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

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.

The American occupation of Japan holds a singular and problematic place in the histories both of Japan and of American foreign policy. For the Japanese, the occupation marked the transition from war to peace, from authoritarianism to democracy, and from privation to plenty, making it a passage from one of the darkest chapters in Japanese history to one of the brightest.

One of the most turbulent and romanticized eras in ancient Chinese history is that of the three kingdoms period. During the third century AD in China, warlords battled for supremacy. This turbulent and bloody era is known as the three kingdoms period. It's also one of the most romanticized eras in Chinese history; heroes and villains like Cao Cao, Liu Bei, and Zhuge Liang have served has inspiration for poetry, novels, opera, and song in China.

Freedom of the press isn’t just a fundamental right in America but a key part of the democratic process. When the United States secured its independence against Britain in the War of Independence in 1783, there was no certainty about what the new country would look like in terms of national governance. In 1787, delegates from the various states convened in Philadelphia to draft a constitution that would define this.

The current view of science is that Earth is around 4.6 billion years old. The first four billion years of its development are known as the Precambrian period. For the first billion years or so, there was no life on Earth, and then the first single-celled life-forms, early bacteria and algae, began to emerge. It’s unknown where they came from or even if they originated on this planet at all, but this gradual development continued until suddenly (in relative geological terms), more complex forms of life began to emerge.

Japan's blissful isolation changed with the arrival of American Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853. In awe of the American weapons and ships, the Tokugawa shogunate quickly realized that they needed to evolve and modernize their military to survive, and a time of rapid change descended on Japan. Within a mere 30 years, the Tokugawa period’s great samurai caste was extinct. Military service was no longer the exclusive domain of the privileged warrior class who had combined the military with an intricate network of social status and vassalship to their feudal lords.

In southern Iraq, a crushing silence hangs over the dunes. For nearly 5,000 years, the sands of the Iraqi desert have held the remains of the oldest known civilization: the Sumerians. When American archaeologists discovered a collection of cuneiform tablets in Iraq in the late 19th century, they were confronted with a language and a people who were at the time only scarcely known to even the most knowledgeable scholars of ancient Mesopotamia.

Robert Smalls’ life illustrates what can happen when one is freed from the fetters of others’ estimations. Smalls’ metamorphosis from slave to ship pilot to U.S. Congressman displays the power of fiery determination and unrelenting ambition. News of Smalls’ incredible exploit made it all the way up to Lincoln, who eventually met him and asked why he would dare such a thing. Smalls replied with only one word: ‘Freedom.

The modern world has the ancient Romans to thank for the origins of many modern technologies, conveniences, and ideas, from running water, baths, and republican style government to roads. Similarly, by the 3rd century BCE, the Romans were prodigious monument builders, so much so that the memory of the great Roman Republic and the Roman Empire continues to exist within a cityscape of stone.

As one of the most influential and recognizable religious figures in history, Martin Luther continues to impact the world over 550 years after his death. Luther was a German priest and theologian whose writings and teachings sparked the Protestant Reformation in the early 16th century, creating one of the greatest schisms in the history of the Catholic Church and touching off religious turmoil and bloodshed that would engulf Europe for the next 2 centuries.

The ability to remain and travel underwater for an extended period of time has long been a dream for a good portion of mankind, perhaps second only to that of flying. The first “submersible” may have been a kind of glass container made for Alexander the Great so that he could observe undersea life firsthand. Despite this early attempt, fate decreed the idea of traveling beneath the surface of the water would lie fallow for nearly another 2,000 years after this experiment in about 332 B. C. Alexander’s death the next year effectively squashed any further developments.

In the wake of the Civil War, African Americans attained freedom from chattel slavery, but continued to suffer discrimination both legal in the form of Jim Crow laws and de facto in the continued perception among the vast majority of white Americans that African Americans were at the very least inferior and at the most a constant dangerous presence in their communities who must be carefully controlled.

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. From the Library and Lighthouse of Alexandria to the Great Pyramid at Giza, the ancient Egyptians produced several wonders of the world, revolutionized architecture and construction, created some of the world’s first systems of mathematics and medicine, and established language and art that spread across the known world.

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, which took place from the 16th-19th centuries.

The Harlem Hellfighters, also known as the 369th Infantry Regiment of the U. S. Army, embody a significant intersection of America’s military history and racial history. Initially raised as the 15th New York (Colored) National Guard and later federalized for World War I, the regiment was "loaned" to the French Army, where it compiled an extraordinary combat record, with a remarkable 191 days on the line and suffering about 1,400 casualties while never yielding its sector (Morrow & Sammons, 2014, pp. 3–6; Harris, 2003, pp. 233–235).

For more than half a century, the names J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were synonymous with epic fantasy. Thanks to his classics, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Tolkien both revived interest in fantasy literature and set the standard for the genre, and today he is widely acknowledged as the “father” of modern fantasy.

Given the RAF’s importance, it should come as no surprise that some of the pilots ranked among Britain’s most recognized war heroes, and Douglas Bader remains one of the most famous British soldiers in World War II. He has become synonymous with courage and perseverance in adversity, especially since both his legs were amputated after an air crash in 1931, yet he managed to continue flying and return to the RAF at the outbreak of the war in 1939. He became a well-decorated and highly promoted fighter ace before being shot down and taken prisoner by the Germans.

Just 12 days before Pigg’s death, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had already immortalized the men of the Royal Air Force with one of the West’s most famous war-time quotes. But the sentiment and gratitude Churchill expressed back in 1940 is very much alive today. The sacrifice made by “The Few”, the British and Allied fighter pilots who won the Battle of Britain in 1940, remains close to the hearts of the British public, and the piece by the BBC is typical of the national sentiment manifested in air shows, museums, TV programs and books.

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 still free.

In the 21st century, most people associate the idea of the possession of a person or place by a malevolent supernatural entity with the medieval world and particularly with the Catholic Church, but the truth is considerably stranger. Virtually every human culture that has ever existed has talked about both possession and exorcism, a rite or ritual used to free a person or place from possession. The terms used to describe the process of possession and entities thought to be responsible have changed throughout history, but the central theory does not.