Few educators in history have made such a profound effect on the shape of the future as John Locke. His practical, down to earth approach on education and his belief in the folly in the practice of divine kinship did much to shape the course of the Enlightenment period and the basis of modern European thought.
In 1682, Locke’s anti royal sentiments resulted in his banishment to Holland. It was in exile that Locke penned his influential work “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.” In 1688, the Glorious Revolution in which William of Orange overthrew the current English king, James II. This meant Locke could return to his homeland without fear of persecution or prosecution and so he did.
Founded in 1897 by French playwright and director, Oscar Metenier, the Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol was Paris’s smallest theater – and its most infamous. Drawing on his experience a “chien de commissaire” – the French term for one who leads the condemned to their execution – Metenier set about transforming the former convent and chapel at the end of a Parisian cul-de-sac into a showcase for stories of thieves, prostitutes and murderers at their worst.
However, the Grad Guignol’s provocative subject matter made it an easy target for censors. The theater’s stage adaptation of Guy de Maupassant’s Mademoiselle Fifi was temporarily halted after police shut down the production for daring to present the saga of a lady of the night — the first such on-stage portrayal in the history of French drama.
Nonetheless, the Grand Guignol proved to be a huge success and the following year, under the tutelage of director Max Maurey and novelist Andre de Lorde, the theater began to expand its repertoire into even more risqué territory. Soon, Guignol productions would trace the paths of necrophiliacs, rapists, torturers, cannibals, and thrill killers — but all meted out with an ample dose of black comedy.
In doing so, the Guignol pioneered an assorted array of then-cutting edge special effects and props, including faux severed heads, imitation acids, blunted guillotines, sheep’s eyeballs and gallons upon gallons of fake blood. Maurey is said to have measured the success of a particular play based on the number of people who would faint in a given evening. He even went so far as to hire a house doctor to play up the theater’s macabre reputation.
For the next five decades, the Grand Guignol would remain one Paris’s most popular destinations, just behind the Louvre and Eiffel Tower. Even today, the term “Grand Guignol” remains synonymous with exaggerated and excessive gore and the theater itself is popularly credited for creating an entirely new genre of drama that Hollywood has gone to exploit to great success: the slasher film.
But as the pain and strife of a real world horror story – World War II – played out across France and the greater European continent, the Grand Guignol began a slow but steady decline before finally being shuttered in 1962. As the theater’s last director famously lamented to Time magazine after the Guignol’s final performance, “We could never equal Buchenwald. Before the war, everyone felt that what was happening onstage was impossible. Now we know that these things, and worse, are possible in reality.”
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Bonnie Prince Charlie, or Charles Edward Louis Philip Casimir Stuart, was the son of the executed English King, James Stuart. Charlie was brought up a Roman Catholic and was taught to believe that the Stuarts were the true ruling family of England and Scotland. From his birth the Prince was at the center of the Jacobite revolt and he was trained in the military arts so that he would be able to lead his own army to war and reclaim his rightful kingdom. 
Unfortunately at The Battle of Culloden on the 16th April 1746 the Jacobite army was defeated by William Aufustus, the Duke of Cumberland. Thousands of Jacobites were killed but the Prince managed to escape with a bounty of £30,000 or $1 million on his head. After the battle Charlie fled to the Island of Benbecula, where Flora MacDonald lived.
Flora gave her own account of what happened: “After Miss MacDonald (with some difficulty) agreed to undertake the dangerous enterprise, she set out for Clanranald’s house, Saturday, June 21st and at one of the fords was taken prisoner by a party of militia, she not having a passport. She demanded to whom they belonged? And finding by the answer that her stepfather was then commander, she refused to give any answer till she should see their captain. So she and her servant, (Neil MacKechan), and another woman, Bettie Burk, a good spinster, and whom he recommended as such in a letter to his wife at Armadale in Sky, as she had much lint to spin. If her stepfather (Hugh MacDonald of Armadale) had not granted Miss a passport she could not have undertook her journey and voyage. Armadale set his stepdaughter at liberty, who immediately made the best of her way to Clanranald’s house and acquainted the Lady Clanranald with the scheme, who supplied the Prince with apparel sufficient for his disguise, viz. a flower’d gown, a white apron, ect., and sent some provisions along with him.”
