The battle is upon us, and the old gods are waking.Within these pages gods of fable, creatures of lore, and ancient rituals have been brought back to life in over two hundred drabbles of exactly one hundred words each.Tremble as you rediscover the darkness that came before, the darkness that could eat the world. Delve into the madness created by award-winning horror and fiction authors from around the world. We dare you to remember the fear of the unknown, ...

DARKNESS RECLAIMED is a collection of ten wonderfully dark stories spanning the best of the horror genre. Body horror, psychological horror, thriller, dark fantasy and tech horror.Each bite-sized page-turning story will have you checking over your shoulder and sleeping with the lights on. Supernatural and paranormal encounters. Deranged families and brutal murders. An insatiable itch and a train ride from hell ... Delve into the madness within these pages and let th...

As the Western Roman Empire collapsed in the late 5th century, Hadrian’s Wall was abandoned and Roman control of the area broke down. Little is known of this period of British history, but soon the Anglo-Saxons – who had been harassing the Saxon Shore as pirates – showed up and began to settle the land, creating a patchwork of little kingdoms and starting a new era of British history. Several early medieval historians, writing well after the events, said the Anglo-Saxons were invited to Br...

It was the sail that linked the continents of Africa and America, and thus it was also the sail that facilitated the greatest involuntary human migration of all time. The African slave trade is a complex and deeply divisive subject that has had a tendency to evolve according the political requirements of any given age, and is often touchable only with the correct distribution of culpability. It has for many years, therefore, been deemed singularly unpalatable to implicate Africans themselv...

Africa may have given rise to the first humans, 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 spr...

Given the abundance of funerary artifacts that have been found within the sands of Egypt, it sometimes seems as though the Egyptians were more concerned with the matters of the afterlife than they were with matters of the life they experienced from day to day. This is underscored most prominently by the pyramids, which have captured the world’s imagination for centuries. The pyramids of Egypt are such recognizable symbols of antiquity that for millennia, people have made assumptions about ...

Olivia de Havilland was one of the last living actresses who worked during the Golden Era of Hollywood, but also one of the most decorated, winning dozens of awards over the course of a 50 year career. Among those, she most notably won the Academy Award for Best Actress for To Each His Own (1946) and The Heiress (1949), more than a decade after she got her start as an 18 year old in Hollywood.Of course, de Havilland isn’t well remembered for any of those accolades...

In September 1862, the Union had no intelligence service worthy of the name. It had detectives, scouts, scattered networks of informants, balloons, signal flags, and a great deal of luck, but the federal government did not have a coordinated system, to the extent that military commanders did not know enemy troop strength. By the end of the war, the Union would be running the most sophisticated intelligence operations in American history to that point, utilizing an integrated, all-source, p...

Around the very same time that Congress was drafting the Declaration of Independence, it also had a committee drafting a constitution for the United States. The committee was led by John Dickinson, who presented the committee's conclusion on July 12, 1776. Drafting the document was no easy task: as with the writing of the Declaration of Independence, the individual states were often reluctant to hand sovereignty over to a greater confederate power.After the Revolution, the new Unit...

A land of almost 3 million square miles has lain since time immemorial on the southern flank of the planet, so isolated that it remained entirely outside of European knowledge until 1770. However, the first human footprints on this vast territory were felt 70,000 years earlier, as people began to cross the periodic land bridges and the short sea crossings from Southeast Asia.The history of the indigenous inhabitants of Australia, known in contemporary anthropology as the “Aborigina...

During the 17th century, the Netherlands, despite having only 1.5 million people in 1600, became a global maritime and trading power. By contrast, France at the time had 20 million people, Spain had 8 million, and England had 5 million. Nevertheless, Amsterdam became one of the most important urban centers in the world and the location of the world’s first stock market, and Dutch merchant ships and pirates plied the Atlantic Ocean, the Indian Ocean, and the Pacific Ocean. The Dutch acquire...

India has been the location of many different empires throughout its long history. The Indus Valley Civilization was home to one of the world’s first civilizations more than 5,000 years ago, which was followed by the Aryan-Vedic culture and then a host of other kingdoms that flourished across the Sub-Continent. India has also been the birthplace of many religions. The Vedic religion of the Aryans evolved into the Hindu religion, and Buddhism and Jainism were also born in India. By the Midd...