In 1799 France changed forever. After a decade of rumbling discontent regarding the concentration of wealth towards the powerful and the exploitation of the masses who were facing widespread starvation, the French rose up and killed everyone in charge, from the King on down. The failure of the ancien regime, the creaking feudal order of
Roman emperors are perhaps remembered for their notoriety more than anything else. We remember Julius Caesar, after whom all the subsequent rulers took their name, as a brilliant commander (and because he wrote an awful lot of histories about himself) but he is most famous for his actions against the dying Roman Republic, for which
Japan is, perhaps more than any other country, strange to the west. There are many far off lands and many exotic cultures, but that of the Japanese, even today, stands apart. There are good reasons for this, to be sure. For 250 years Japan chose to isolate herself from the rest of the world. Under