Pirates dominate movie box office profits, they are theme park entertainment, and they occupy a place in popular culture that has outlasted the era when they originally ruled the seas. Contemporary audiences who are safe from the pistols and cutlasses of the men who sailed the Caribbean, Indian, and Atlantic Oceans to prey upon ships […]
There have been countless words written about the Founding Fathers. As the people who crafted the documents that would win Americans freedom from Great Britain and establish a constitutional republic, they were indeed a special group. One of the most overlooked Founders is James Madison. His life was as extraordinary as the others, but for some
A little over 2000 years ago a man named Julius Caesar changed the world. Even if you had never heard of him his lasting legacy has no doubt had an impact on your life. No doubt, even the very calendar that you use is based upon the system he created, with the month of July
The Russian Revolution in 1917 was a moment in time when the will of the people put an end to a system of government that had been in place for centuries. The story of Russia’s transition from Imperial reign to eventual Communist dictatorship is a tale rooted in the ranks of the common people and
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The saga of the Vikings rises and falls on the banks of history, ebbing and flowing with popular opinion and whimsical anecdotes. The Vikings are routinely typecast and labeled anywhere from bloodthirsty tyrants to valiant heroes. They have been condemned as pirates and praised as explorers. We have all heard the stories of the fierce
What do you think of when you consider the Middle Ages? Knights in armor and damsels in distress? Vikings plundering monasteries?Religious dissenters burning at the stake?The dead bodies piling up as war, famine, and plague devastated Europe?Think again. While all these are part of the tapestry of the medieval era, the threads of politics, personality and war,
Founded at the dawn of the seventeenth century as European nations were establishing global empires, the English East India Company would become a vital part of burgeoning British supremacy. Begun as a joint-stock company for trade with the East Indies, this organization would evolve into one of the world’s first capitalistic corporations. Inside you will
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During the late years of the eighteenth century, the spirit of Enlightenment thinking and revolution were in the air. The world was changing, moving away from ingrained beliefs about religion, reason, society, and the rights of the individual and turning more towards the laws of nature as interpreted by the scientific method. Nowhere was the
During the Middle Ages, the nations of Europe forged new identities that moved them away from the lost glory of the Roman Empire into their own ethnicity. The experience of maturation was often clumsy and out of step, an evolutionary process that saw the nation’s developing at their own pace as they struggled to replace
Alexander Hamilton did not rise to public prominence as an austere New Englander or a gentlemanly Virginian. He was not born in the colonies at all. He was born in the West Indies, the son of a woman of French descent who had left her husband for another man. As an illegitimate child, Hamilton could
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