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61) The Gutians: The History and Legacy of the Asian Nomads Who Spread across the Near East in Antiq
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The ancient Gutians are probably not one of the groups that come to most people's minds when they think of barbarian hordes, but they were among the most important in the Bronze Age Near East. Little is known about the Gutians before they entered the historical record around 2200 BCE. in Mesopotamia, and even after that point, the contemporary records are open to interpretation because they are “obviously” biased against the outsiders.
Since...
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New Spain was established in the aftermath of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire in 1521, and as the most spectacular conquest and the richest province, New Spain quickly became the focus of Spanish America. The Viceroyalty of New Spain was established in 1535, comprising a vast region of what is now the American Southwest, all of Mexico and Central America, the various Spanish held islands of the Caribbean, the "Spanish Main," and the Spanish...
63) Janissaries and Sipahi: The History of the Elite Infantry and Cavalry that Fueled the Ottoman Empire
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In terms of geopolitics, perhaps the most seminal event of the Middle Ages was the successful Ottoman siege of Constantinople in 1453. The city had been an imperial capital as far back as the 4th century, when Constantine the Great shifted the power center of the Roman Empire there, effectively establishing two almost equally powerful halves of antiquity's greatest empire. Constantinople would continue to serve as the capital of the Byzantine Empire...
64) Western Democracy: The History and Legacy of Representative Governments in the West from the Anci
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In today's modern world every political regime, even the most authoritarian or repressive, describes itself as democracy or a Democratic People's Republic. The concept of rule by the people, on behalf of the people, has come to be accepted as the norm, and very few would overtly espouse the cause of dictatorship, absolute monarchy or oligarchy as the most desirable political system upon which to base the government of any country.
It is also generally...
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"Had I just 10,000 Cossacks, I would have conquered the whole world.” (Napoleon Bonaparte)
The history of Ukraine is a fascinating story of how cultures, political systems, religions, and power have met, intersected, morphed, and expanded. The region was relatively sparsely populated for much of ancient history, a wilderness of rivers, forests, and steppes, but that does not detract from the rich historical development of the region. A huge area,...
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Movie stars are revered for their ability to captivate audiences, and Hollywood began to flourish before the onset of television, allowing movies to enjoy relatively uncontested supremacy over American entertainment. The popularity of various actors would thus extend well beyond the success of any of their individual films, reflecting their much broader cultural significance as monuments of Hollywood during its Golden Age. In the 1920s, the burgeoning...
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In 1938, the Soviet Union film company Mosfilm released the motion picture Alexander Nevsky, directed by Sergei Eisenstein. It is a historical drama depicting the defense of the Republic of Novgorod against an invasion of the Teutonic Knights in the mid-13th century. The eponymous hero of the story, the Prince of Novgorod, leads his troops against the German knights on a field of solid ice. During the battle, called the Battle on the Ice or the Battle...
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The annals of world history are filled with intriguing, although often outlandish stories of lost cities and kingdoms, and in addition to Atlantis, there are also Hyperborea, Shambhala, and Aztlan, to name just a few. Besides being cities and kingdoms that have been lost, often through some sort of catastrophe, all of these places are mentioned in religious texts or as part of a peoples' national history. They play a major role in the identity of...
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Samurai Sasaki Kojiro was growing increasingly impatient as he waited on the beach at Funa Island in Kokura. An undefeated master swordsman, he was tense and his anger was getting the better of him. He was on the small island for a duel, a clash of steel between two swordsmen where a man's life could end in seconds. The duel was the ultimate test of the swordsman, and Sasaki, one of the best in Japan, was known as "The Demon of the Western Provinces."...
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As Earth entered the Cambrian Period, there was a relatively sudden increase in life form diversity throughout the oceans. Completely new forms of life, more complex and more diverse than anything that had been seen before, began to spread. This acceleration in the evolution of new forms of life was so dramatic that this has come to be known as the "Cambrian explosion."
