The 20th century was an intensely bloody time for the Balkan region (20th century timeline & maps) as it emerged from centuries of control by the Ottoman Empire, and briefer control by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, that triggered World War I, took place on the Latin Bridge (also known as the Princip...
Industrial Disasters: the Chemical Leak in Bhopal (04/09)
Bhopal (
map) is the capital of Madhya Pradesh in central India. The violent impact of the tremendous chemical leak described in
Animal's People is based on the real life chemical leak in Bhopal in 1984, which is considered to be one of the world's worst industrial disasters.
On the morning of December 3, 1984 a holding tank of stored ...
Conscientious Objectors during WWII (04/09)
'This is a war story. It was not meant to be. It started as a love story, the story of a marriage, but the war has stuck to everywhere like shattered glass. Not an ordinary story of men in battle, but of those who did not go to war. The cowards and shirkers; those who let an error keep them from their duty, those who saw it and hid, those...
Caravaggio (02/09)
A painting presumed to be by the 17
th century painter
Caravaggio is central to the plot of
The Garden of Evil. The work found (which is purely fictional) is purported to be the artist's copy of an actual oil by Annibale Carracci, entitled
Venus with a Satyr and Cupids.
Caravaggio is one of the most fascinating and influential ...
Ken Saro-Wiwa (02/09)
In his acknowledgments, Richard North Patterson confirms that
Eclipse is
loosely based on the life and death of Nigerian writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1995.
Ken Saro-Wiwa (1941-1995) was born Kenule Benson Tsaro-Wiwa in Bori, Rivers
State (a coastal state in the south of Nigeria,
map).
He was the son of Jim Beesom ...
The British Resistance (02/09)
During WWII, Winston Churchill initiated the British Resistance Organization, or
Auxiliary Units, as preparation for the expected invasion of the British Isles
by Nazi Germany. In Owen Sheers's alternative history, the Nazis succeed, and
the insurgents mobilize at once. A highly secretive organization, the resistance
primarily ...
The Tiananmen Square Protests (02/09)
Beginning in mid-April, 1989, thousands of demonstrators anchored by a core
group of dissident university students occupied Beijing's Tiananmen Square. In
what has been described as the greatest challenge to the communist state in
China since its inception in 1949, tens of thousands soon joined in the peaceful
protest, angered by ...
A Plantagenet Primer (02/09)
Henry II
(1133-1189), the first Plantagenet* king, was born and brought up in France but lived
to rule England for 35 years. His name will always be tied obliquely to the
murder of Archbishop Thomas à Becket at Canterbury Cathedral in 1170, even
though he's often lauded as one of the most effective of all England's
monarchs...
The Black Panthers (01/09)
The author's father, Paul Coates, was a member of the
Black Panther Party. As Coates describes in his book, the Party's original
aims concerned self-defense and social justice. Bobby Seale and Huey Newton
founded the Party in 1966. Its diverse membership, however, made cohesion
difficult and produced geographically clustered ...
On the set of the film Can-Can, Shirley MacLaine and Frank Sinatra gave the communist dictator a taste of good old fashioned American titillation.
