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"This is a large and important lawsuit that arrives 71 years after the war. A relatively large amount of Hungarian Holocaust survivors and their descendents live in Israel," Zell said, who himself is a distant relative of a Hungarian Holocaust survivor.

"There were attempts in the past to get reparations from Nazi criminals in Hungary, but this case is unique because this is the first time the Hungarian government is being sued. Usually the Nazi crimes occurred in areas where there was no independent regime, such as Poland

"I grew up in a nationalist-Hungarian, a secular Jew. I saw Hungary as the homeland and what happened was disappointing," he said, and explained that "justice should be done. Whomever is to blame has to pay the price."

How many Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire at the start of the mass killings?Many historians agree that the number was about 2 million. However, victims of the mass killings also included some of the 1.8 million Armenians living in the Caucasus under Russian rule, some of whom were massacred by Ottoman forces in 1918 as they marched through East Armenia and Azerbaijan.

on the night of April 23-24, 1915, the authorities in Constantinople, the empire's capital, rounded up about 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders. Many of them ended up deported or assassinated.

Estimates range from 300,000 to 2 million deaths between 1914 and 1923, with not all of the victims in the Ottoman Empire

Some show Ottoman soldiers posing with severed heads, others with them standing amid skulls in the dirt.The victims are reported to have died in mass burnings and by drowning, torture, gas, poison, disease and starvation. Children were reported to have been loaded into boats, taken out to sea and thrown overboard. Rape, too, was frequently reported.

The election took place 17 years to the day after Mr. Chávez was first elected president — and for virtually all of that time, Mr. Chávez, his allies or his political heirs controlled the National Assembly.

Many voters said that they did not know the names of the opposition candidates they were voting for, nor did they care

The archducal couple were on their way to a civic reception in the yellow-and orange-banded city hall, an endowment of the Hapsburg era that borrowed from Moorish Spain, when the violence began,

Shortly before 11 a.m., the couple left the reception, deeply shaken by the bombing but determined to see the day’s formalities through.

The sepia photographs in glass cases at the museum show Princip as a slight, whispery-mustached man with staring eyes, otherwise forgettable in his homespun jacket and collarless shirt.

He told the Sarajevo court empaneled hastily to try him and his fellow conspirators that he had lost hope

presenting Princip his victims at close range.

on behalf of Serbs first, but also, they say, on behalf of Croats and Muslims — and thus as an early standard-bearer for the South Slav kingdom of Yugoslavia,

in Vienna at the time of the assassination for protection against Balkan domination by the mainly Orthodox Serbs,

So it is small wonder that the centenary has revived the passions that made Bosnia a hotbed of violence in both world wars and again in the 1990s. In the last conflict, a vote by Bosnian Muslims and Croats in 1992

As a result of the political tug of war, commemorations of the assassination, like so much else in Bosnia, have been divided along sectarian lines.

which will be broadcast live in 40 countries, is the centerpiece of a two-week program of conferences, concerts, poetry readings, plays and sporting performances whose organizers are determined not to take sides in the Princip dispute.

Balkan Serbs in a “greater Serbia” once the colonial hold of the Austro-Hungarians and the Ottomans had been broken.

Despite the boycott by hard-line Serbs, the hope is that the centenary can be used to move sectarian groups toward a new sense

Nearly two decades later, Bosnia remains one of the poorest nations in Europe.

After those upheavals, Mayor Ivo Komsic of Sarajevo, a Bosnian Croat, appealed to the country’s 3.8 million people to make the 1914 centenary an occasion to renounce sectarian animosities in favor of a new beginning that could carry Bosnia to membership in the European Union

To a reporter returning to Sarajevo for the first time since the siege of the early 1990s, the evidence of a new beginning is palpable. Even in driving rain, bars and restaurants are

ommunities account for a majority of the players. When shells and mortars were falling in the 1990s and Serb artillery batteries were targeting bread and water lines,

Visegrad, whose population was once two-thirds Muslim, is overwhelmingly Serb now.

