In early 1798, the Directory, the oligarchy that was ruling revolutionary France, ordered its top general, Napoleon Bonaparte, to plan the invasion of England. Instead, Napoleon organized and carried out the invasion of Egypt, which became the first modern incursion by the West into the Middle East.
Napoleon's plan was for his army to arrive in Egypt not as conquerors but liberators. Landing in Aboukir Bay on July 1, 1798, the French captured Alexandria the next day, overcoming the surprised Mamelukes - the despotic local rulers - with a combination of modern artillery and infantry tactics.
In the winter of 1940, 'The Atlantic Monthly' invited Peter Viereck, a twenty-three-year-old Harvard graduate who had won the college's top essay and poetry prizes, to write about 'the meaning of young liberalism for the present age.'
Alexandre Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie - father of the future Alex Dumas - was born on February 26, 1714, in the Norman province of Caux, a region of rolling dairy farms that hung above great chalk cliffs on the northwest coast of France.
When I was a kid, my mum had a lot of Dumas books in the house, and she's from France originally. My mother had one particular Dumas book that was a family heirloom - this old, beat-up 1938 edition of 'The Count of Monte Cristo' in French. She came to America after losing her parents in World War II as a little kid.
Napoleon - the people who were becoming Napoleon's generals realized that for him, it was not about spreading freedom and revolution; it was about creating a new empire with Napoleon the dictator or the emperor.
Conservatism as a formal political doctrine didn't exist in America in 1940. The word 'conservative' was associated primarily with fringe groups - anti-industrial Southern agrarians and the anti-New Deal tycoons who led the Liberty League.
The life of General Alex Dumas is so extraordinary on so many levels that it's easy to forget the most extraordinary fact about it: that it was led by a black man, in a world of whites, at the end of the eighteenth century.
Even arch-isolationists, such as former President Herbert Hoover and Senator Robert Taft of Ohio - two of the most right-wing figures in the Republican Party - insisted on being called liberal.
This is the positive way of seeing the modern Jewish dilemma: I am from everywhere. The negative way is no matter where you go, you find out that you're a victim, that you're unwanted and don't belong.
The Jewish exodus from North Africa, in the late nineteen-fifties and the nineteen-sixties, brought hundreds of thousands of Algerian, Moroccan, and Tunisian Jews to France.
As a writer, I can't be a heroic sword fighter like General Dumas, but I can rescue someone who's been taken out of history by using my writing to bring them back.