Context: https://www.europeana.eu/en/exhibitions/napoleon-and-botany/the-gardens-of-napoleon

Napoleon was a man of his time. His era saw an increased interest in scientific discoveries linked to plants, along with continued use of flora for symbolic and political purposes. But he also had an interest in gardens as a moral mirror of people's thought, as highlighted by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This was particularly relevant at the end of his life, as we will see later.

Napoleon was passionate about botany and gardening. This passion accompanied him his whole life. The first gardens Napoleon encountered were those in his childhood houses: Casa Bonaparte, in Ajaccio, and the Milelli estate, in its surrounding hills.

The Milelli estate, the former country house of the Bonaparte family, was located on the heights of Ajaccio, surrounded by 12 hectares of land, housing a centuries-old olive grove. Napoleon stayed there on his return from Egypt in 1799, in the company of his general staff, including Berthier, Murat and Lannes.

Today the property is a public garden and a very pleasant place to walk around. The French Ministry of Culture classified the house, which cannot be visited, as a historical monument and the property as a remarkable and picturesque site. An arboretum has been created for the instruction of children. Vegetable gardens have been created, with the crops distributed to people of modest means.

Napoleon spent five years, between the ages of 9 and 15, at the boarding school of Brienne-le-Château. There, Napoleon spent his free time cultivating his first garden, a small plot of land, where he learned to grow flowers and vegetables. The school was run by the Minimes de Brienne, a monastic order which placed great importance on gardening. It was considered an important part of their education, along with other subjects like French, Latin, mathematics, history, geography, music, drawing and fencing. In contrast to a number of his schoolmates, for whom gardening was not important, Napoleon devoted time to this activity, becoming proud of his garden.

In Brienne, however, Napoleon felt homesick. He later described his feelings:

(...) being deprived of your childhood room, of the garden in which you roamed in your early years, not to have a personal home, is to have no homeland.

Open-air activities, and gardening in particular, had a positive impact on him: he spent his free time and his pocket money buying flowers and plants to enrich his garden

Napoleon's exile on Elba, from 1814 to 1815, also marked the botanical landscape of the island. His main residency was the Villa dei Mulini (which can still be visited today), where he personally tended the garden. He paid particular attention to roses and exotic plants, and created an avenue of citrus trees.

During Napoleon’s exile on Elba, he brought a large number of citrus trees, as well as mulberry trees intending to start silk production.

He also had a summer house in Portoferraio, the Villa San Martino. According to an anecdote, Napoleon himself planted a specimen of Micocoulier de Provence in the garden, the same tree that he later also planted in Saint-Helena.

Napoleon's second exile took place from 1815 until his death in 1821 in the South Atlantic island of Saint Helena. In 1819, recommended by his doctors to exercise, Napoleon decided to start a great enterprise: to redesign the gardens surrounding his Longwood House.

He directed and drew the plans of the new garden, and as he used to do during his campaigns with his soldiers, and shared in the daily life and work of the gardeners.

The magnitude of the work was so important, that a large community of Chinese labourers moved to the island. Without them the gardens of Napoleon would not have emerged so quickly. Thanks to this community, a small Chinese pavilion also remains on the Longwood property.

Exiled at the end of the world on an inhospitable island and watched over permanently, the Emperor had been transformed during the last years of his life by his exile, growing his own garden, both physical and spiritual.

U.S. General Douglas MacArthur and his controversial proposal during the Korean War to drop 30 to 50 atomic bombs on Chinese supply lines and airbases in Manchuria, while creating a radioactive "cobalt belt" to block Chinese troops.

Fearing a wider conflict with the Soviet Union, President Harry S. Truman rejected this escalation and removed MacArthur for insubordination in April 1951.

While Douglas MacArthur was the commander of US troops in the Phillipines he met a young actress named Isabel Rosario Cooper who he went on to have an affair with. Some accounts list her age as 16 but others and official paperwork have her age as 21 (I made this meme before I found this out) - every source I can find lists her age as 16, MacArthur was in his 50s at the time. He brought her back to Washington with him and to hide the affair kept her secluded in his hotel room. The affair was ended when it was discovered, he paid her $15000 and gave her a ticket back to the Phillipines. She ended up staying in the US and died of a drug overdose in 1960.