Mr. Kusturica has overseen the construction of a $20 million model village, Andricgrad, based on old Serb traditions.

“Gavrilo Princip was our national pride, a revolutionary who helped us to get rid of slavery,” he told visitors from Sarajevo as some 200 workers hastened about under a mosaic of Princip and his fellow conspirators, putting the final touches on the village.

under Otto von Bismarck and then the kaiser. Numbers alone tell a story: In 1870, as Bismarck unified Germany, Kiel had around 30,000 inhabitants.

Always calm, she brooked little criticism and brushed aside anti-German sentiment as she pushed to impose austerity on supposedly profligate European neighbors.

When he learned of the assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Hapsburg Empire, he hastened to Berlin.

Britain and France were alarmed by Wilhelm’s ambition. Britain’s determination to keep its navy supreme only heightened German anxieties, already running high because the kaiser felt beleaguered on two fronts.

Wilhelm poured torrents of money into the German Navy. In 1906, Britain’s Royal Navy took delivery of H.M.S. Dreadnought, with its groundbreaking armament of big guns. Wilhelm

Naval historians, however, tend to accord more significance to Germany’s U-boats, which were responsible for the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, for instance, eventually helping to draw the United States into Europe’s Great War.

Wilhelm’s proud Naval Academy, for instance, is now the parliamentary seat of Schleswig-Holstein, the state of which Kiel is the capital.

The other is the Flandernbunker, or Flanders bunker, built outside the main surviving military base here. Its name stems from a Nazi campaign to

The location was the memorial built for the World War I sailors. It is a tower and flamelike structure of reinforced concrete with an outer layer of north German brick, soaring nearly 300 feet above the coast at Laboe, where

there are 200,000 a year — confront a 1936 glass tableau of sailors’ lives on ship and shore, in which a still-discernible swastika has replaced the sun.

Mr. Witt and his associates believe that the memorial can carry a message of peace. Standing in a hall that shows every German ship lost in the two world wars, the 35,000 German sailors lost in World War I a

"One minute, 32 seconds — ha! I beat you by one second!" a triumphant Margarita Maluchenkova, an 18-year-old with crimson-tinted hair,

They absently point the muzzle at other club members seated around a table watching the practice

I like handling guns, though it's more interesting when they are loaded,"

She believes Russia stands tall in the world.

Clubs such as Our Army have been cropping up across Russia at a fevered pace amid heightened tensions with the West and with former Soviet republics that have defected from Moscow's orbit.

heir year of compulsory military service.

he military has been experiencing a renaissance in recent years as the government spends billions to modernize and looks to its upcoming conscripts to fend off Western enemies the Kremlin sees as encroaching on Russian borders.

he Crimea gambit has brought the wrath of the democratic world down on Russia in the form of sanctions that have blacklisted dozens of senior Kremlin officials and cronies and deepened an economic crisis brought on by fallen oil prices.

"You should know your enemy, and, make no mistake, we do consider the Western world an enemy, especially America. That is the most dangerous threat to our future."

"We don't teach hatred, though hatred can be a powerful force," he acknowledges.

Russia has every single one of these features in place," Trudolyubov says. "Being healthy and sporting is good for everyone — there's no argument about that. But in what context does it develop?"

"It used to be that those newly inducted into the army learned how to use a Kalashnikov or drive an armored vehicle in basic training.

when the demoralized Soviet Red Army was mired in a costly and unwinnable war in Afghanistan and military careers were a sentence to poverty and hardship. Respect for the armed services continued to decline after the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union.

It's a normal and natural process when young people understand that the state gives them a free education and the means to make a living, and for that they pay a debt to society by serving in the army.

Vladimir Putin is a star in the eyes of Russian children," she says.

Support from the Kremlin — and Putin — has elevated the image of the military profession, she says.

At the Our Army clubhouse, the teens count off into two squads for assault training, the "twos" taking a synchronized step forward, heads snapping to the left, eyes fixed on an unseen point in the distance.

