If the world had a navel, it would be the Dead Sea, the lowest point on Earth where one can still stand on dry land. The photographs of this unique lake seem to be taken from a science fiction movie, or a land devastated after a nuclear holocaust. To others, the fluffy shores could remind them of Antarctica although it is in one of the warmest spots on the planet. Its white, creamy masses, scattered along golden beaches, are not ice floes or frozen water, but effervescent salt formations. ...

In 1831, a 26-year old French foreign service official by the name of Ferdinand de Lesseps was sent to Alexandria to serve as vice-consul. While undergoing an obligatory period of quarantine, the French Consul-General, Monsieur Mimaut, sent his new understudy a number of books to help pass the time, and one of these books proved to be a lengthy memorandum composed by French engineer Jacques-Marie le Père, writing on instructions from Napoleon Bonaparte. The subject was the linking of the R...

Cave painting falls under the heading of “parietal art,” a term used to note any prehistoric art found on the walls or ceilings of caves. It includes five basic types of work, from stencils of handprints, and other hand and finer marks, to a number of abstract signs and symbols, figurative painting, engraving and relief sculpture. It also encompasses all petroglyphs and engravings. The term generally implies prehistoric art as coming from the dawn of early man, but can also be far more rec...

The study of paleoanthropology is the branch of anthropology that examines the development of humans and pre-humans, often called collectively hominins, through history. Although paleoanthropology is directly concerned with human history, it diverges from traditional historical studies in that historians use historical records as their primary sources to reconstruct history, while paleoanthropologists work with bones and other artifacts hominins left as their records. Historians deal with ...

Indulgence is at the heart of modern perceptions of eating and drinking for the ancient Romans. The majority of primary sources depicting food and drink that have survived show rich patricians reclining at a table loaded with exotic foods, and Roman diners are often depicted as gorging themselves over numerous courses served over many hours. Of course, the history of eating and drinking for the wider population within the more than 1,000-year span of the empire was somewhat different. Thes...

In the wake of taking Constantinople, the Ottoman Empire would spend the next few centuries expanding its size, power, and influence, bumping up against Eastern Europe and becoming one of the world’s most important geopolitical players. It would take repeated efforts by various European coalitions to prevent a complete Ottoman takeover of the continent, and one of the most important battles among those efforts took place at Vienna in 1529.At the time, the Ottomans were led by one o...

In 1783, the last British troops left the American East Coast port cities of Savannah, Charleston, and New York. The War of Independence was over, and the United States of America finally emerged as an independent nation free from British rule. It was a stunning defeat for the British, but it was no less surprising to the victors – in fact, the man who would become the first president of the new nation, George Washington, described the outcome of the war as "little short of a standing mira...

The United States and Canada today share the longest undefended border in the world, encompassing 5,525 after the U.S. purchased Alaska, and though they have long been allies, the border has not always been peaceful. During colonial times, generations of the British war with France meant generations of threats and of actual attacks by Canadian militia and allied Indians from New France. The British ended that threat from Canada by defeating France in 1763 and forever ending French rule in ...

The successful Apollo 11 mission was certainly an astonishing technological triumph, but what is less well remembered now are that many programs preceded Apollo and were essential to its success. Project Mercury was one of those, and in many ways it represented the greatest step forward in terms of the conquest of space. Before Project Mercury, there was no certainty that a human could survive the rigors of a space launch or live outside Earth’s atmosphere. There was no agreement on just w...

Shortly after Emperor Hadrian came to power in the early 2nd century CE, he decided to seal off Scotland from Roman Britain with an ambitious wall stretching from sea to sea. To accomplish this, the wall had to be built from the mouth of the River Tyne – where Newcastle stands today – 80 Roman miles (76 miles or 122 kilometers) west to Bowness-on-Solway. The sheer scale of the job still impresses people today, and Hadrian’s Wall has the advantage of being systematically studied and partial...

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 themselves in the perpetration of the institution, and only in recent years has the large-scale African involvement in both the Atlantic and Indian Ocean Slave Trades come to ...

In some ways, Project Gemini is a neglected part of the US space program. Sandwiched between the excitement of Project Mercury and the sending of the first American astronauts to space and the euphoria of the Apollo Moon landings, Gemini was a step forward rather than a dramatic leap. However, this project achieved many important firsts, including the first spacewalk, the first rendezvous and docking between two spacecraft, the first flights of more than one week’s duration and many more. ...