Word: napoleon
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...before in the continental U.S. It was indeed present and, as if on cue, put on a show for the hundreds of bird watchers by feeding three times each day with a flock of Bonaparte's gulls (named after Charles Lucien Bonaparte, an ornithologist and a nephew of Napoleon) making their accustomed annual visit...
Epic Greed. It was there that the tremendous vitality of 19th century French painting would henceforth be nourished. Napoleon's art adviser, Dominique Vivant Denon, a man so feared for his rapacity that he was known throughout Europe as l'emballeur (the packer), set out to bring back to Paris every portable masterpiece he could lay hands on in conquered territory. This exercise in epic greed was an unqualified success. It assured the dominance of French art for another hundred years...
...might be expected. Napoleon also takes several curtain calls. The great British historian G.M. Trevelyan (in a 1906 essay that gave the other writers the idea for this collection) has Bonaparte win at Waterloo, then plunge Europe into decades of troublesome peace. England is unable to disarm because of the danger that he still represents and is ruined by the cost of its huge military establishment. (The ubiquitous Byron, in this version, leads an unsuccessful workers' rebellion against George IV and is executed.) H.A.L. Fisher's Napoleon is a bit more believable. At 46, he escapes to America...
...epidemic spread as fast as ships could carry infected passengers round the world. The highest mortality occurred in India, where 12.5 million people died. Very few places remained influenza-free because of fanatically enforced quarantine regulations. Among them were the South Atlantic island of St. Helena, Napoleon's last home, and a U.S. naval training station in San Francisco Bay, where drinking fountains were sterilized hourly with blowtorches. Nearly everywhere else life for the survivors changed radically. Moviehouses, restaurants and concert halls were ordered shut. Courting became medically dangerous. A sort of mass purdah prevailed as millions learned...
Some of the royals have gone to work. Prince Louis Murat, whose great-great-great grandfather briefly ruled the kingdom of Naples in Napoleon's day, is president of Compagnie Ferguson Morrison-Knudsen, a Paris-based subsidiary of America's Morrison-Knudsen Co., while Michael of Rumania is a stockbroker in Lausanne. Some live off the money they or their family got out of the country. Others, like Italy's Umberto, manage very well with the help of monarchist friends who either hope to restore them to power or are moved by a sense of nostalgia...