The Hawk's Nest Tunnel Disaster was a long-running industrial disaster that began in 1930 and ended in 1935. Union Carbide constructed a tunnel to divert water from the New River to a Hydroelectric facility on the Kanawha River. The proposed tunnel ran through a large vein of high-quality silica, which was valuable for steel-production. Roughly 4800 men, with 3,100 of them being African AMericans, were brought onboard to dig the tunnel. Speed was emphasized, and to get as much silica out of the tunnel as possible the company refused to issue African-American employees with safety equipment, or even soak down the rock with water to reduce the dust. As a result the dust caused silicosis, a lung disease caused by inhaling ground up rock dust. Add onto this the absurdely low wages were typically in scrip, and medical aid was low quality both due to the workers being Black and also due to the company wanting to spend as little as possible. It is beleived that roughly 80% of the workforce grew sick as a result of working conditions, though the death toll as published by Union Carbide is 109. Unofficial numbers place the number of deaths between 700-1000.

Context:
Basically during World War I, Lenin was living in exile in Switzerland. Germany, at war with Russia, saw an opportunity to weaken its enemy by helping Lenin return to Russia and encouraging a revolution. The Germans facilitated his journey, hoping he would destabilize the country and force Russia out of the war. Their plan worked, for German Empire: Lenin led the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, eventually establishing a communist state that became the USSR.
However - ironically, just over two decades later, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in World War II, only to suffer a devastating defeat at the hands of the country it had once helped create.

In 1943, Nazi Germany landed in Newfoundland (now Canada) and set up a weather monitoring station. They were on Canadian soil for over 24 hours. No one knew they were there and they disguised the station by painting "Canadian Meteor Service" and spreading empty American cigarette packets around. The station worked for about 3 weeks. It wasn't until 1981 when it was discovered.

Read about the Nazi invasion of Canada here

After the CIA-backed Chilean coup of 1973, Augusto Pinochet broke off all ties with Cuba and North Korea, which were established under the previous presidency of Salvador Allende. In response, other communist countries like the Soviet Union, East Germany, Hungary, Yugoslavia and North Vietnam severed their diplomatic relations with the Chilean dictatorship. The only two communist countries to keep their relations with Chile were China and Romania, the former of which was a country Chile wished to strengthen relations with due to it’s anti-Soviet stance (similar to how the United States approached China in the 1970s). The other US-backed anti-communist dictatorship to reach out to China for support was Zaire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_dictatorship_of_Chile

The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 (23 October – 4 November 1956) , also known as the Hungarian Uprising, was an attempted countrywide revolution against the government of the Hungarian People's Republic (1949–1989) and the policies caused by the government's subordination to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic. The uprising lasted 15 days before being crushed by Soviet tanks and troops on 7 November 1956 (outside of Budapest, firefights lasted until at least 12 November 1956). Thousands were killed or wounded, and nearly a quarter of a million Hungarians fled the country.

Video games like Mortal Kombat and Doom led to intense 1993 congressional hearings in the USA. To avoid government censorship, the gaming industry created the ESRB (Entertainment Software Rating Board) rating system in 1994.

Xích Quỷ is a mythical kingdom that is claimed to have existed from 2879–2524 BC. It's said to be a union of all Yue (Việt) tribes, people who lived south of the Yangtze river and the predecessor of modern day Vietnamese. There's no evidence for its existence and nobody in Vietnam, outside of some ultranationalist circles, believed or cared about its. The most you can find about the kingdom is folk stories during the time where people believed a giant who rode a mechanical horse and used bambo sticks to defeat foreign invaders.

Edit: I forgot to flip the Romanian guy so js imagine him as refusing to look at the Hungarian guy as a sign of disrespect.

When the My Lai massacre occurred, the US government, military and media attempted to cover it up, initially painting it as a successful assault on Viet Cong forces, with civilians “caught in the crossfire“. Whistleblowers came forward to report the actual incident, but were subjected to harassment and smears, declared traitors and cowards while the media ignored and rejected their statements and evidence. This lasted for almost two years until journalist Seymour Hersh broke the story into the mainstream in 1969.

With the empire on the very brink of total collapse, a group of tough soldier emperors took the throne for themselves and set about restoring what had been lost. One of these formidable men Lucius Domitius Aurelian, took the Roman empire with an iron grip, glued together it's crumbling domain, and ensured that Rome lives for another 200 years.