King Charles the Second was the son and successor of King Charles the First. These two are the only kings of the name of Charles that have appeared, thus far, in the line of English sovereigns. Nor is it very probable that there will soon be another. The reigns of both these monarchs were stained and tarnished with many vices and crimes, and darkened by national disasters of every kind, and the name is thus connected with so many painful associations in the minds of men, that it seems to have been dropped, by common consent, in all branches of the royal family...

On the day after the assassination of Mr. Lincoln, Andrew Johnson took the oath of office, and became President of the United States. He was a native of Raleigh, North Carolina, born in 1808. With no advantages of education, he passed his boyhood in poverty and neglect. In 1828 he removed to Tennessee and settled at Greenville. Here, through toil and hardship, he rose to distinction, and after holding minor offices was elected to Congress. As a member of the United States Senate in 1860-61, he opposed secession with all his powers, and continued to hold his seat as senator from Tennessee. On the 4th of March, 1862, he was appointed military governor of that State. This office he held until 1864, and was then nominated for the Vice-Presidency. Now, by the death of the President, he was called to assume the responsibilities of chief magistrate. On the ist of February, 1865, Congress adopted an amendment to the Constitution by which slavery was abolished and forbidden in all the States and Territories of the Union. By the 18th of the following December the amendment had been ratified by the legislatures of twenty- seven States, and was duly proclaimed as a part of the Constitution. The Emancipation Proclamation had been issued as a military measure; now the doctrines and results of that instrument were recognized and incorporated in the fundamental law of the land. The problem of reconstruction of the Southern States was a most serious one and the Republican party came near splitting asunder over it. As early as 1863 President Lincoln had formulated a plan by which any seceding State might be restored to the Union if one-tenth of its voters of 1860 should take an oath to support the Constitution and the laws and should set ...

THE seventeenth century is the period when Europe, shattered in its political and religious ideas by the Reformation, reconstructed its political system upon the principle of territorialism under the rule of absolute monarchs. It opens with Henry IV., it closes with Peter the Great. It reaches its climax in Louis XIV. and the Great Elector. It is therefore the century in which the principal European States took the form, and acquired the position in Europe, which they have held more or less up to the present time. A century, in which France takes the lead in European affairs, and enters on a course of embittered rivalry with Germany, in which England assumes a position of first importance in the affairs of Europe, in which the Emperor, ousted from all effective control over German politics, finds the true centre of his power on the Danube, in which Prussia becomes the dominant state in north Germany, in which Russia begins to drive in the Turkish outposts on the Pruth and the Euxine - a century, in short, which saw the birth of the Franco-German Question and of the Eastern Question - cannot be said to be deficient in modern interest...

"A symposium held at the Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame, February 24, 2007 ; organized by Robin F. Rhodes and Charles R. Loving."--P. [ii].