Charles River Editors
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Spanish accounts and Mesoamerican ruins have ensured that 500 years later, people remain fascinated by civilizations like the Maya and Aztec, as well as sites such as Chichen Itza and Tikal. What is often overlooked is that the Maya and Aztec established kingdoms on lands that had been inhabited for millennia before them, and ancient cultures had not only left ruins but also influenced the civilizations that came after them. Thus, while sites like...
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The Third Reich's Luftwaffe began World War II with significant advantages over other European air forces, playing a critical role in the German war machine's swift, powerful advance. By war's end, however, the Luftwaffe had been decimated by combat losses and crippled by poor decisions at the highest levels of military decision-making, and it proved unable to challenge Allied air superiority despite a last-minute upsurge in German aircraft production.
When...
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Most scientists believe the evolution of humans has a history nearly as long as life itself. Anatomically modern humans and all other life that has existed on the planet first came about from the single-celled microorganisms that emerged approximately 4 billion years ago. Through the processes of mutation and natural selection, all forms of life developed, and this continuous lineage of life makes it difficult to say precisely when one species completely...
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Altogether, the Battle of Stalingrad was the deadliest battle in the history of warfare, and the Soviets' decisive victory there is considered one of the biggest turning points in the entire war, and certainly in the European theater. Over the next two years, the German gains in Russia were steadily reversed, and the Red Army eventually began pushing west towards Berlin. Fittingly, the importance of Stalingrad was commemorated in several ways, from...
7) Medieval Invasions of Italy: The History and Legacy of the Conflicts across the Italian Peninsula
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The gradual collapse of the Roman Empire brought monumental changes to Europe and beyond. The system that once bound both sides of the Mediterranean Basin together was gone, and with it, many of the connections people from Mesopotamia to Spain and from Gaul to Arabia once enjoyed. In its place, a period of transition began - once referred to as the "Dark Ages," although that term has fallen out of favor with modern scholars - after the Western Roman...
8) Luftwaffe and the Royal Air Force: The History and Legacy of Nazi Germany and Great Britain's Air
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"My Luftwaffe is invincible…And so now we turn to England. How long will this one last - two, three weeks?" – Hermann Göring, June 1940
Given its unique strengths and distinctive weaknesses by the personal quirks of the men who developed it, the Luftwaffe initially overwhelmed the more conservative, outdated military aviation of other countries. Its leaders embraced such concepts as the dive-bomber, which proved both utterly devastating and extremely...
9) Fighting After the War: A History of the Most Famous American Battles that Took Place After the Wars
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There are countless examples of battles that take place in wars after a peace treaty is signed. The last battle of the Civil War was a skirmish in Texas that Confederate forces won, nearly a month after Lee's surrender at Appomattox. As fate would have it, the last fighting of the Civil War took place two days after Confederate President Jefferson Davis had been captured in Georgia
It's certainly rare for the most famous battle of a war to take place...
10) The Avars: The History and Legacy of the Eurasian Nomads in Central Europe during the Middle Ages
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During the period after the collapse of the Roman Empire and the establishment of medieval Europe, which was once commonly referred to as the Dark Ages, many different tribes migrated across Europe, feeding on what was left of Rome and attempting to establish new kingdoms in the vacuum. Most of these tribes were Germanic in ethnicity and language and shared the same goals of either entering Roman territory to become Roman citizens or tearing down...
11) Alfred Hitchcock's Legendary Leading Ladies: The Lives of Grace Kelly, Ingrid Bergman, Joan Fontaine
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Considering that her film career lasted just six years, it would seem as though the reputation of Grace Kelly far outweighs her actual output. Indeed, from the time of her arrival in Hollywood in 1951 through her final film, High Society, in 1956, Kelly acted in just 11 films, leaving viewers to wonder whether Kelly was still in the beginning of her career or whether High Society was a proper culmination to an extraordinarily brief stay in the film...
12) War of the Keys: The History and Legacy of the Military Conflict Between the Holy Roman Empire and
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It has been famously pointed out that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, but it was also not an empire in the sense people expect when hearing the term. In theory, the emperor was the highest prince in Christendom, and his dominion extended the length and breadth of Western Europe. The empire had been created by the papacy when Pope Leo III famously crowned the supposedly unwitting Charlemagne in Saint Peter's Basilica, intending to...
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India has been the location of many different empires throughout its long history. The Indus Valley Civilization was home to one of the world's first civilizations more than 5,000 years ago, which was followed by the Aryan-Vedic culture and then a host of other kingdoms that flourished across the Sub-Continent. India has also been the birthplace of many religions. The Vedic religion of the Aryans evolved into the Hindu religion, and Buddhism and Jainism...
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The KGB is one of the most famous abbreviations of the 20th century, and it has become synonymous with the shadowy and often violent actions of the Soviet Union's secret police and internal security agencies. In fact, it is often used to refer to the Soviet state security agencies throughout its history, from the inception of the inception of the Cheka (Extraordinary Commission) in 1917 to the official elimination of the KGB in 1992. Whether it's...
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Individuals who decide to take up learning about the Old Testament of the Bible are immediately faced with the difficult proposition of identifying the various peoples that the Hebrews met and sometimes came into conflict with when they entered the territory that eventually became Israel. The Moabites and Edomites were just two of the many Canaanite groups that the Hebrews dealt with, often violently, but there were dozens of other Canaanite groups,...
16) Charles Babbage and Alan Turing: The Lives and Careers of the English Mathematicians Who Revolutioni
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Today, the world is in the midst of the transformative and ever-developing Digital Age, otherwise referred to as the "Age of Information." It has been an unprecedented, remarkable, and explosive era marked by social media and computer-generated imagery (and with it, deep fakes), among other novel, previously unimaginable concepts. The bulky monitors and blocky towers of personal computers and laptops, which were once upon a time considered fashionable,...
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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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The pages of world history textbooks contain a litany of "lost" empires and civilizations, but usually, upon further review, it is revealed that these so called lost empires are often just lesser known cultures that had a less apparent impact on history than other more well-known civilizations. When one scours the pages of history for civilizations that seem inexplicably lost but had a great impact during its time, a number of places in Asia Minor...
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By mid-1943, British leaders, particularly Churchill, believed that while the defeat of Germany and Italy were important, victory should not be achieved at the expense of ceding control of post-war Europe to the Soviets. What went unsaid was that Churchill's goal was British control over the Mediterranean, and his insistence on using Allied resources in the Mediterranean and working to block Russian gains even while the war was still in progress caused...
20) Burying the Dead in Ancient Egypt: The History of Egyptian Mummies, Tombs, and Other Burial Rituals
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Given the abundance of funerary artifacts that have been found within the sands of Egypt, it sometimes seems as though the Egyptians were more concerned with the matters of the afterlife than they were with matters of the life they experienced from day to day. This is underscored most prominently by the pyramids, which have captured the world's imagination for centuries. The pyramids of Egypt are such recognizable symbols of antiquity that for millennia,...