Portal:History

Introduction

Herodotus (c. 484 BC – c. 425 BC), often considered the "father of history"

History (from Greek ἱστορία, historia, meaning "inquiry, knowledge acquired by investigation") is the study of the past as it is described in written documents. Events occurring before written record are considered prehistory. It is an umbrella term that relates to past events as well as the memory, discovery, collection, organization, presentation, and interpretation of information about these events. Scholars who write about history are called historians.

History can also refer to the academic discipline which uses a narrative to examine and analyse a sequence of past events, and objectively determine the patterns of cause and effect that determine them. Historians sometimes debate the nature of history and its usefulness by discussing the study of the discipline as an end in itself and as a way of providing "perspective" on the problems of the present.

Stories common to a particular culture, but not supported by external sources (such as the tales surrounding King Arthur), are usually classified as cultural heritage or legends, because they do not show the "disinterested investigation" required of the discipline of history. Herodotus, a 5th-century BC Greek historian is considered within the Western tradition to be the "father of history", and, along with his contemporary Thucydides, helped form the foundations for the modern study of human history. Their works continue to be read today, and the gap between the culture-focused Herodotus and the military-focused Thucydides remains a point of contention or approach in modern historical writing. In East Asia, a state chronicle, the Spring and Autumn Annals was known to be compiled from as early as 722 BC although only 2nd-century BC texts have survived.

Ancient influences have helped spawn variant interpretations of the nature of history which have evolved over the centuries and continue to change today. The modern study of history is wide-ranging, and includes the study of specific regions and the study of certain topical or thematical elements of historical investigation. Often history is taught as part of primary and secondary education, and the academic study of history is a major discipline in university studies.

Selected periods of history

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  The Enlightenment (also known as The Age of Enlightenment or The Age of Reason) was an intellectual and philosophical movement that dominated the world of ideas in Europe during the 18th century, the "Century of Philosophy".
  
  French historians traditionally place the Enlightenment between 1715 (the year that Louis XIV died) and 1789 (the beginning of the French Revolution). International historians begin the period in the 1620s, with the start of the scientific revolution. Les philosophes (French for "the philosophers") of the period widely circulated their ideas through meetings at scientific academies, Masonic lodges, literary salons, coffee houses and in printed books and pamphlets. The ideas of the Enlightenment undermined the authority of the monarchy and the Church and paved the way for the political revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries. A variety of 19th-century movements, including liberalism and neo-classicism, trace their intellectual heritage to the Enlightenment. Read more...
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  The Diamond Sutra, of Dunhuang, China was published in 868 AD as the first printed book in world history using woodblock printing techniques. This image is a front piece for the book which was instrumental in spreading East-Asian Buddhism. Post-classical times were an era of religion. Matters of faith took part in the development of political power and in the personal lives of most ordinary people in both the New and Old World. Geographic regions were often divided based on a location's religious affiliation.

  
  For more maps, images and other media please see *Post-classical history at Wikimedia Commons
  
  Post-classical history (also called the Post-Antiquity era, Post-Ancient Era, or Pre-Modern Era) is a periodization commonly used by the school of "world history" instead of Middle Ages (Medieval), which is roughly synonymous. The period runs from about AD 500 to 1450 though there may be regional differences and debates. The era was globally characterized by the expansion of civilizations geographically, the development of three of the great world religions (Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism), and development of networks of trade between civilizations. Read more...
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  The High Middle Ages, or High Medieval Period, was the period of European history that commenced around 1000 and lasted until around 1250. The High Middle Ages were preceded by the Early Middle Ages and were followed by the Late Middle Ages, which ended around 1500 (by historiographical convention).
  
  Key historical trends of the High Middle Ages include the rapidly increasing population of Europe, which brought about great social and political change from the preceding era, and the Renaissance of the 12th century, including the first developments of rural exodus and of urbanization. By 1250, the robust population increase had greatly benefited the European economy, which reached levels that would not be seen again in some areas until the 19th century. That trend faltered during the Late Middle Ages because of a series of calamities, most notably the Black Death, but also numerous wars as well as economic stagnation. Read more...
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  A Roberts loom in a weaving shed in 1835. Textiles were the leading industry of the Industrial Revolution and mechanized factories, powered by a central water wheel or steam engine, were the new workplace.

