Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln (1809 to 1865) was the sixteenth President of the United States, who led the nation through its civil war and brought an end to…
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Mahatma Gandhi
Mahatma Gandhi (1869 to 1948) was the leader of India's independence movement against British rule, famous for his philosophy of nonviolent…
Piltdown Man
Piltdown Man was a supposed "missing link" between apes and humans, announced in 1912 from fossil fragments found in England. For decades it misled…
How the Americas Were Settled
How and when the first people reached the Americas is a genuinely contested question. That humans came from Asia is clear, but the timing and the…
Vitalism
Vitalism was the long held belief that living things contain a special, non physical "vital force" or "life energy" that animates them and that…
The Caloric Theory
The caloric theory was an explanation of heat, widely accepted into the early nineteenth century, which held that heat is an invisible, weightless…
The Origin of Language
How human language first arose is one of the hardest questions in science. That we alone among animals possess full language is clear; when, how, and…
The Wright Brothers' First Flight
On 17 December 1903, near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, the brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright achieved the first sustained, controlled flight of a…
Tea
Tea is a drink made by steeping the cured leaves of the tea plant in hot water. After plain water, it is the most widely consumed beverage in the…
The Acropolis of Athens
The Acropolis of Athens is an ancient citadel on a rocky hill above the city, crowned by the temples of classical Greece. Its most famous building,…
The Vikings
The Vikings were seafaring Norse people from Scandinavia who raided, traded, explored, and settled across much of Europe and beyond between roughly…
The Mona Lisa
The Mona Lisa is a portrait painted by Leonardo da Vinci in the early sixteenth century, now hanging in the Louvre in Paris. The most famous painting…
The Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution was the transition, beginning in Britain in the late eighteenth century, from making goods by hand to making them with…
The Bronze Age Collapse
The Bronze Age collapse was a sudden, widespread breakdown of civilizations around the eastern Mediterranean roughly 3,200 years ago. Within a few…
The Berlin Wall
The Berlin Wall was a heavily guarded barrier that divided the city of Berlin from 1961 to 1989, separating communist East Germany from democratic…
The Great Sphinx of Giza
The Great Sphinx of Giza is a colossal ancient statue in Egypt, with the body of a lion and the head of a human. Carved from a single mass of…
The Telescope
The telescope is an instrument that gathers and focuses light to make distant objects appear closer and clearer. Its invention transformed astronomy,…
Chocolate
Chocolate is a food made from the seeds of the cacao tree, enjoyed around the world in countless forms. From a sacred drink of ancient Mesoamerica to…
The Aztec Empire
The Aztec Empire was a powerful state that dominated central Mexico in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, until it was conquered by Spanish…
The Silk Road
The Silk Road was a vast network of trade routes that connected China with Central Asia, the Middle East, and Europe for many centuries. More than a…