Although new species in the Cambrian explosion developed almost entirely in the...
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Most Americans have heard of the Little Bighorn, the 1876 battle in which a band of Lakota Sioux and their allies wiped out most of the 7th US Cavalry under the command of George Armstrong Custer. The movie images are of fierce warriors in long eagle feather headdresses flowing behind them as they gallop across the plains on nimble Indian ponies. In fact, many Americans know the names of the commanders who beat Custer, most notably Sitting Bull and...
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One September day, New York City suffered a devastating act of domestic terrorism, but that day was not the 11th, and the attack took place over 80 years before the most notorious terrorist attack on America. In 1920, an explosion in the Financial District of New York City killed 38 people, injured hundreds more, and caused damage that is still visible on some of Wall Street's most famous buildings today. Although the attack has largely been forgotten,...
73) The Great Railroad Strike of 1877: The History and Legacy of the Protests Across America Over Wag
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When trains were introduced as a popular means of transportation, some of the first tracks laid terminated in New York, and the expansion of railroads led to the birth of train stations across the country. In general, these were small buildings where passenger could buy tickets and wait for their trains to arrive, and according an article written by Samuel Dunn around the turn of the 20th century, "The first Manhattan terminal was opened in 1832 at...
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By the time the Pleistocene Epoch ended around 12,000 years ago, Homo sapiens had become one of the most significant species on the planet. It was also near the end of that period of time that modern humans began to gradually populate what would become Europe, Asia, and the Americas, eventually becoming the inheritors of the Paleolithic era and the only human species to make it into the Neolithic era. The cold Pleistocene temperatures lowered water...
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"They have soldiers. We only have arguments." — French Foreign Minister Théophile Delcassé Near the end of the 19th century, Otto von Bismarck, the German chancellor, brought the plenipotentiaries of all major powers of Europe together to deal with Africa's colonization in such a manner as to avoid provocation of war. This event, known as the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, galvanized a phenomenon that came to be known as the Scramble for Africa....
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Some of the most iconic symbols of the Roman Empire that have survived into the modern world today are the arches that Romans erected to commemorate military victories and glorify individual emperors. The story of how arches came to be used throughout the Roman world in such a way is one that involves the evolution of the military and its leaders into the political forces that came to dominate the state, and those arches, along with the triumphs that...
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During the reign of the Artaxiad dynasty, Armenia became a hub of trade and commerce, connecting the Silk Road and the Mediterranean world. The Armenian kings encouraged the development of agriculture, commerce, and arts, and the kingdom became renowned for its skilled artisans, writers, and philosophers. Of course, given its central location, the dynasty also faced numerous challenges, including repeated invasions by the Roman and Parthian empires,...
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At one point in antiquity, the Achaemenid Persian Empire was the largest empire the world had ever seen, but aside from its role in the Greco-Persian Wars and its collapse at the hands of Alexander the Great, it has been mostly overlooked. When it has been studied, the historical sources have mostly been Greek, the very people the Persians sought to conquer. Needless to say, their versions were biased, and attitudes about the Persians were only exacerbated...
79) The Chisholm Trail: The History and Legacy of 19th Century America's Most Famous Cattle Drive Route
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Around the time that the Civil War ended in 1865, the open ranges of south Texas were full of the cattle, known as longhorns. Hundreds of thousands of the distinctive steer, with their horns spanning as much as seven feet from tip to tip, roamed free on the range, so cattle ranchers took advantage of the bounty and claimed the wild longhorns as their own. With a beef shortage on the East Coast, the demand for cattle was high, so the ranchers just...
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The Mongols were pushed out of the region by the Poles and Lithuanians, who then occupied state territories in the 14th century. Poland seized areas in the west, known as Galicia, while Lithuania occupied a northern area called Volynia. The Mongol-Tatars, however, retained control of the Crimean Peninsula, using it as a base for trade, including that of slaves, with the Ottoman Empire. The Tatars would actually strengthen their grip on the Crimea...
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