From the $2.1 million sale of one of Napoleon’s hats at a Paris auction in 2023 to the Napoleonic jewelry heist at the Louvre in 2025, the first Emperor of the French keeps making headlines over 200 years after his death on the solitary island of Saint Helena in the Atlantic Ocean in 1821.
Anna Barker’s book, 13 Notes from Napoleon, Iowa: Musings on the Edge of the French Empire, illuminates multiple aspects of Iowa’s Napoleonic past such as Iowa cities named after the Napoleonic battles of Marengo and Waterloo and explains the mystery of Iowa’s distinctly French-looking flag.
Along the way, Anna muses on other Napoleon-related matters, such as Empire waist gowns and Napoleonic fashion, the Battle of Waterloo (and ABBA’s immortal take on this event!), and to what extent Europe’s current internal contradictions have been impacted by its Napoleonic past.
Anna Barker is an educator and journalist who, with her husband Jim, raised three children in Iowa City and teaches at the University of Iowa. She walks her Yorkie Watson along the Iowa River, writes on Iowa Avenue, publishes essays in the Iowa City Press-Citizen, and believes that this designational monotony could have been easily avoided if Iowa City had retained the name of the original 1838 settlement: Napoleon.