On January 18, 1871, the Second Reich was created. On this day, in the Palace of Versailles near Paris, Bismarck, in the presence of German princes, read out the text of the proclamation of the Prussian king as the German emperor. It was a triumph of the policy of unifying Germany with “iron and blood” of the great German statesman Bismarck. The German Empire politically united all states with the German population (25 states with 40 million Germans), with the exception of Austria, Luxembourg and Liechtenstein....
Alice Brown was born in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire. In 1876 she graduated from Robinson's Seminary in Exeter. For five years after that, she worked as a school teacher, and then moved to Boston, where she decided to devote herself completely to writing. At first she worked in Christian Register magazine, and since 1885 - in Youth's Companion. For many years it enjoyed great fame and reputation as a prolific author, but its popularity waned after the beginning of the 20th century. She published one book a year until 1935, when she withdrew from writing....
Orison Swett Marden is an American publicist, author of books on self-improvement and the path to success in life. He has published more than 50 books and brochures on this subject, since 1897 he has been publishing the Success magazine, which had about half a million subscribers....
The legend of Tristan and Isolde is of Celtic origin. Its origins were probably located in Ireland, but it was widely known in all countries of medieval Europe, living in many literary works, the earliest of which dates back to the 12th century. The main idea of the legend is the victory of love over death. The story tells about the love of the knight Tristan and the wife of the Cornish king the beautiful Isolde. The great German composer, a reformer of opera music, who created the direction of “musical drama” and had a profound influence on European modernism and decadence, Richard Wagner...
The pinnacle of the work of the English writer, journalist and graphic artist William Makepeace Thackeray was the novel Vanity Fair. All characters of the novel - positive and negative - are involved, according to the author, in the "eternal circle of grief and suffering." Saturated with events, rich in subtle observations of everyday life of its time, imbued with irony and sarcasm, the novel "Vanity Fair" took pride of place in the list of masterpieces of world literature....
The idea of evil has never been in the shadow of history. Christianity, which became the very foundation of European civilization, placed the opposition of good and evil at the epicenter of the intellectual reflection of European society. It is no secret that the Christian God was thought to be the personification of good, while evil in the European consciousness was embodied in the defective and ghostly nature of the devil and his demons. At the sunset of the Middle Ages, the ever-lasting idea of evil acquired a special sound in public consciousness in connection with the well-known...
Hydrogenation of organic substances was first developed in 1897. In 1907, a German chemist, Edwin Kuno Kaiser, moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, the hometown of the Procter & Gamble soap maker. Shortly after arrival, Kaiser entered into a commercial deal with Procter & Gamble and submitted two cotton oil hydrogenation technologies to the company for the purpose of creating raw materials for soap production. But, since the product looked like lard outwardly, Procter & Gamble began selling it in June 1911 as a cooking oil called “Crisco,” which is an acronym for crystallized cottonseed oil....
Baldwin grew up in a family of a stepfather, a priest and was the oldest of nine children. Baldwin never knew his own father and partially suffered from this, which was reflected in some of his works. In his youth, Baldwin is going to follow in the footsteps of his stepfather and helps him in the church. But the older the future writer becomes, the more distinctly he understands that his stepfather’s sermons diverge from what is happening on the streets of Harlem, and, most importantly, with the behavior of the stepfather himself at home. After leaving school in the Bronx, Baldwin moved to...
Daniel and Peachy arrived from Britain to India to undergo military service, but the soldiers had their own plans for life. Fraudulent friends intend to leave for the country called Kafiristan to become its rulers, and take possession of the treasures of the whole country hidden in the bowels of the mountains....
The tragedy "Macbeth", like many of Shakespeare’s dramatic works, was created on the basis of the legend of the tyrant king, the image of which the author so masterfully embodied. However, researchers of Shakespeare and historians have come to the conclusion that the pathos and plot of the work contradicts historical facts. During the reign of the Scottish King Macbeth, bard poets belonging to opposition circles created a story about a killer ruler, which served as the source for the play....
This book aims to furnish a concise and connected account of human progress during ancient, medieval, and early modern times. It should meet the requirements of those high schools and preparatory schools where ancient history, as a separate discipline, is being supplanted by a more extended course introductory to the study of recent times and contemporary problems. Such a course was first outlined by the Regents of the University of the State of New York in their _Syllabus for Secondary Schools_, issued in 1910....
Nicholas Rowe, an English playwright, poet laureate, studied law at Middle Temple, became a barrister, received an inheritance after his father's death, and engaged in literary work. His most significant dramatic works are Ambitious Stepmother; Tamerlane; Fair penitent; Jane Shore and Lady Jane Gray. In some of his plays, Rowe combined a heroic drama with family tragedy. In the center of the action is usually the heroine, whose distress makes the viewer feel sorry and sympathy. Rowe was one of the first editors of Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s prepared plays saw the light of day in 1709. Rowe...
The novel "Hero of Our Time" was first published in 1840. Then no one could have imagined that the author’s life would end so soon, and many contemporaries predicted Mikhail Yuryevich a great future precisely as a prose writer. Gogol, in particular, remarked: "Lermontov the prose writer will be higher than Lermontov the poet." With his novel “The Hero of Our Time” Lermontov greatly expanded the scope of the literary tradition. Unusual was the composition of the work, consisting of five independent stories. A peculiar chronology of events and a constantly changing circle of heroes attracted...
The ruthless Dictator of Mekin has already subjugated twenty-two helpless planets. Now he wants Kandar's unconditional surrender - or he will blast it out of existence!...