  
  The Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes in Europe and the US, in the period from about 1760 to sometime between 1820 and 1840. This transition included going from hand production methods to machines, new chemical manufacturing and iron production processes, the increasing use of steam power, the development of machine tools and the rise of the factory system. The Industrial Revolution also led to an unprecedented rise in the rate of population growth.
  
  Textiles were the dominant industry of the Industrial Revolution in terms of employment, value of output and capital invested. The textile industry was also the first to use modern production methods. Read more...
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  An early nuclear power plant that used atomic energy to generate electricity.

  
  
  The Atomic Age, also known as the Atomic Era, is the period of history following the detonation of the first nuclear ("atomic") bomb, Trinity, on July 16, 1945, during World War II. Although nuclear chain reactions had been hypothesized in 1933 and the first artificial self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction (Chicago Pile-1) had taken place in December 1942, the Trinity test and the ensuing bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended World War II represented the first large-scale use of nuclear technology and ushered in profound changes in sociopolitical thinking and the course of technology development.
  
  While atomic power was promoted for a time as the epitome of progress and modernity, entering into the nuclear power era also entailed frightful implications of nuclear warfare, the Cold War, mutual assured destruction, nuclear proliferation, the risk of nuclear disaster (potentially as extreme as anthropogenic global nuclear winter), as well as beneficial civilian applications in nuclear medicine. It is no easy matter to fully segregate peaceful uses of nuclear technology from military or terrorist uses (such as the fabrication of dirty bombs from radioactive waste), which complicated the development of a global nuclear-power export industry right from the outset. Read more...
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  Charlemagne's empire included most of modern France, Germany, the Low Countries, Austria and northern Italy.

  
  The Early Middle Ages or Early Medieval Period, sometimes referred to as the Dark Ages, are typically regarded as lasting from the 5th or 6th century to the 10th century CE. They marked the start of the Middle Ages of European history. The term "Late Antiquity" is used to emphasize elements of continuity with the Roman Empire, while "Early Middle Ages" is used to emphasize developments characteristic of the earlier medieval period. As such it overlaps with Late Antiquity, following the decline of the Western Roman Empire, and precedes the High Middle Ages (c. 10th to 13th centuries).
  
  The period saw a continuation of trends evident since late classical antiquity, including population decline, especially in urban centres, a decline of trade, a small rise in global warming and increased migration. The Early Middle Ages was labelled the "Dark Ages" in the 19th century, a characterization based on the relative scarcity of literary and cultural output from this time. However, the Eastern Roman Empire, or Byzantine Empire, continued to survive, though in the 7th century the Islamic caliphates conquered swathes of formerly Roman territory. Read more...
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  Petrarch, who conceived the idea of a European "Dark Age". From Cycle of Famous Men and Women, Andrea di Bartolo di Bargilla, c. 1450

  
  
  The "Dark Ages" is a historical periodization traditionally referring to the Middle Ages, that asserts that a demographic, cultural, and economic deterioration occurred in Western Europe following the decline of the Roman Empire.
  
  The term employs traditional light-versus-darkness imagery to contrast the era's "darkness" (lack of records) with earlier and later periods of "light" (abundance of records). The concept of a "Dark Age" originated in the 1330s with the Italian scholar Petrarch, who regarded the post-Roman centuries as "dark" compared to the light of classical antiquity. The phrase "Dark Age" itself derives from the Latin saeculum obscurum, originally applied by Caesar Baronius in 1602 to a tumultuous period in the 10th and 11th centuries. The concept thus came to characterize the entire Middle Ages as a time of intellectual darkness between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance; this became especially popular during the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment. Read more...
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  The launch of the Sputnik 1 satellite marked the start of the Space Age.

  The signals of Sputnik 1 continued for 22 days.