It is said that the during the journey the Prince sung Flora many songs including ‘The King shall enjoy his own again’
There are few dates in recent human history that cause more of an emotional stir in historians than that of September 1, 1939. On this day, Adolph Hitler, then chancellor of Germany declared to his parliament (Reichstag) that enough was enough that Danzig in Poland was a German city full of German people and should be taken back. The culmination of the Nazi ideology of “Lebensraum,” in which all lands currently or formerly belonging to Germany should be returned to Germany and inhabited by German people, would soon signal the death of millions of Jews, Russians, homosexuals, gypsies, agitators, allies and non combatants.
Adolph Hitler fought in World War I and like many Germans felt that the treaty of Versailles was a slap in the face to the German nation making them wholly responsible for a war that involved many nations that came into conflict because of the multitudinous pacts that punctuated European politics.
German troops marched into Danzig to reclaim the city and the Danzig Corridor on September 1 by force. It was not the first act by Germany in regards to nullifying the Versailles Treaty but it would become the most significant. The invasion of Poland was a direct result with Hitler’s Non Aggression Pact with Russia and the secret plan for the two nations to invade Poland and divide her up between the to powers. Because of a pact Britain and France had with Poland, they were forced to declare war on Germany on September 3 and just like the First World War, nation after nation followed suit until the disastrous global conflict was played out once again, only this time religion and ethnic persecution would play a large and deadly role. 
Chauvet Cave was first discovered by Jean-Marie Chauvet in 1995. It is located in southeast France and has been dated between 30,000 and 33,000 years B.P. (Before the Present). These dates place the drawings in the Auriganacian, or the early Upper Paleolithic period. This era is defined by the functionally flexible stone tool industry, their manufacture of body ornaments and sophisticated cave art. 
Art of the Aurignacian era can be separated into two groups. The first is portable art which began appearing about 35,000 B.P. and is made up of carvings such as the Venus figurine. The second group is stationary art, or parietal art, mainly made up of cave drawings and paintings. Over Europe, the majority of cave art depicts animals with an overwhelming representations of animals of significant economic value like horse, reindeer, bison, aurochs, ibex, and mammoth along with carnivores such as lions, bears and wolves. Chauvet Cave particularly seems to contain a surprisingly large number of carnivores, with at least thirty-three figures making up almost fourteen percent of the animal figures. The carnivores represented include mainly bears and large cats including at least one spotted panther. These animals, especially the felines, are consistently among the most inaccurately proportioned with their canine teeth substantially larger than in real life. This may be because the large cats are harder to observe than other common animals such as the horse and bison, however, their teeth do seem to attract a lot more attention in general. Not only were the carnivores the only animals drawn with teeth but also their teeth were used as jewelry.
It is hard today to interpret the art of the Upper Paleolithic because so much has changed over the 30,000 years since its creation. When studying Paleolithic art we are only observing a small proportion what was made, only the surviving art is accessible to us. While art historians often view this early cave art as the ‘awakening’ of a human instinct to study the world around them, the majority of pre-historians believe instead that it is part of a wider cultural behavior. One suggestion is that the art represented a type of communication related to the movement and behavior of animals, perhaps in response to planned hunting activities. This hypothesis shows a marked shift from the idea of symbolism towards one focused on the communication of information about the surrounding environment. At any rate, the majority of experts agree that the people creating the drawings are copying images and scenes from real life. It is, however important to note, that while many of the drawings found probably do represent some greater thought or idea, there may be a certain percentage of meaningless scrawl made by amateurs or practicing children.
