Professor John Röhl, the historian, who has died aged 85, was born to a German father and English mother and endured a fractured early childhood in Germany and Hungary during the Second World War; moving to England after the war, he went on to spend some 50 years engaged in original archival research into the life of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the last German emperor, of whom he published a lavishly praised three-volume biography, in both German and English, running to some 4,000 pages.
The second expedition of Commodore Matthew Perry of the US to Japan in 1854 sent ships to Formosa on the way back to the US to assess Keelung’s potential as a coaling station. Far-sighted, Perry recommended that the US establish a presence on Formosa, as Taiwan was then known. His suggestion went unheeded, but others were watching, few more closely than Prussia.
The Prussians had wanted to follow up the Americans with an expedition of their own. In 1858, when William I became regent, the idea of entering the colonial race in the Far East began to take shape in the
(Inside Science) Over the past several years, scientists have published research suggesting that people’s brains change after spending longer than a few months in space. These studies started because astronauts experienced issues like vision problems and swollen optic nerves upon returning to Earth after long missions.