  
  
  The Space Age is a time period encompassing the activities related to the Space Race, space exploration, space technology, and the cultural developments influenced by these events. The Space Age is generally considered to have begun with Sputnik (1957). Read more...
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  The Iron Age is the final epoch of the three-age system, preceded by the Stone Age (Neolithic) and the Bronze Age. It is an archaeological era in the prehistory and protohistory of Europe and the Ancient Near East, and by analogy also used of other parts of the Old World.
  The three-age system was introduced in the first half of the 19th century for the archaeology of Europe in particular, and by the later 19th century expanded to the archaeology of the Ancient Near East. Its name harks back to the mythological "Ages of Man" of Hesiod. As an archaeological era it was first introduced for Scandinavia by Christian Jürgensen Thomsen in the 1830s. By the 1860s, it was embraced as a useful division of the "earliest history of mankind" in general and began to be applied in Assyriology. The development of the now-conventional periodization in the archaeology of the Ancient Near East was developed in the 1920s to 1930s.
  As its name suggests, Iron Age technology is characterized by the production of tools and weaponry by ferrous metallurgy (ironworking), more specifically from carbon steel.
  
  The duration of the Iron Age varies depending on the region under consideration. It is defined by archaeological convention, and the mere presence of some cast or wrought iron is not sufficient to represent an Iron Age culture; rather, the "Iron Age" begins locally when the production of iron or steel has been brought to the point where iron tools and weapons superior to their bronze equivalents become widespread. For example, Tutankhamun's meteoric iron dagger comes from the Bronze Age. In the Ancient Near East, this transition takes place in the wake of the so-called Bronze Age collapse, in the 12th century BC. The technology soon spreads throughout the Mediterranean region and to South Asia.
  Its further spread to Central Asia, Eastern and Central Europe is somewhat delayed, and Northern Europe is reached still later, by about 500 BC. Read more...
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  Diffusion of metallurgy in Europe and Asia Minor – the darkest areas are the oldest.

  
  The Bronze Age is a historical period characterized by the use of bronze, and in some areas proto-writing, and other early features of urban civilization. The Bronze Age is the second principal period of the three-age Stone-Bronze-Iron system, as proposed in modern times by Christian Jürgensen Thomsen, for classifying and studying ancient societies.
  
  An ancient civilization is defined to be in the Bronze Age either by producing bronze by smelting its own copper and alloying with tin, arsenic, or other metals, or by trading for bronze from production areas elsewhere. Bronze itself is harder and more durable than other metals available at the time, allowing Bronze Age civilizations to gain a technological advantage. Read more...
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  The early modern period of modern history follows the late Middle Ages of the post-classical era. Although the chronological limits of the period are open to debate, the timeframe spans the period after the late portion of the post-classical age (c. 1500), known as the Middle Ages, through the beginning of the Age of Revolutions (c. 1800) and is variously demarcated by historians as beginning with the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, with the Renaissance period, and with the Age of Discovery (especially with the voyages of Christopher Columbus beginning in 1492, but also with Vasco da Gama's discovery of the sea route to the East in 1498), and ending around the French Revolution in 1789.
  
  Historians in recent decades have argued that from a worldwide standpoint, the most important feature of the early modern period was its globalizing character. The period witnessed the exploration and colonization of the Americas and the rise of sustained contacts between previously isolated parts of the globe. The historical powers became involved in global trade, as the exchange of goods, plants, animals, food crops, and slaves extended to the Old World and the New World. The Columbian Exchange greatly affected the human environment. Read more...
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  Modern history saw extreme changes in the way people lived including industrialization

  
  Modern history, the modern period or the modern era, is the linear, global, historiographical approach to the time frame after post-classical history. Modern history can be further broken down into periods:

  • The early modern period began approximately in the early 16th century; notable historical milestones included the European Renaissance, the Age of Discovery, and the Protestant Reformation.
  • The late modern period began approximately in the mid-18th century; notable historical milestones included the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the Great Divergence, and the Russian Revolution. It took all of human history up to 1804 for the world's population to reach 1 billion; the next billion came just over a century later, in 1927.
  • Contemporary history is the span of historic events from approximately 1945 that are immediately relevant to the present time.

