Volume 16 Issue 8 August 1966

The transatlantic connection was ‘an additional bond of union’, in the words of Queen Victoria to President Andrew Johnson, which strengthened the link between Britain and the United States.

Astonished by the hustle of American life, and awed by the immensity of the country, Richard L. Rapson describes how visitors from Britain returned home both chastened and invigorated.

The result of the Seven Weeks’ War in 1866 subordinated the Austrian Empire to Prussian ambitions. Brian Bond describes the last lightning victory in the Napoleonic manner, until Hitler’s blitzkrieg of 1940.

Michael D. Biddiss describes one of the chief originators of the pernicious racist doctrines that have played so malevolent a part in the history of modern Germany. Gobineau was a French historian whom a nineteenth-century German professor once described as a ‘God-inspired hero’.

The first sod of the longest railway on earth was turned by the last of the Tsars in 1891; Hilda Hookham describes an epic process of construction, with the line finally completed in 1904.

Popular suspicion rather than imperial policy, writes Bruce S. Eastwood, was responsible for Christian persecution in the Roman Empire.

Just when the great merchant-banker had reached the zenith of his career, writes A.R. Myers, Jacques Couer was suddenly disgraced and imprisoned. Three years later, he was able to escape and took refuge, first in Provence, then in Rome with a sympathetic Pope.