"England is a nation of shopkeepers."  Thus spake Napoleon. Napoleon Bonaparte was not being complimentary. It was a put-down, his way of saying England was no France, and certainly no match for his Grande Armee that was planning an invasion of England. Napoleon was wrong. England was not a nation of shopkeepers but a nation of inventors whose work led to the standardization of parts and a decided edge in weapon's production and in shipbuilding, giving the English army and

The Age of Enlightenment began in an English coffee house. The Enlightenment was about ideas, and what better place to talk about ideas than at the local coffee house? They were also known as “penny universities.” For a penny cup-of-coffee you could sit in on what amounted to a college course conducted by, say, Adam Smith or David Hume, or whomever happened to drop in that day. It started in Cambridge, moved on to London and Edinburgh, then across the English Channel to Pari

When the Founding Fathers were searching for a moral basis on which to declare independence from Britain, they looked to the writings of...

As a survivor of the Nazi holocaust, Gidon Lev should be bitter, angry and unforgiving.  But he isn't.  He's an eternal optimist, and...

You have to love a guy who can laugh at himself. You can be sure he likes people and above all enjoys life. Now imagine that someone is a...

No one would ever accuse Ben Jonson of modesty—or tact. He took life by the horns, consequences be damned. A bricklayer’s son, he rose to...

Could it be? William Shakespeare—the world’s greatest playwright—was better known in his day as one of the great actors of the London...

It was threatening to become an international incident.  The United States had the Crown of St. Stephen locked up in the vault at Fort...

It was getting near Christmastime, and the communist regime that had held Czechoslovakia in its iron grip for 40 years was letting go. ...

It’s been called the “Pearl of the Adriatic,” “Venice Without Canals,” and “Heaven on Earth.” Pronounced DU-brov-nick, it's the most...

It took a year-and-a-half of waiting in anterooms, of personal humiliations, of lobbying the government for official recognition, and of...

Imagine a place where the gap between rich and poor is minimal, where the ruling elite govern democratically, and, despite having no...

Hamburg is a city that just won’t be defeated.  It’s been flooded, burned, bombed, seen half its population decimated by the plague and,...

Many famous rights activists over decades have been known for expressing a mental liberation while in prison.  Nelson Mandela sang...

Few places are as different as the country where Duma Boko was born in 1969 and the one where he became president last November. He...

Look on the map and you'll see Vienna is exactly in the middle of Europe.  Yes, Vienna, as in the Vienna Waltz, the Vienna hot dog,...

At the outset of the new year, assessments of global security warn that conflict is spreading across more countries worldwide and a new...

As the elected president off Moldova -- one of Europe's poorest countries -- Maia Sandu often uses part of her day to rebut online...

After its surprising but effective military incursion into Russia in August, Ukraine has shown why it is not really seeking territorial...

Throughout history rivers have been the lifeline of civilization.  In "Rivers of Power" author and geophysicist Laurence Smith shows how...