  
  
  This article primarily covers the 1800–1950 time period with a brief summary of 1500–1800. For a more in depth article on modern times before 1800, see Early Modern period. Read more...
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  Modern history saw extreme changes in the way people lived including industrialization

  
  Modern history, the modern period or the modern era, is the linear, global, historiographical approach to the time frame after post-classical history. Modern history can be further broken down into periods:

  • The early modern period began approximately in the early 16th century; notable historical milestones included the European Renaissance, the Age of Discovery, and the Protestant Reformation.
  • The late modern period began approximately in the mid-18th century; notable historical milestones included the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the Great Divergence, and the Russian Revolution. It took all of human history up to 1804 for the world's population to reach 1 billion; the next billion came just over a century later, in 1927.
  • Contemporary history is the span of historic events from approximately 1945 that are immediately relevant to the present time.

  
  
  This article primarily covers the 1800–1950 time period with a brief summary of 1500–1800. For a more in depth article on modern times before 1800, see Early Modern period. Read more...
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  17th century philosophy is generally regarded as seeing the start of modern philosophy, and the shaking off of the medieval approach, especially scholasticism. It succeeded the Renaissance and preceded the Age of Enlightenment. It is often considered to be part of early modern philosophy. Read more...
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  A visualization of the various routes through a portion of the Internet.

  
  The Information Age (also known as the Computer Age, Digital Age, or New Media Age) is a historic period in the 21st century characterized by the rapid shift from traditional industry that the Industrial Revolution brought through industrialization, to an economy based on information technology. The onset of the Information Age is associated with the Digital Revolution, just as the Industrial Revolution marked the onset of the Industrial Age. The definition of what "digital" means (or what "information" means) continues to change over time as new technologies, user devices, methods of interaction with other humans and devices enter the domain of research, development and market launch.
  
  During the Information Age, digital industry shapes a knowledge-based society surrounded by a high-tech global economy that exerts influence on how the manufacturing and service sectors operate in an efficient and convenient way. In a commercialized society, the information industry can allow individuals to explore their personalized needs, therefore simplifying the procedure of making decisions for transactions and significantly lowering costs both for producers and for buyers. This is accepted overwhelmingly by participants throughout the entire economic activities for efficacy purposes, and new economic incentives would then be indigenously encouraged, such as the knowledge economy. Read more...
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  From the Apocalypse in a Biblia Pauperum illuminated at Erfurt around the time of the Great Famine. Death sits astride a lion whose long tail ends in a ball of flame (Hell). Famine points to her hungry mouth.

  
  The Late Middle Ages or Late Medieval Period was the period of European history lasting from 1250 to 1500 AD. The Late Middle Ages followed the High Middle Ages and preceded the onset of the early modern period (and in much of Europe, the Renaissance).
  
  Around 1300, centuries of prosperity and growth in Europe came to a halt. A series of famines and plagues, including the Great Famine of 1315–1317 and the Black Death, reduced the population to around half of what it was before the calamities. Along with depopulation came social unrest and endemic warfare. France and England experienced serious peasant uprisings, such as the Jacquerie and the Peasants' Revolt, as well as over a century of intermittent conflict, the Hundred Years' War. To add to the many problems of the period, the unity of the Catholic Church was temporarily shattered by the Western Schism. Collectively, those events are sometimes called the Crisis of the Late Middle Ages. Read more...
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  Contemporary history, in English-language historiography, is a subset of modern history which describes the historical period from approximately 1945 to the present. The term "contemporary history" has been in use at least since the early 19th century.
  
  Contemporary history is politically dominated by the Cold War (1945–91) between the United States and Soviet Union whose effects were felt across the world. The confrontation, which was mainly fought through proxy wars and through intervention in the internal politics of smaller nations, ultimately ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact in 1991, following the Revolutions of 1989. The latter stages and aftermath of the Cold War enabled the democratisation of much of Europe, Africa, and Latin America. In the Middle East, the period after 1945 was dominated by conflict involving the new state of Israel and the rise of petroleum politics, as well as the growth of Islamism after the 1980s. The first supranational organisations of government, such as the United Nations and European Union, emerged during the period after 1945, while the European colonial empires in Africa and Asia collapsed, gone by 1975. Countercultures rose and the sexual revolution transformed social relations in western countries between the 1960s and 1980s, epitomised by the Protests of 1968. Living standards rose sharply across the developed world because of the post-war economic boom, whereby such major economies as Japan and West Germany emerged. The culture of the United States, especially consumerism, spread widely. By the 1960s, many western countries had begun deindustrializing; in their place, globalization led to the emergence of new industrial centres, such as Japan, Taiwan and later China, which exported consumer goods to developed countries. Read more...
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  Cantino planisphere 1502, earliest surviving chart showing the explorations of Columbus to Central America, Corte-Real to Newfoundland, Gama to India and Cabral to Brazil. Tordesillas line depicted, Biblioteca Estense, Modena

