Charles River Editors

An often overlooked, yet very important, environmental process in world history is known as the “Late Antique Little Ice Age,” which took place during the 6th century A.D. across most of the Northern Hemisphere and received its name because it was shorter and less well-known than the Little Ice Age.

Africa may have given rise to the first human beings, and Egypt probably gave rise to the first great civilizations, which continue to fascinate modern societies across the globe nearly 5,000 years later.

The reign of the Khmer Rouge, a Cambodian communist regime, began on April 7, 1975 as Khmer Rouge militants entered the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, ultimately gaining control and forcing out its residents....

To the Aztecs, Huitzilopochtli wore a blue-green hummingbird helmet and was draped in pure white heron feathers. He carried a smoking mirror, an obsidian mirror, a shield, darts, and the serpent Xiuhcoatl that carried with it the fury and might of the sun....

The Apocrypha of the Bible examines the history of the books excluded from the Bible, the characters and events told by the books, and the discoveries that have influenced Biblical studies in the last few centuries....

The Overland Campaign that pitted Robert E. Lee against Ulysses S. Grant is one of the most famous campaigns of the Civil War, and perhaps its greatest chess match. While Grant sought to destroy Lee's Army of Northern Virginia along the way to Richmond, Lee aimed to defend his capital....

During the first half of the 1st millennium CE, an empire arose in Persia that extended its power and influence to Mesopotamia in the east, Arabia in the south, the Caucasus Mountains in the north, and as far east as India.

Jean Antoinette Poussin, the woman who would become known as Madame de Pompadour, was a middle-class girl of uncertain parenthood who became one of many in a long line of King Louis XV’s mistresses before she died at the age of 42....

Given the abundance of funerary artifacts that have been found within the sands of Egypt, it sometimes seems as though the Ancient Egyptians were more concerned with the matters of the afterlife than they were with matters of the life they experienced from day to day....

It's rare for weather systems that produce storms to collide. In fact it's unusual enough that when it happened in October 1991, a weatherman called it the "perfect storm"....

In 2000, The Patriot, starring Mel Gibson, captured the nation's attention with the highly dramatized story of an American patriot fighting the British in South Carolina....

The library of Nag Hammadi, Egypt, is as significant in the study of early Christianity as the writings of the Essenes to the understanding of Judaism during the time of the Roman occupation....

"The golden age of piracy" generally refers to the era when history's most famous pirates roamed the seas of the West Indies from 1670-1720....

The Civil War was the deadliest conflict in American history, lasting four years and inflicting over a million casualties. Historians have studied the biggest battles ever since....

Many ancient civilizations have influenced and inspired people in the 21st century....

The early history of Earth covers such vast stretches of time that years, centuries, and even millennia become virtually meaningless. Instead, paleontologists and scientists who study geochronology divide time into periods and eras....

The FBI and J. Edgar Hoover: The History and Legacy of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Under Its First Director examines the events that led to the formation of the FBI, the most important cases it was involved in, and the controversies surrounding Hoover’s methods....

In 323 BCE, Alexander the Great was on top of the world; on June 11, 323 B.C., Alexander the Great, King of Macedon, Hegemon of the League of Corinth, King of Kings, died....

Patagonia is in the southernmost region of South America, comprising about 400,000 square miles going from the Colorado River in the north to the Tierra del Fuego archipelago in the south....

Few consider the question of whether the Old Testament is "complete" and whether in antiquity there were other books besides "Genesis", the "Exodus" or "Judges", with different histories and unknown characters, that were excluded from the canon and got lost in the sands of time....