"The Religious Right did not start because of a concern about abortion," says Ed Dobson, who as an associate pastor at Falwell's church, was present at the founding of the Moral Majority. "I sat in the non-smoke-filled back room with the Moral Majority, and I frankly do not remember abortion ever being mentioned as a reason why we ought to do something.

Trump, who has been married three times and derives his language more from the vulgarities of bathrooms than from the niceties of the pulpit, has also taken stances on key cultural issues, including abortion and gay rights, that are at odds with the Republican Party's white evangelical base.

Falwell would repudiate his segregationist past and his movement would pivot from race to "family values." Yes, abortion was murder and homosexuality was unnatural. But each also undermined family life.

"In one fell swoop," writes political scientist Corey Robin, "the heirs of slaveholders became the descendants of persecuted Baptists, and Jim Crow a heresy the First Amendment was meant to protect."

al candidates, including Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, Jeb Bush and Bernie Sanders, have addressed Liberty stud

Other presidenti

With this promise in sight, it seems like a good time to revisit what Falwell Sr. said about King before and after he co-founded the Moral Majority in 1979 as a "pro-life, pro-family, pro-moral, and pro-American" organization.

This ruling stripped tax-exempt status from all-white private schools formed in the South in reaction to the Brown v. Board of Education mandate to desegregate public schools.

Their intent was safeguard children from secularization, not racial integration, but their schools had been unfairly and illegally targeted by a federal government hell-bent on making secular humanism the nation's false faith.

"There was an overnight conversion," recalled Paul Weyrich -- the conservative strategist who coined the term "moral majority" -- as conservative Christians realized that "big government was coming after them as well."

Similarly, feminism was dangerous because it confused the distinct roles men and women and boys and girls were to play in the "traditional family," which Falwell and his fellow travelers understood to be of a singular sort: one male breadwinner and one female homemaker, married, with children, living under one roof and the patriarchal authority of the man of the house.

Nonetheless, he does have a story to tell that resonates not only with white evangelicals' complaints about the decline of a Christian America, but also with the broad contours of the Christian story, which runs from The Fall in Eden to redemption at the hands of the crucified and resurrected Christ. Both of these narratives get going with a fall from grace and point toward an upcoming revival.I know many evangelicals, and Trump is not one of them.

you can usefully combine these takes, and describe Bush nostalgia as a longing for something America used to have and doesn’t really any more — a ruling class that was widely (not universally, but more widely than today) deemed legitimate, and that inspired various kinds of trust (intergenerational, institutional) conspicuously absent in our society today.

we miss the WASPs — because we feel, at some level, that their more meritocratic and diverse and secular successors rule us neither as wisely nor as well.

The WASP virtues also included a cosmopolitanism that was often more authentic than our own performative variety — a cosmopolitanism that coexisted with white man’s burden racism but also sometimes transcended it

However, one of the lessons of the age of meritocracy is that building a more democratic and inclusive ruling class is harder than it looks, and even perhaps a contradiction in terms. You can get rid of the social registers and let women into your secret societies and

you still end up with something that is clearly a self-replicating upper class, a powerful elite, filling your schools and running your public institutions.

you even end up with an elite that literally uses the same strategy of exclusion that WASPs once used against Jews to preserve its particular definition of diversity from high-achieving Asians — with the only difference being that our elite is more determined to deceive itself about how and why it’s discriminating

certain of the old establishment’s vices were inherent to any elite, that meritocracy creates its own forms of exclusion

the WASPs had virtues that their successors have failed to inherit or revive

Those virtues included a spirit of noblesse oblige and personal austerity and piety that went beyond the thank-you notes and boat shoes and prep school chapel going — a spirit that trained the most privileged children for service, not just success, that sent men like Bush into combat alongside the sons of farmers and mechanics in the same way that it sent missionaries and diplomats abroad in the service of their churches and their country.

