Between the 1890s and early 1900s, the U.S.A., Britain and Canada were engaged in a territorial dispute over the southeastern Alaska border, commonly known as the Alaska boundary dispute. At the time, Canada was a British dominion, so the British government was responsible for n…
By 1516, Michelangelo Buonarroti was at the height of his fame, having already created many of his most celebrated works, including Pietà (1498–1499), David (1501–1504) and the ceiling frescos of the Sistine Chapel (1508–1512). Since he became financially successful, Michelan…
German composer Richard Wagner struggled with depression and extreme mood swings throughout his life, and some retrospective diagnoses have suggested that he suffered from bipolar disorder. As I mentioned in an earlier post , in 1854 the composer was introduced to the philosophy…
I earlier discussed the controversy surrounding Harriet Beecher Stowe's essay The True Story of Lady Byron’s Life in this post . In her article, published in the reputable magazine The Atlantic Monthly in September 1869, Stowe accused the famous English poet Lord Byron —…
I recently watched the four-episode series Death by Lightning on Netflix, which tells the story of the 20th President of the United States, James A. Garfield, and the man who eventually assassinated him, Charles Guiteau. It's an interesting piece of American history that I …
Born on 14 November 1805, Fanny Hensel Mendelssohn came from a well-to-do German-Jewish family and was raised in a highly educated and cultured household in Berlin. Felix Mendelssohn, the renowned composer, was her brother, and they had two other siblings, Paul and Rebecka. Whil…
For nearly three months in 1859, John Everett Millais' paintings The Vale of Rest and Spring ( Apple Blossoms ) were displayed at the prestigious Royal Academy Exhibition, receiving often negative reviews. Especially The Vale of Rest — depicting two nuns in a cemetery, one…
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was an avid reader, devouring novels, poetry and plays from a young age. Not only did he admire Russian authors like Leo Tolstoy, Alexander Pushkin, Anton Chekhov and Nikolai Gogol, but he also loved Western writers such as William Shakespeare, William M…
British authors Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins met in March 1851, introduced by their mutual friend, the painter Augustus Egg. By that time, Dickens (then 39) was already a literary star, whereas Collins (then 27) was still an aspiring writer. Both men shared a fondness for …
In the summer of 1885, American painter John Singer Sargent visited the English seaside town of Bournemouth where Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson was temporarily living with his wife Fanny. The two men had been friends since they met in Paris in the mid-1870s. At the time…
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