Catalog Search Results
1) 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...
2) Great Patriotic War: The History of the Fighting Between the Soviets and Germans During World War
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In the warm predawn darkness of June 22, 1941, 3 million men waited along a front hundreds of miles long, stretching from the Baltic coast of Poland to the Balkans. Ahead of them in the darkness lay the Soviet Union, its border guarded by millions of Red Army troops echeloned deep throughout the huge spaces of Russia. This massive gathering of Wehrmacht soldiers from Adolf Hitler's Third Reich and his allied states – notably Hungary and Romania...
3) Ottoman Empire's Worst Defeats: The History and Legacy of the Decisive Battles that Checked the Otto
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In the wake of taking Constantinople, the Ottoman Empire would spend the next few centuries expanding its size, power, and influence, bumping up against Eastern Europe and becoming one of the world's most important geopolitical players. It was a rise that would not truly start to wane until the 19th century. The long agony of the "sick man of Europe," an expression used by the Tsar of Russia to depict the falling Ottoman Empire, could almost blind...
4) Ancient Anatolia: The History of the Region's Most Powerful Cities, Kingdoms, and Empires in Anti
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During the Late Bronze Age, from about 1500-1200 BCE, the Near East was a time and place where great kingdoms and empires vied for land and influence, playing high stakes diplomatic games, trading, and occasionally going to war with each other in the process. The Egyptians, Hittites, Babylonians, Assyrians, and several smaller Canaanite kingdoms were all part of this system, which was one of the first true "global" systems in world history and also...
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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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Though history is usually written by the victors, the lack of a particularly strong writing tradition from the Mongols ensured that history was largely written by those who they vanquished. Because of this, their portrayal in the West and the Middle East has been extraordinarily (and in many ways unfairly) negative for centuries, at least until recent revisions to the historical record. The Mongols have long been depicted as wild horse-archers galloping...
7) Ottoman Empire's Greatest Victories: The History and Legacy of the Most Important Battles Won by the
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Description
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...
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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,...
9) Medieval History of Montenegro: The History of the Region's Rulers and Culture Before the Modern Era
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Much has been written about Western intervention during the breakup of Yugoslavia, and whether it made matters worse, prevented worse atrocities, or was simply ineffective. In early 1992, however, what was clear was that Europe was hopelessly divided over the best course of action to take towards Yugoslavia, and after several years of fighting, the Bosnian War was one of the most violent conflagrations in Europe since the end of World War II.
That...
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Description
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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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...
12) Ancient and Medieval Conspiracy Theories: The History of the World's Most Persistent Conspiracy Theo
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Perhaps it should also not be surprising that the themes found in contemporary conspiracy theories are often echoed in ancient conspiracy theories. While some people still insist that Lyndon B. Johnson was in on John F. Kennedy's assassination, it was speculated across the ancient world that the young Macedonian king, Alexander the Great, conspired to have his own father, Philip II of Macedon, assassinated. Likewise, the New Age beliefs that Mesoamerican...
13) Great Northern War: The History of the Conflict that Made Russia the Dominant Empire in the Baltic
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The Great Northern War, fought from 1700-1721, gets its name from the fact the war focused on the Baltic, but the battlefields extended into Germany and deep into Poland and Ukraine. Sweden was a military power with a small empire in the Baltic, while Russia was still a landlocked place, backward when compared to the rest of Europe, not very powerful, and highly xenophobic. The Poland-Lithuanian Commonwealth was still powerful, and the Cossacks were...
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In addition to being ubiquitous parts of daily life, Egyptian religion and mythology were also complex, and while Egyptian society was polytheistic like other ancient civilizations, that's where the comparisons end. Religion was so pervasive that it heavily influenced funerary practices and the belief in an afterlife, and deities like Osiris and Isis (who are still well known today) had become so firmly ingrained that even the Ptolemaic pharaohs,...
15) 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....
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Although the Declaration of Independence is now considered one of the most important political documents in history, the men that drafted it did not initially favor such a move at the start of the American Revolution. Despite its assumption of governing duties, the Second Continental Congress never intended, at least initially, to become the governing body of a new nation. Instead, it merely hoped to transform the relationship between Britain and...
17) Brandy Station and the March to Gettysburg: The History of the Confederate Invasion of Pennsylvania
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As Lee's army moved into Pennsylvania, Stuart's cavalry screened his movements, thereby engaging in the more traditional cavalry roles, but it's widely believed that he was still smarting over the results of June 9. As a result, many historians think it likely that he had already planned to remove the negative effect of Brandy Station by duplicating one of his now famous rides around the enemy army, much as he did to McClellan's Army of the Potomac...
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Before the Vietnam War, most Americans would have been hard pressed to locate Vietnam on a map. South Vietnamese President Diệm's regime was extremely unpopular, and war broke out between Communist North Vietnam and South Vietnam around the end of the 1950s. Kennedy's administration tried to prop up the South Vietnamese with training and assistance, but the South Vietnamese military was feeble. A month before his death, Kennedy signed a presidential...
19) The Dakota War of 1862: The History and Legacy of the Sioux Uprising during the American Civil War
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Despite being one of the most erstwhile foes the U.S. government faced during the Indian Wars, the Sioux and their most famous leaders were grudgingly admired and eventually immortalized by the very people they fought. Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse remain household names due to their leadership of the Sioux at the fateful Battle of the Little Bighorn, where the native warriors wiped out much of George Custer's 7th Cavalry and inflicted the worst defeat...
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...
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