Bastille

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness…”(Dickens 1). These words portray the time period for the citizens of England and France in Tale of Two Cities. A novel written by Charles Dickens, Tale of Two Cities displaces the suffering and unfairness that happen in England and France. Charles Dickens wrote some…

France, she is known for her extreme action of murdering a Jacobin leader named Jean-Paul Marat (“Charlotte Corday (French Noble)”). As a member of the Girodin political party, Corday opposed Marat’s Jacobin agenda and planned to murder him during the Bastille Day parade on July 14, 1793 (“Charlotte Corday Assassinates Marat”). However, Corday changed her plan for some reason and attempted to sneak into Marat’s bedroom. She succeeded and on July 13, 1793, Charlotte Corday murdered Jean-Paul…

There are themes throughout history that appear in various different places and in very different timeframes. Comparing the similarities and differences between ideological shifts that took place worlds away is essential to understanding the world we live in. In Fidel Castro’s An Interview with Dan Rather, Maximillian Robespierre’s Revolutionary Speech, and Charles de Gaulle’s Comments on Algeria one can examine the similarities and differences in ideological shifts. Each differed in the…

Introduce yourself, your writing and your books to our readers I have two careers really: One as a teller of truth and one as a teller of lies. After working fulltime as a journalist in the US for a decade, I abruptly decided to move to Yemen, where I became the editor in chief of a newspaper. My first book is a memoir about the experience of running that paper and the journey I took with my Yemeni reporters. It was the most difficult, hilarious, and rewarding year of my life. Writing that…

inmates who had gathered yelling at the top of their lungs…”Fresh Meat”, “Little Lambs”, things along those lines anyway. As I approached the Main Building, I started to panic. The thick Stone walls of this place started to collapse in on me. This Bastille that I’ve only ever seen from afar, is now up close. A Rough, Metallic place, each Fence as high as the next,…

The Black Jacobins C. L. R. James The Black Jacobins is an excellent book, even though it is highly subjective. James wrote it in 1938, and it delineates the history of The Haitian Revolution which was the first and only successful slave revolution in human history and celebrates the triumph of Toussaint L’Ouverture and other slaves and freed men who made its success possible. Throughout his book he highlights the dialectical interaction between the revolutions in France and Haiti. The…

and grape products for grain. Since they were located on the coast, Greece had a strategic point for trade and cultural diffusion. Athens became a rich commercial center and Greeks had a money system. They had city-states with identities and cultures. They were considerably independent and were always competing with each other. Sparta was militaristic and agricultural while Athens was cultural, political, and commercial. In Sparta, women had more rights than in other areas. They had adult male…

Ghandi's campaign for independence went on, with his encouragement of peaceful protest and criticism of British administration and taxes. In 1921, Ghandi called for all Indians to boycott paying taxes on farming tools to the British, a strategy to have a negative effect on the economy. His non-cooperation campaign, despite its nonviolent aims, periodically became violent, and Ghandi was imprisoned in 1922 for instigating the movement. He was released two years later. The movement, however, was…