The goal would have been to keep piety and discipline embedded in the culture of a place like Harvard, rather than the mix of performative self-righteousness and raw ambition that replaced them.

for every Brahmin bigot there was an Arabist or China hand or Hispanophile who understood the non-American world better than some of today’s shallow multiculturalists.

And somehow the combination of pious obligation joined to cosmopolitanism gave the old establishment a distinctive competence and effectiveness in statesmanship — one that from the late-19th century through the middle of the 1960s was arguably unmatched among the various imperial elites with whom our establishment contended

“Those who are mourning the passing of the old Establishment should mourn its many failures, too,” he writes. Which is fair enough: The old ruling class was bigoted and exclusive and often cruel, it had failures aplenty

And as an American today, you don’t have to miss everything about the WASPs, or particularly like their remaining heirs, to feel nostalgic for their competence

long with the establishment failure in Vietnam, which hastened the collapse of the old elite’s authority, there was also a loss of religious faith and cultural confidence, and a belief among the last generation of true WASPs that the emerging secular meritocracy would be morally and intellectually superior to their own style of elite

the WASP ascendancy did not simply fall; it pre-emptively dissolved itself.

its virtues were to some extent transferable to a more diverse society: The establishment had always been somewhat permeable to arrivistes,

in our era their admirable influence is still felt in figures as different as Barack Obama and Mitt Romney

In such a world the establishment would have still admitted more blacks, Jews, Catholics and Hispanics (and more women) to its ranks … but it would have done so as a self-consciously elite-crafting strategy, rather than under the pseudo-democratic auspices of the SAT and the high school resume and the dubious ideal of “merit.”

At the same time it would have retained both its historic religious faith (instead of exchanging Protestant rigor for a post-Christian Social Gospel and a soft pantheism) and its more self-denying culture (instead of letting all that wash away in the flood of boomer-era emotivism).

So as an American in the old dispensation, you didn’t have to like the establishment — and certainly its members were often eminently hateable — to prefer their leadership to many of the possible alternatives

it’s to look forward, and to suggest that our current elite might someday be reformed — or simply replaced — through the imitation of the old establishment's more pious and aristocratic spirit.

Right now, almost all the discussion of our meritocracy’s vices assumes the system’s basic post-WASP premises, and hopes that either more inclusion (the pro-diversity left’s fixation) or a greater emphasis on academic merit (the anti-affirmative right’s hobbyhorse) will cure our establishment’s all-too-apparent ills.

a more radical theory of the case, one proposed by Helen Andrews in a 2016 Hedgehog Review essay on meritocracy and its discontents:

The meritocracy is hardening into an aristocracy — so let it. Every society in history has had an elite, and what is an aristocracy but an elite that has put some care into making itself presentable? Allow the social forces that created this aristocracy to continue their work, and embrace the label

By all means this caste should admit as many worthy newcomers as is compatible with their sense of continuity. New brains, like new money, have been necessary to every ruling class, meritocratic or not

they must give up any illusion that such tinkering will make them representative of the country over which they preside. They are separate, parochial in their values, unique in their responsibilities. That is what makes them aristocratic.

If we would learn from their lost successes in our own era of misrule, reconsidering this idea — that a ruling class should acknowledge itself for what it really is, and act accordingly — might be a fruitful place to start.

Marriage was often arranged.

The largest shift happened after World War II.

Family lineage is more important than marriage.

(1602-1868), women did not legally exist

Wives could be returned to her family if she failed to produce an heir.

The Civil Code of 1947 granted woman every possible legal right:

All were heads of the household. Now, should could be the head of the household (Sato, 1987)

Japanese men average only 30 minutes of housework, child care, and elder care each day (North, 2009).

Women are entitled to not much beyond motherhood; men are not entitled to much beyond work (Bae, 2010).

Marriage and children are synonymous

women are expected to submit to male authority in three ways

Motherhood is adulthood in many regards.

Equality benefits men as much as it does women.

Many men want to be present fathers rather than distant father figures.

Increasingly, families want to have daughters rather than sons.

