Napoleon always understood the importance of public opinion and the means by which it might be shaped and manipulated. The “Coronation of Napoleon” by Jacques-Louis David (1807), which depicts the new “emperor of the French” standing in magnificent coronation robes and about to crown empress Josephine, was conceived as a work of propaganda, to further establish his political legitimacy in the eyes of the French public and, incidentally, the monarchs of Europe. In that, both t

On December 7th, 1941, the Japanese surprise attack against Pearl Harbor, in Hawaii, marked the onset of a gigantic military clash between Japan and the United States in the Pacific. It was to last a little less than four years, leading to the unconditional capitulation of Japan. In the United States, Pearl Harbor was quickly presented as a premeditated, treacherous attack against an innocent nation, Franklin Roosevelt calling December 7th, “the day of infamy.” Sixty years la

To celebrate World Diabetes Day, a brief reminder of the tremendous medical breakthrough achieved by four researchers in Toronto (Frederick Banting, Charles Best, John Macleod, and James Collip): the discovery of insulin, in 1921, which forever altered the way diabetes is being treated. All began in 1920 when Frederick Banting (1891-1941), a trained physician and medical scientist approached his colleague, John Rickard Macleod, Professor of Physiology and Associate Dean of Me

Following Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo and the second return of Louis XVIII to power, all attempts at remembering the man who had presided over Europe’s fate for 15 years were deliberately crushed. And yet, the aura of the former emperor never faded. His death, on 5 May 1821, was welcomed with shock and disbelief. As French author and diplomat Chateaubriand then stated, Napoleon had never been more alive than in death. As early as 1796, following his victorious campaign agai