  
  
  The Age of Discovery, or the Age of Exploration (approximately from the beginning of the 15th century until the end of the 18th century), is an informal and loosely defined term for the period in European history in which extensive overseas exploration emerged as a powerful factor in European culture and which was the beginning of globalization. It also marks the rise of the period of widespread adoption in Europe of colonialism and mercantilism as national policies. Many lands previously unknown to Europeans were discovered by them during this period, though most were already inhabited. From the perspective of many non-Europeans, the Age of Discovery marked the arrival of invaders from previously unknown continents.
  
  Global exploration started with the Portuguese discoveries of the Atlantic archipelagos of Madeira and the Azores in 1419 and 1427, the coast of Africa after 1434 and the sea route to India in 1498; and from the Crown of Castile (Spain), the trans-Atlantic voyages of Christopher Columbus to the Americas between 1492 and 1502 and the first circumnavigation of the globe in 1519–1522. These discoveries led to numerous naval expeditions across the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans, and land expeditions in the Americas, Asia, Africa and Australia that continued into the late 19th century, and ended with the exploration of the polar regions in the 20th century. Read more...
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  Viking age picture stone, Gotland.

  
  The Viking Age (793–1066 AD) is a period in European history, especially Northern European and Scandinavian history, following the Germanic Iron Age. It is the period of history when Scandinavian Norsemen explored Europe by its seas and rivers for trade, raids, colonization, and conquest. In this period, the Norsemen settled in Norse Greenland, Newfoundland, and present-day Faroe Islands, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Normandy, Scotland, England, Wales, Ireland, Isle of Man, the Netherlands, Germany, Ukraine, Russia, and Turkey.
  
  Viking travellers and colonists were seen at many points in history as brutal raiders. Many historical documents suggest that their invasion of other countries was retaliation in response to the encroachment upon tribal lands by Christian missionaries, and perhaps by the Saxon Wars prosecuted by Charlemagne and his kin to the south, or were motivated by overpopulation, trade inequities, and the lack of viable farmland in their homeland. Read more...

Selected images

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  Great Mosque of Kairouan, Tunisia, founded 670 CE

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  Battle during 1281 Mongol invasion of Japan

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  Obelisk of Aksum, Ethiopia

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  "Venus of Willensdorf", Austria, c. 26,500 BCE

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  Moai, Rapa Nui (Easter Island)

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  Parthenon, Athenian Empire

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  Atomic bombings: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, 1945

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  Crusader Krak des Chevaliers, Syria

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  Watt's steam engine powered the Industrial Revolution.

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  Fresco, Knossos, Minoan Crete

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  Taj Mahal, Mughal Empire, India

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  1570 world map, with Europeans' discoveries

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  Chennakesava Temple, Belur, India

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  Russian chapel, Fort Ross, California, U.S.

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  Ming Dynasty section, Great Wall of China

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  Gutenberg Bible, produced using movable type c. 1450

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  Hagia Sophia, Istanbul (formerly Constantinople), Turkey

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  Buddha

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  Cave painting, Lascaux, France, c. 15,000 BCE

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  The Pantheon in Rome, Italy, now a Catholic church

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  Terracotta army, China, c. 210 BCE

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  University of Timbuktu, Mali

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  Maya observatory, Chichen Itza, Mexico

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  Brass "Benin bronze", Nigeria

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  Great Pyramids of Giza, Egypt

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  The September 11, 2001, Al Qaeda attacks influenced U.S. foreign policy.

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  Civilians (here, Mỹ Lai, Việt Nam, 1968) suffered greatly in 20th-century wars.