The preference for daughters points to a continuation of tradition in regards to women and a more liberal view with men.

the equality is the option to continue traditional ways if she chooses

Women are demure; men are assertive. These are traditional traits in both Japanese and American societies.

Men are able to shed the silliness of masculinity (Big boys don’t cry. Men must be strong, etc)

Together these three families own $348.7 billion, as much wealth as the four million families whose wealth—roughly $80,000—is at the national median. 

Adjusted for inflation, median wealth in 1983 was roughly $84,000. So, while wealth at the top has exploded, the wealth at the bottom and in the middle has stagnated—and the racial wealth gap continues to grow, too.

the wealth of these families allows them to both aggressively protect their fortunes and also lobby to influence policy ... often to protect their fortunes.

even these families’ original patriarchs wouldn’t have had capable employees absent the public investment in schools, or been able to move their goods absent the public investment in roads, or been able to protect their property absent the public investment in policing. Nonetheless, Hoxie points out, many rich people then “use their wealth and their economic power to protect themselves and shield themselves from contributing anything for the public good

“Some 10 percent of the world’s wealth has vanished,” Collins tells the Prospect. “Where is that money? It’s in our midst. Real estate, art—all those assets are owned by trusts and entities that don’t require disclosure, so the wealth is still bouncing around—disrupting our local economies and [enabling the wealthy to inflate] housing markets.”

One way wealthy families have used their influence and millions has been to lobby against the estate ta

That campaign has been notably successful. The GOP tax law doubled the estate tax exemption; wealthy families can now pass on up to $22 million without the estates being taxed. (While inheritances demonstrably reduce the incentive for rich heirs to work, the GOP also pushes forward work requirements in assistance programs as “work incentives.”) 

Through their backing of right-wing think tanks, campaigns, and candidates, the Koch brothers, John M. Olin, Richard Mellon Scaife, and the DeVos family have “moved the Republican party so far to the right that Trump could stomp in and grab it,” wrote Klein

The IPS report focuses on two redistributive taxes that could have significant effects—taxing inheritances and implementing a flat tax on wealth.

“We’re not a society trying to create kings and queens and piles of hereditary fortunes,” says Collins, “but that’s essentially where we’re heading if we don’t intervene to break up these wealth dynasties. And if you think we’re already there,” he adds, the future “will be worse.”

arl Albrecht, who was famously secretive, only spoke publicly about Aldi’s business model on one occasion – in 1953. Its fundamental principles, he said, were “narrow product range and low price, [which] cannot be separated

Lacking capital, they stocked only a tight range of staples, such as pasta and soap, planning to widen the offering later. But they soon realised that offering a limited selection of cheap, fast-selling goods kept their costs down and the cash flowing, which they could use to invest in new stores. As the former Aldi executive Dieter Brandes and his son Nils wrote in “Bare Essentials”, their book about the company: “Basically, a completely new business model was created along the lines of a discovery in the natural sciences: by accident.”

in 1961, when they had 300 stores, they chose to split Aldi, short for Albrecht Discount, into two parts. The “Aldi equator” ran through Essen, with Theo taking the part of Germany to the north, and Karl the south. Aldi North and Aldi South shared all information, except profits, and conducted some supplier negotiations jointly, but were otherwise run separately, with their stores carrying different product ranges and featuring differently coloured floors – one yellow and one grey.

Theo continued to put in long hours at the office, managing even the smallest details in his quest to save money. He wore pencils down to the nubs and turned off the light when entering an office if he judged that his staff could see well enough without it. He once told his board to look at the thickness of the paper used for photocopies. Outside consultants and media interviews were banned, considered unnecessary expenditures or distractions. Asceticism was a virtue in life and business, he believed. “People live more on what they do not eat,” he once said. He wanted Aldi to be a place where “people who don’t hate their money can safely go shopping”

In their book “Bare Essentials”, Dieter and Nils Brandes argued that Aldi’s embrace of kaizen, its lean management structure and just-in-time approach to inventory – taking delivery of stock only when needed, to cut holding costs – made it the “most Japanese” company in Germany.

