History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘History’
Hardworking Kichijiro wins Ima’s heart and Kanshichi’s hatred without noticing a thing.
The following tale was told to Gordon Smith as a real-life story, set in seventeenth-century Maizuru. Since 1943, Maizuru has been a naval base in Japan’s Kyoto Prefecture; in 1626, when our tale begins, it was a modest provincial harbour where prosperous merchant Shiwoya Hachiyemon had his business.
The Founder of Singapore established his city on principles of free people and free trade.
Sir Stamford Raffles (1781-1826) is well-known to anyone who has visited Singapore, the city he founded in 1819. Still held in honour there, he is much less widely remembered back in his own country, but deserves better from us for his pioneering campaigns against slavery in the Far East and for being a champion of free trade in a world dominated by gunboat diplomacy.
The Russians had checked it in the East, but in the West the expansion of Napoleon Bonaparte’s empire was far from over.
In 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte wrapped up the short-lived French Republic, crowned himself Emperor of the French, and set about conquering Europe. However, failure to invade Moscow in 1812 was the first sign of vulnerability, and on June 18, 1815, his dream was ended by allied forces commanded by the Duke of Wellington.
Gregory Rasputin is tricked into attending a dissolute Moscow soirée, and shares his sadness with Englishman Gerard Shelley.
One evening in April 1915, scandal-plagued holy man Gregory Rasputin (1864-1916), a close friend of Empress Alexandra, answered the invitation of pretty, young Marya Mlozov to visit her in Moscow. He was expecting to meet soldiers wounded in the Great War, but stumbled instead into a decidedly bohemian party in full swing. After disappointing Marya by shunning every temptation she put his way, he walked home with Gerard Shelley a picture of dejection.
Stamford Raffles, Lieutenant-Governor of Java, urged London to bypass our European partners and trade directly with Japan.
On February 13, 1814, Stamford Raffles (1781-1826) in Java wrote to Lord Minto, former Governor-General of India, urging London to pursue a more vigorous trade policy with Japan. Previous trade links had employed Dutch agents, but Raffles believed that Britain would do better by trading directly rather than through European partners.
The Gallipoli landings in 1915 did not achieve the Admiralty’s goals, but for John Masefield they remained one of the proudest moments of the Great War.
The Dardanelles Campaign of April-December 1915, during the Great War, is remembered especially for the Anzac and Indian troops who gave their lives on the Gallipoli Peninsula in western Turkey. Then as now it was regarded as a failure by many, but John Masefield took quite another view — of the campaign, and of failure itself.