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  Pillar erected by India's Maurya Dynasty Emperor Ashoka

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  Socrates

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  Last Moon landing: Apollo 17 (1972)

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  China has become a leader in wind power and solar panels.

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  World population, 10,000 BCE – 2,000 CE (vertical population scale is logarithmic)

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  Trajan's Column, Rome

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  St. Peter's Basilica, Vatican City

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  Empires, 1898

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  Cuneiform writing, Mesopotamia

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  Persepolis, Achaemenid Empire, 6th century BCE

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  Collegium Maius of Kraków's Jagiellonian University, Copernicus's first alma mater

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  Machu Picchu, Inca Empire, Peru

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  da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, Renaissance Italy

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  Angkor Wat temple, Cambodia, early 12th century

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  World War I trench warfare

Selected histories by subject

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  The history of Christianity concerns the Christian religion, Christendom, and the Church with its various denominations, from the 1st century to the present.
  
  Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christianity spread to all of Europe in the Middle Ages. Since the Renaissance era, Christianity has expanded throughout the world and become the world's largest religion. Today there are more than two billion Christians worldwide. Read more...
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  Veiled dancer, ancient Greek terracotta figurine from Myrina, ca. 150–100 BC. Louvre Museum

  
  The history of dance is difficult to access because dance does not often leave behind clearly identifiable physical artifacts that last over millennia, such as stone tools, hunting implements or cave paintings. It is not possible to identify with exact precision when dance became part of human culture. Read more...
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  The history of literature is the historical development of writings in prose or poetry that attempt to provide entertainment, enlightenment, or instruction to the reader/listener/observer, as well as the development of the literary techniques used in the communication of these pieces. Not all writings constitute literature. Some recorded materials, such as compilations of data (e.g., a check register) are not considered literature, and this article relates only to the evolution of the works defined above. Read more...
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  Sociology as a scholarly discipline emerged primarily out of the Enlightenment thought, shortly after the French Revolution, as a positivist science of society. Its genesis owed to various key movements in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of knowledge. Social analysis in a broader sense, however, has origins in the common stock of philosophy and necessarily pre-dates the field. Modern academic sociology arose as a reaction to modernity, capitalism, urbanization, rationalization, secularization, colonization and imperialism. Late-19th-century sociology demonstrated a particularly strong interest in the emergence of the modern nation state; its constituent institutions, its units of socialization, and its means of surveillance. An emphasis on the concept of modernity, rather than the Enlightenment, often distinguishes sociological discourse from that of classical political philosophy.
  
  Various quantitative social research techniques have become common tools for governments, businesses, and organizations, and have also found use in the other social sciences. Divorced from theoretical explanations of social dynamics, this has given social research a degree of autonomy from the discipline of sociology. Similarly, "social science" has come to be appropriated as an umbrella term to refer to various disciplines which study humans, interaction, society or culture. Read more...
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  Starting in the 6th century BC, the Classical period of performing art began in Greece, ushered in by the tragic poets such as Sophocles. These poets wrote plays which, in some cases, incorporated dance (see Euripides). The Hellenistic period began the widespread use of comedy.
  
  However, by the 6th century AD, Western performing arts had been largely ended, as the Dark Ages began. Between the 9th century and 14th century, performing art in the West was limited to religious historical enactments and morality plays, organized by the Church in celebration of holy days and other important events. Read more...
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  The history of Islam concerns the political, social, economic and developments of the Islamic civilization. Despite concerns about the reliability of early sources, most historians believe that Islam originated in Mecca and Medina at the start of the 7th century, approximately 600 years after the founding of Christianity. Muslims, however, believe that it did not start with Muhammad, but that it was the original faith of others whom they regard as prophets, such as Jesus, David, Moses, Abraham, Noah and Adam.
  
  In 610 CE, Muhammad began receiving what Muslims consider to be divine revelations. Muhammad's message won over a handful of followers and was met with increasing opposition from Meccan notables. In 618, after he lost protection with the death of his influential uncle Abu Talib, Muhammad migrated to the city of Yathrib (now known as Medina). With Muhammad's death in 632, disagreement broke out over who would succeed him as leader of the Muslim community. Read more...
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  The Ptolemaic system of celestial motion, from Harmonia Macrocosmica, 1661.