1976, Aldi South, Karl’s company, opened the first Aldi store on the east coast of the US. Three years later, in 1979, Theo’s Aldi North purchased Trader Joe’s, a California chain that sells cheap gourmet foods and enjoys a cult-like following. (The US is still the only foreign market where both Aldis operate.)

Second, the main chains – the big four as well as the leading “soft” discounter Kwik Save (which stocked a larger range than Aldi) – were listed on the stock exchange. The best way to fight Aldi early on is to slash prices, but few bosses of public companies are happy to accept lower profits, and thus lower bonuses, by pursuing long-term strategies

Fourth, and most importantly, the UK is, by global standards, a high-wage economy. This means that labour costs make up a big part of a supermarket’s operating expenses. Here, discounters have a major competitive advantage, because their business model – stocking a small range of products, eschewing delicatessens and promotions, and so on – allows them to operate with fewer, more productive, staff. (The most important performance measure in any Aldi branch is revenue divided by employee hours.)

Paying well obviously helps attract and retain staff, who might otherwise go to chains where the pace of work is slower. But it also serves to drive up wages across the industry, which, because of Aldi’s lower overall employee costs, hurts its competitors more.

As a private company, with no shareholders other than Karl Albrecht’s family to answer to, it could afford to be patient. “Aldi is very attuned to going into a country, making the investment, and building slowly and steadily,” said Richard Hyman, the retail expert. “Most other companies don’t have a 30-year view – or even a five-year view.”

By the time the supermarkets awoke to the structural shift that had occurred in the industry, the damage was done. “The big four bosses were not just sleeping at the wheel,” said Black. “They were comatose.”

“Ten years ago we had 900 lines, now we have 1,800,” said Neale. “That’s not because we are trying to become a big-four retailer, it’s because consumer tastes have evolved. We are managing the equilibrium between what customers want and costs.”

As the large supermarkets have realised, it is very hard to make money from internet sales because the profit margin on groceries is small and the delivery costs are so high – but now they can’t reverse course without losing customers. Andy Clarke, the former boss of Asda, told the Sunday Times last year that if the big four supermarkets had their time again “they wouldn’t have offered home deliveries, full stop”. “Online groceries are a cost drain,” Neale said. “Why should 90% of customers subsidise the 10% who get free home delivery?”

All supermarkets have their own private labels: made not by them, but for them, by manufacturers who agree to put their merchandise in a bag or box with the grocer’s logo on it. But Aldi takes this to extremes: more than 90% of the products it sells, from shaving cream to dark chocolate and frozen pizza, are private labels

Stocking mostly own-label goods allows the company to order huge quantities of a single item, to its own specifications, at a low unit cost.

Aldi’s entire ketchup order comes from one manufacturer that can operate the same, unchanging product run, all the time, and has no marketing costs to build into the price. “For many SKUs we are the biggest buyer by a country mile,” Neale said.

Among UK suppliers, who have often been treated badly by the big supermarkets, with their pressure for back margin fees and slow payment terms, Aldi has a good reputation

in 2010, following the death of Theo, which it said brought to an end “the story of the most eccentric, secretive and mysterious pair of siblings in Germany’s post-war economic history”. Karl died four years later, the richest man in Germany with a net worth of $25bn. (Second on the list was Dieter Schwarz, the Lidl owner, followed by Theo’s heirs.)

In 2017, Aldi South’s revenues reached €52bn, with about 20% of that from the UK and Ireland. In Ireland, Aldi has 12% of the market, and in Australia 13%, behind Woolworths and Coles. Its share in the US is only 2% – but Aldi plans to raise its number of outlets from 1,800 to 2,500 by 2022, which would make it the third-biggest chain in the US by store count, after Walmart and Kroger

In the UK there is still plenty of room to grow. Aldi hopes to have 1,000 shops in three years, up from just over 800 today. Dave McCarthy, a retail analyst at HSBC, said that given Aldi and Lidl’s expansion plans, their share of the market could peak at more than 20%.

