* In 1888, a typical Jewish immigrant, Benjamin Wonskolaser, a Jewish cobbler from Romanov Poland, arrived with his sons, moving between London, Ontario and Youngstown, Ohio, and making a living by mending shoes, selling pots and pans, running a grocery store and bicycle shop before opening a bowling alley. This would lead to their opening a theatre in New Castle, Pennsylvania, funded by pawning a horse; the theatre became a cinema that tempted them into the movie business. Benjamin changed his name to Warner; his sons Szmuel, Hirsz and Aaron changed their names to Sam, Harry and Albert, and, joined by their brother Jack, a ‘song and dance man’, would become the kings of the Hollywood film business.
* A typical Bavarian immigrant, Friedrich Drumpf, first worked as a barber in Manhattan, then, like Roosevelt, headed west, establishing the Poodle-Dog, a brothel-cum-milk-’n’-booze bar (‘Rooms for Ladies’) in Seattle, before following the latest gold rush to Monte Cristo in Washington State and then Klondike in Canada, where his Arctic Hotel offered gold-dust scales and rooms by the hour, expanding to the White Horse Hotel that served 3,000 meals a day. Drumpf returned to Kallstadt to marry a tinker’s daughter, Elizabeth Christ, whom he brought to the Bronx, where in 1905 his son Fred, Donald Trump’s father, was born.
* Anglo-American history is filled with piously monumental moments – Magna Carta,
* Japan did consider occupying the islands. In 1917 Lili‘uokalani died aged seventy-nine. Pearl Harbor was only fully developed as a naval base in 1931.
* ‘The energy, creativity and efficiency of the tribe of Sem,’ wrote the kaiser, ‘would be diverted to worthier goals than sucking dry Christians, and many Social Democrats would clear off East.’ But he added, ‘Given the immense, extremely dangerous power which International Jewish Capital represents, it would be of huge advantage to Germany.’ Antisemitism already contained a contradictory duality: poor Jews in Polish
* Jameson combined a colonial career with his medical one, treating not just Rhodes but also King Lobengula and President Kruger of Transvaal.
* Khama’s grandson Seretse would be the first president of a new country, Botswana; his great-grandson would be president in the twenty-first century.
* Later Jameson was rehabilitated and elected Cape premier; he went on to receive a baronetcy. Rudyard Kipling wrote ‘If …’ about his optimism in the face of adversity.
* Menelik’s planned successor had been his cousin, Ras (duke) Makonnen Wolde Mikael, a grandson of a king of Showa, his top commander at Adowa, but he died first, leaving a son, Tafari Makonnen, later Emperor Haile Selassie. When the emperor had a stroke in 1904, his wife Taytu ruled for him and on his death vainly attempted to stop the succession of his grandson, Lij Iyasu.
* Just after the war, Rhodes died, aged forty-eight, leaving North and South Rhodesia (Zambia and Zimbabwe) named after himself. Buried with the salute of Ndebele warriors in today’s Zimbabwe, he left his fortune to educate Rhodes scholars at Oxford.
* It was what a Russian leader did. Since the Romanovs had come to power in 1613, Russia had expanded an average 55 square miles a day, 20,000 a year, from 2 million square miles to 8.6, which, with only a few setbacks in 1856 and 1878, made it one of the most successful conquest machines in world history.
* In 1873 a successful gunmaker named Ludwig Nobel, son of a Swedish inventor who had made his fortune in Russia and brother of Alfred who had invented nitroglycerine dynamite first for mining then for war, arrived from St Petersburg and bought a refinery in Baku. Nobel invented the first oil tanker, appropriately called the
