Charles River Editors

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.

The hurricane that struck Galveston, Texas, on September 8, 1900, made landfall with winds at 145 miles per hour. In the days before radio, few people knew about impending hurricanes....

The History and Folklore of Vampires chronicles how vampires became so popular....

By the time Christopher Columbus started setting east from the New World, he had explored San Salvador in the Bahamas (which he thought was Japan), Cuba (which he thought was China), and Hispaniola, the source of gold....

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....

After the siege of Boston forced the British to evacuate that city in March 1776, Continental Army commander George Washington suspected that the British would move by sea to New York City....

The Partition of Ireland and the Troubles: The History of Northern Ireland from the Irish Civil War to the Good Friday Agreement analyzes the tumultuous events that marked the creation of Northern Ireland, and the conflicts fueled by the partition....

They say that judgment does not exist in Lourdes. Once one sets foot on this hallowed soil, all barriers of race, social status, background, and religious differences cease to exist....

Today, the term "Philistine" is often used as a euphemism for a person who is particularly uncouth, uncultured, ignorant, and possibly violent....

Towards the 17th century, the Puritan-raised George Fox became increasingly discouraged by the worsening moral conditions of society....

Since the early days of human warfare, which may date back to the Stone Age, combatants have sought to gain an advantage through the acquisition of secret information. With the growth of technology, a parallel advantage was sought through the application of numerous types of torture....

"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 Balkan area has historically been one of the world’s most combustible regions. Home to several national groups and at a crossroads of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, the Balkans have exerted an outsized role on world affairs....

Worship of the Feathered Serpent can be traced back 2,000 years, and the Serpent’s cults appear all across Mesoamerica. The Olmec, the Aztec, and both the Yucatec and K’iche Mayans all had different names for this deity, including Kukulkan, Q’uq’umatz, and Tohil....

To say Edith Stein lived a remarkable life would be a dramatic understatement. Born in Breslau (then part of Germany) at the end of the 19th century, Edith was raised as an observant jew, only to turn her back on religion right around the time World War I devastated the continent....

As soon as man discovered writing, he began engaging in historiography (historical writing and philosophy), but paleoanthropology only really began in the late 1800s....

“Scotch-Irish” is an American term that became popular in the latter 1800s, referring to the largely Protestant immigrants to the United States originating in the northern Irish province of Ulster....

The spy novel emerged from the intrigues of the mid-20th century for good reason. The war with the Third Reich involved an unseen cloak-and-dagger struggle between the participants, but beyond that, an even larger and longer contest took place in the shadows....

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....

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....