検索キーワード： 著者 "Charles Rivers" すべてのカテゴリー

Over 450 years after his reign, Henry VIII is still the most famous and recognizable King of England, but it’s for all the wrong reasons. Though well regarded by contemporaries as a learned king and "one of the most charismatic rulers to sit on the English throne", he is best remembered today for his gluttony and multiple marriages. History for Kids: An Illustrated Biography of King Henry VIII chronicles Henry VIII’s life and reign.

The importance of Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus (or as he was known from birth, Gaius Octavius “Octavian” Thurinus) to the course of Western history is hard to overstate. His life, his rise to power, his political, social, and military achievements, all laid the foundations for the creation of an empire which would endure for almost five centuries, and whose traditions, laws, architecture, and art continue to influence much of Europe and the world today.

History for Kids: The Illustrated Life of Queen Elizabeth I chronicles the life and reign of England’s most famous queen, but it also humanizes the woman who ruled one of the world’s most powerful kingdoms in an age dominated by men. Elizabeth inherited her grandfather’s political acumen and her father’s magnificence, thus creating not just one of the most colorful courts in Europe but also one of the most effective governments in English history.

At the conclusion of World War I, a once promised unified Arab state, which was to include the modern Hejaz, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine/Israel, Jordan and Iraq, did not materialize. Instead, the territories were divided between the French and British, but the British did reward the Hashemites by putting local leaders on the thrones of Iraq and Jordan....

On a hot night in the middle of August 1791, in a wooded clearing in the mountains above the northern plain of Saint-Domingue, men and women gathered where the lanterns of the great houses could not reach them. They came on foot through the cane, slipping away from plantations whose owners counted them as property and nothing more. Some had crossed the ocean in chains and still carried the names of African towns in their mouths. Others had been born on the island and knew only the cane, the whip, and the work that killed a grown person in a handful of years.

In the autumn of 2011, while a civil war ripped across Libya and the long reign of dictator Muammar Gaddafi came apart in gunfire, a team of archaeologists in England announced that they had located more than 100 lost towns and villages in the middle of the Sahara. Making it all the more amazing, they had spotted the ancient settlements from space.

The year 753 B.C. has been immortalized as the birth year of Rome, the Eternal City, which according to legend was founded by the brothers Romulus and Remus. When Remus was killed, allegedly by Romulus or one of his followers, Romulus's new city found itself with a male-to-female ratio that was severely unbalanced, and the Romans on Palatine Hill had trouble spawning the next generation.

As a basic definition, it may be said that an Ice Age is simply a period of time during which thick ice sheets cover vast areas of land. These sheets have advanced and retreated, at times taking over the entire planet, and conversely disappearing nearly altogether. Glacial ice formed by this regularly occurring process does not sit in a state of inertia, but moves dynamically, reshaping the geological features of the continents.

A cup rattles, three small cubes of bone or ivory spill across a wooden board, and for one held breath the whole room leans in. A soldier's monthly pay, a merchant's profit, and occasionally a man's own freedom was riding on which faces land upward. That scene played out countless times a day throughout the ancient world, in army camps on the frozen Rhine, in the back rooms of Pompeian wine shops, in the tiled gaming chambers of senatorial villas, and in the palace itself, where more than one emperor kept a set close at hand.

On a wooden board marked with a simple grid, two players take turns setting down smooth stones, one side black and the other white. There are no dice, no cards, and no hidden information. Each stone is identical to every other stone of its color, and once placed, a stone never moves again unless it is captured and lifted from the board. A player claims territory by surrounding empty points with stones, captures enemy stones by surrounding them, and at the end counts the ground held. That is nearly the whole of the game.

On the afternoon of May 11, 1997, in a television studio on the 34th floor of a building in midtown Manhattan, one of the strongest chess players in history sat down to play the sixth and final game of a match he had expected to win. Garry Kasparov was 34 and had held the world championship for 12 years, making his name a synonym for the human mind operating at the absolute edge of its power. Across the board from him sat an opponent with no mind at all. The opponent was a black tower of processors built by IBM and named Deep Blue.

While the fight over gay marriage has been bitterly contested and debated for much of the 21st century, it’s still somewhat difficult to believe that just 50 years ago, homosexual activity was illegal in nearly every state in America. Homosexuals faced discrimination that surpassed that of even African-Americans or suspected Communists, and their lifestyles were so taboo that they were typically considered to be a security risk because it would be so easy for someone who wished to harm the country to blackmail them.

Johannes Vermeer has fascinated a growing number of 21st century viewers with his most intimate depictions of the nature of human existence. The formal perfection of his compositions and the precision of his painting technique, expressing his fantastic narrative ability and accurate realism, have become a quintessential characteristic of the Dutch Golden Age of painting. Nearly 400 years later, Vermeer is still celebrated for his incomparable sense of timelessness, human dignity and unprecedented talent for creating luminosity and purity of color in his scenes.

On the night of April 1, 1951, in six republics along the western edge of the Soviet Union, soldiers moved into villages and towns while the people inside their houses slept. They came with dogs and machine guns, and they carried lists on which names and addresses had already been written. The lists had been compiled over the preceding months by the Ministry of State Security, the agency the Soviets called the MGB. The men knocked, and when the doors opened, they read out an order.

Among the figures of early Roman history, few stand out quite like Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, a man who to his contemporaries stood as the very image of the Roman Vir Bous (the Good Man). His life, whether viewed through the lens of ancient writers or treated as something of a foundational myth, has shaped Western thought surrounding civic duty and the restraint of power for more than 2,000 years.

“Pancho Villa,” people whispered at the beginning of the 20th century, "can march 100 miles without stopping, live 100 days without food, go 100 nights without sleep, and kill 100 men without remorse." The legend of Francisco Villa is full of heroism, tragedy and romance, a story about how a poor farmer boy became a bandit after avenging an injustice on his family and transformed into a military genius who fled from an oppressive government to lead the largest revolutionary army in his country's history.

There is a farm outside La Porte, Indiana, that no longer exists. The buildings burned to the ground on the morning of April 28, 1908, but what the fire left behind was a cellar full of horrors that the people of La Porte and the country at large spent the better part of that spring trying to comprehend. Investigators found the remains of several bodies that had been dismembered, wrapped, and buried with the kind of efficiency that suggested someone had done the work many times before.

Often called the “Father of Geometry,” Euclid’s influence is so pervasive that his book, The Elements, was the primary math manual for over 2,000 years. It was not a “textbook” in the modern sense, as it did not have problem sets, word problems, or diagrams for practice, but it was a foundational reference and logical guide that students had to read, memorize, and demonstrate. In the Western and Islamic worlds, Euclid’s Elements was the standard geometry text for almost every educated person until the 19th century.

Despite the enmity towards Carthage held by the Greeks and Romans, they nevertheless spent centuries romanticizing and mythologizing its legendary founder, Queen Dido. It’s an established fact that the Phoenicians established a maritime empire with Tyre at the forefront in the early 1st millennium BCE, and from that, the ancients believed that a Phoenician princess named Elisa fled Tyre to North Africa after her brother killed her husband, where she managed to negotiate with local leaders for land and secure the site of Carthage, becoming Queen Dido in the process.

In popular media and culture, the Paleolithic era is often depicted as a time when humans were completely savage, spoke with little more than grunts, hit women over their heads with clubs and kidnapped them, and of course, everyone lived in caves. The reality is that the Paleolithic era was a time of great change when humans coalesced into groups and developed different technologies that helped them survive and ultimately thrive in harsh environments.