Prince Mohammed, the kingdom’s de facto ruler, is pushing to end its dependence on oil revenues. That plan will largely depend on Saudi Arabia—a country with a Byzantine bureaucracy and an opaque legal system—becoming more attractive to foreign investors.

Billboards touting Prince Mohammed as the face of change in the kingdom could be seen in the streets of London.

He is creating a new and vibrant Saudi Arabia,” said one of the billboards, sponsored by a Saudi consulting firm.

But the two leaders, Prince Mohammed and Mrs. May, will also have to address difficult issues like the Saudi war in Yemen.

he added that “we are all concerned about the appalling humanitarian situation in Yemen,” but said that engaging with the Saudi leadership was the best way to get aid into the country.

Britain has deployed the monarchy as a tool of soft power with the Gulf’s Arab states before. Prince Charles has traveled frequently to Saudi Arabia—on one occasion even participating in the traditional Saudi sword dance.

But Prince Mohammed’s visit also underscores the stark differences between the two monarchies.

the king could not have evaded the parliamentarians without the help of numerous ordinary men and women

fervour of regicides

It was often in the priest holes of their country houses that Charles sought sanctuary as he moved around England

No study of the life of Charles would be complete without an account of his time concealed within the branches of the Boscobel oak tree with Major William Careless

an episode in British history that deserves to be better known

James’s adherence to Roman Catholicism caused the English Parliament to pass a bill of attainder against him in 1701

he was driven away by the British before he could land

In 1708 the Pretender set out in French ships to invade Scotland

that he renounce Roman Catholicism and become an Anglican in order to be designated Queen Anne’s heir to the throne of England

He passed the remainder of his life in or near Rome

Charles Edward precipitated one last, futile Jacobite rebellion in Britain in 1745

To oppose this, the League of Augsburg was formed on July 9, 1686, by Emperor Leopold, the electors of Bavaria, Saxony, and the Palatinate, and the kings of Sweden and Spain

he planned a short French invasion of the Rhineland

Louis sent his forces into the Palatinate

Louis’s inveterate opponent, William of Orange, stadtholder of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, would be preoccupied with his coming attempt to overthrow James

Many German princes were aroused by Louis’s actions and feared French annexations

William had been quickly and completely successful in expelling James II from the English throne (January 1689), and the Jacobite counterrevolution that Louis supported in Ireland was crushed by William (now William III of England) at the Battle of the Boyne (July 1690)

Instead of a short venture in Germany

France was now forced to fight a nine-year-long, worldwide war

the members of the Grand Alliance responded with alacrity when Louis XIV in 1695 opened secret, separate negotiations

A movement for a general peace culminated in the Treaty of Rijswijk in September-October 1697

The rise of England and Austria as effective counterforces to France and the development by William III of the strategy of building and maintaining the Grand Alliance stand out as the significant features of this war

“In the future, there will be millions of men who can’t marry, and that could pose a very big risk to society,

Out of China’s population of 1.4 billion, there are nearly 34 million more males than females — the equivalent of almost the entire population of California, or Poland, who will never find wives and only rarely have sex.

India, a country that has a deeply held preference for sons and male heirs, has an excess of 37 million males

The imbalance creates a surplus of bachelors and exacerbates human trafficking, both for brides and, possibly, prostitution.

Village life and mental health. Among men, loneliness and depression are widespread. Villages are emptying out. Men are learning to cook and perform other chores long relegated to women.

Housing prices and savings rates. Bachelors are furiously building houses in China to attract wives, and prices are soaring. But otherwise they are not spending, and that in turn fuels China’s huge trade surplus

In India, there is the opposite effect: Because brides are scarce, families are under less pressure to save for expensive dowries

Human trafficking. Trafficking of brides is on the rise. Foreign women are being recruited and lured to China, effectively creating similar imbalances in China’s neighbors.

