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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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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...
3) The Diadochi: The History of Alexander the Great's Successors and the Wars that Divided His Empire
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On his deathbed, some historians claim that when he was pressed to name a successor, Alexander muttered that his empire should go "to the strongest". Other sources claim that he passed his signet ring to his general Perdiccas, thereby naming him successor, but whatever his choices were or may have been, they were ignored. Alexander's generals, all of them with the loyalty of their own corps at their backs, would tear each other apart in a vicious...
4) Shays' Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion: The History and Legacy of Early America's Domestic In
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Even as the young United States successfully secured its independence, the new nation was beset by problems. The drafters of the Articles of Confederation had deliberately avoided giving the national legislature the power to tax, because Parliament had so abused that authority against the colonies, but this proved to be a severe limitation on the national government. Besides hampering the Continental Army, the inability of the national government...
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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...
6) Medieval Conspiracy Theories: The History of the Most Popular Conspiracy Theories About the Middle A
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Conspiracy theories are nothing new: when the Great Fire of Rome occurred in 64 CE, Suetonius and Cassius Dio, two of Nero's ancient biographers, were adamant that it was the emperor himself who set the fire (or ordered it set), and they are the originators of the myth that Nero played the lyre, danced around his palace, and sang "The Sack of Troy" while Rome burned outside his windows. Nearly 2,000 years later, people still believe the incredibly...
7) Ancient Rome's Provinces: The History of the Foreign Lands Ruled by the Roman Empire in Antiquity
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It can be argued that Roman culture was, indeed, Graeco-Roman rather than Roman. It was the Greek language that served as the lingua franca in the Eastern Empire and much of the west including Italy. Many Greek intellectuals, including Galen, were based in Rome and the Roman aristocracy more and more came to embrace Greek literature and philosophy. Homer's epics inspired Virgil's Aeneid and Seneca wrote in Greek. Earlier, Scipio Africanus (236 –...
8) Tyre & Carthage: The History of the Phoenician Cities that Dominated the Mediterranean for Centuries
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Across the eastern Mediterranean there has been discovered a great number of objects whose appearance or materials are extraneous to local cultures, whether it was an Egyptian amulet in Greece, a Greek vase in Africa, or thousands of strange amulets in Gibraltar. The remains are evidence that a huge amount of goods was once moved from one land to another, systematically transported and traded across the Mediterranean by the ancient commercial network...
9) Albert Speer and Germania: The History of Nazi Germany's Lead Architect and His Plans for a Futur
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In 1933, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party took absolute control of Germany, and his new regime was known as the Third Reich (Third Empire). The first Germanic empire had been the Holy Roman Empire (800-1806), and the second was the German Empire (1871-1918). Hitler was determined the new Reich be more impressive and longer-lasting than any that had gone before, and the Nazis soon began referring to the Tausendjähriges Reich ("Thousand-Year Reich").
Naturally,...
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Europe's attempts to appease Hitler, most notably at Munich in 1938, failed, as Nazi Germany swallowed up Austria and Czechoslovakia by 1939. Italy was on the march as well, invading Albania in April of 1939. The straw that broke the camel's back, however, was Germany's invasion of Poland on September 1 of that year. Two days later, France and Great Britain declared war on Germany, and World War II had begun in earnest.
Of course, as most people now...
11) Flat Earth: A History of Strange Tales, Bizarre Beliefs, and Conspiracy Theories about the Earth'
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The world is filled with mysteries, and even in the modern age, much of the planet remains unexplored. The depths of the oceans and the intricate and extensive cave systems that honeycomb some parts of the Earth are still largely unknown. Thus, it should come as no surprise that when it comes to this terra incognita, people have projected all sorts of ideas. Tales of sunken cities or lost civilizations are just some of the fanciful theories, and those...
12) Italy's Most Powerful Mafias: The History and Legacy of the Cosa Nostra, La Camorra, and 'Ndrangheta
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The word "mafia," Sicilian in origin, is synonymous with Italy, but Italy is home to several different mafias, with three being particularly notorious. While the Cosa Nostra of western Sicily is the most infamous, other powerful groups include the ferocious 'Ndrangheta of Calabria and the Camorra, the third-largest mafia, which is active in Naples and the Campania region. A "mafia" is loosely defined as a criminal organization that is interested in...
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Emerging from France's catastrophic 1940 defeat like a bedraggled and rather sinister phoenix, the French State – better known to history as "Vichy France" or the "Vichy Regime" after its spa-town capital – stands in history as a unique and bizarre creation of German Fuhrer Adolf Hitler's European conquests. A patchwork of paradoxes and contradictions, the Vichy Regime maintained a quasi-independent French nation for some time after the Third...
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The people that came to be known as Germans originally came from Scandinavia and were mainly shepherds and hunters, but they comprised a number of distinct groups. Within each group, there were separate tribes, and as their populations grew, the land they occupied in Scandinavia was unable to support them, so they began migrating south, settling outside the borders of the Roman Empire. The Germans were fierce warriors who employed rather crude but...
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The fighting between the Romans and Jews in the first century CE, brought about some of the most important events in Jewish history. The Roman siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE, resulted in the destruction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem, a disaster that would eventually prove both permanent and catastrophic since it was never rebuilt. The fighting also permanently altered the diaspora of Judaism in the ancient world, but because the First Jewish War...
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The 50 years following the assassination of Severus Alexander on March 19, 235 CE has been generally regarded by academics as one of the lowest points in the history of the Roman Empire. This stands in stark contrast to the previous 150 years, which included the reigns of the Five Good Emperors and has been universally praised as one of the high points of the empire. Severus Alexander was the last of the Severan emperors, and the subsequent years...
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World War I, also known in its time as the "Great War" or the "War to End all Wars", was an unprecedented holocaust in terms of its sheer scale. Fought by men who hailed from all corners of the globe, it saw millions of soldiers do battle in brutal assaults of attrition which dragged on for months with little to no respite. Tens of millions of artillery shells and untold hundreds of millions of rifle and machine gun bullets were fired in a conflict...
18) Imperial Germany's Colonization in Africa: The History of the German Efforts and Conflicts to Col
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Before the mid-19th century, European intervention in much of tropical Africa was extremely difficult because of the disease gradient. The combination of malaria and yellow fever commonly killed off half of European troops stationed in West Africa each year. It was the reverse of the conquest of the Americas, where introduced diseases wiped out 50 million indigenous Americans, opening the land to settlement and greatly reducing the ability to resist....
19) American Monsters: The History of America's Most Persistent Urban Tales about Strange Birds, Serpent
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People have always been fascinated with the hidden, the mysterious, and the unexplained. Every society has its tall tales and ghost stories, its odd legends, and heroes. Also, every society has its stories of strange beasts, dangerous or benign, that live in the twilight world between the everyday and the legendary. Through most of history, people have been closely tied to nature, hunting in forests and having an intimate knowledge of the animals...
20) Napoleon Bonaparte's Most Decisive Land Battles: The History of Austerlitz, the French Invasion of R
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Nearly 50 years after Napoleon met his Waterloo, generals across the West continued to study his tactics and engage their armies the same way armies fought during the Napoleonic Era. Despite advances in military technology and the advent of railroads for transportation, all of which made defensive warfare more effective, acclaimed military geniuses like Robert E. Lee used flank attacks and infantry charges against superior numbers in an effort to...