Public safety. With the increase in men has come a surge in sexual crime in India and concerns about a rise in other crimes in both countries. Harassment of schoolgirls in India has in some towns sparked an effort to push back — but at a cost of restricting them to more protected lives.

Slavery, the Klan, Jim Crow, the Klan again. Internment of Japanese Americans. Gender discrimination and scientific racism. McCarthyism. George Wallace. All leading to a president whom Meacham considers “an heir to the white populist tradition,” a leader eager to undermine the law, the truth and “the sense of hope essential to American life.

Trump is normal in that he embodies recurring maladies of American public life; perhaps the main anomaly is that he brings so many of them together

every generation considers itself under siege and that, with the right leadership, Americans usually find a way forward rather than back. “The good news is that we have come through such darkness before,” he writes.

if you’re living in the gloom, awareness of historical patterns bestows limited consolation. It might, however, inject small doses of those qualities that latter-day resistance requires: Inspiration. Patience. Even humility.

even the exemplars are imperfect. Woodrow Wilson, who signed women’s suffrage into law, also resegregated the federal workforce, suppressed free speech and screened “The Birth of a Nation” in the White House.

King would marvel that it took a white Southerner, Lyndon Johnson, to help fulfill that vision. Progress in America, Meacham explains, “comes when the whispered hopes of those outside the mainstream rise in volume to reach the ears and hearts and minds of the powerful.”

For all his emphasis on elected leaders, however, Meacham argues that “what counts is not just the character of the individual at the top, but the character of the country.”

Franklin Roosevelt, who saved the country from the Great Depression, also sought to pack the Supreme Court and, more damning, detained Americans for no other cause than their Japanese ancestry. “A tragic element of history is that every advance must contend with forces of reaction,” Meacham writes.

In the 1920s, Klansmen held 11 governorships and 16 U.S. Senate seats, while more than 300 delegates at the 1924 Democratic National Convention were Klan members.

The opposition of the press “had the perverse effect of boosting the Klan rather than undercutting it,” Meacham notes. “Hostility from the journalists of the East convinced a number of middle Americans that a cause under such assault must have something to recommend it.” The elite news media as the enemy of real America is hardly just a Trumpian conceit.

the American soul proves expansive and malleable, sometimes dangerously so

When industrial upheaval and urbanization upended rural life, Meacham recalls, the Ku Klux Klan promised “racial solidarity and cultural certitude” — an apt summation of white-nationalists’ appeal a century later.

Trump-like figures are most evident among the latter forces. It is difficult to read Meacham’s descriptions of politicians such as President Andrew Johnson, Sen. Joseph McCarthy and Gov. George Wallace and not feel the current president looming.

After the conclusion of the Thirty Years War in 1648, conflict between France and Spain continued

Spain was in precipitous decline and France was Europe’s dominant military power under Louis XIV

in 1701, Spain’s weakness was starkly revealed by the War of the Spanish Succession, caused when the Spanish King Charles II died without an heir in 1700. Two of Europe’s leading monarchical powers, the House of Habsburg led by Austria, and the Bourbons led by France, fought to place their candidate on the Spanish throne, with the French candidate Philip V (the Duke of Anjou) crowned on 1 November 1700. The victory of the French Bourbon Dynasty represented a severe defeat for Catalonia, as well as the other territories of Aragon. It meant that Spain would henceforth follow the centralising French state tradition

For the next 200 years, Spain followed closely the French project of centralisation under an absolutist monarchy with the imposition of a centralised state model

No Spanish city experienced more political violence and the Spanish military and police stepped in to perform suppressive roles frequently between 1902 and 1923

In 1898 Spain suffered military defeats to the United States, losing its remaining overseas territories

The conflict over differing conceptions of Spain – and the role of national diversity within it – was brought to a head in 1936 with the outbreak of Civil War

the departure of Catalonia would be a disaster for Spain

after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of communism in 1989, the association of the independence movement with the revolutionary left waned. In the 1990s, the concept of independence increasingly entered mainstream political discourse

Today, the struggle for Catalan independence can be considered a middle class revolt.