  
  The history of science in classical antiquity encompasses both those inquiries into the workings of the universe aimed at such practical goals as establishing a reliable calendar or determining how to cure a variety of illnesses and those abstract investigations known as natural philosophy. The ancient peoples who are considered the first scientists may have thought of themselves as natural philosophers, as practitioners of a skilled profession (for example, physicians), or as followers of a religious tradition (for example, temple healers). The encyclopedic works of Aristotle, Archimedes, Hippocrates, Galen, Ptolemy, Euclid, and others spread throughout the world. These works and the important commentaries on them were the wellspring of science. Read more...
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  Indian Ambassadors present Chaturanga to Khosrau I, from "A treatise on chess", 14th century

  
  
  The history of games dates to the ancient human past. Games are an integral part of all cultures and are one of the oldest forms of human social interaction. Games are formalized expressions of play which allow people to go beyond immediate imagination and direct physical activity. Common features of games include uncertainty of outcome, agreed upon rules, competition, separate place and time, elements of fiction, elements of chance, prescribed goals and personal enjoyment.
  
  Games capture the ideas and worldviews of their cultures and pass them on to the future generation. Games were important as cultural and social bonding events, as teaching tools and as markers of social status. As pastimes of royalty and the elite, some games became common features of court culture and were also given as gifts. Games such as Senet and the Mesoamerican ball game were often imbued with mythic and ritual religious significance. Games like Gyan chauper and The Mansion of Happiness were used to teach spiritual and ethical lessons while Shatranj and Wéiqí (Go) were seen as a way to develop strategic thinking and mental skill by the political and military elite. Read more...
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  Real-size resin reproductions of the 12th-century Lewis chessmen. The top row shows king, queen, and bishop. The bottom row shows knight, rook, and pawn.

  
  
  The history of chess can be traced back nearly 1500 years, although the earliest origins are uncertain. The earliest predecessor of the game probably originated in India, before the 6th century AD; a minority of historians believe the game originated in China. From India, the game spread to Persia. When the Arabs conquered Persia, chess was taken up by the Muslim world and subsequently spread to Southern Europe. In Europe, chess evolved into roughly its current form in the 15th century.
  
  "Romantic Chess" was the predominant chess playing style from the late 15th century to the 1880s. Chess games of this period emphasised more on quick, tactical maneuvers rather than long-term strategic planning. The Romantic era of play was followed by the Scientific, Hypermodern, and New Dynamism eras.
  In the second half of the 19th century, modern chess tournament play began, and the first World Chess Championship was held in 1886. The 20th century saw great leaps forward in chess theory and the establishment of the World Chess Federation (FIDE). Developments in the 21st century include use of computers for analysis, which originated in the 1970s with the first programmed chess games on the market. Online gaming appeared in the mid-1990s. Read more...
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  According to tradition, the history of the Catholic Church begins with Jesus Christ and his teachings (c. 4 BC – c. AD 30) and the Catholic Church is a continuation of the early Christian community established by Jesus. The Church considers its bishops to be the successors to Jesus's apostles and the Church's leader, the Bishop of Rome (also known as the Pope) to be the sole successor to Saint Peter, who ministered in Rome in the first century AD, after his appointment by Jesus as head of the church. By the end of the 2nd century, bishops began congregating in regional synods to resolve doctrinal and policy issues. By the 3rd century, the bishop of Rome began to act as a court of appeals for problems that other bishops could not resolve.
  
  Christianity spread throughout the early Roman Empire, despite persecutions due to conflicts with the pagan state religion. In 313, the struggles of the Early Church were lessened by the legalisation of Christianity by the Emperor Constantine I. In 380, under Emperor Theodosius I, Catholicism became the state religion of the Roman Empire by the decree of the Emperor, which would persist until the fall of the Western Empire, and later, with the Eastern Roman Empire, until the Fall of Constantinople. During this time, the period of the Seven Ecumenical Councils, there were considered five primary sees (jurisdictions within the Catholic Church) according to Eusebius: Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria, known as the Pentarchy. Read more...
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  Axial Age (also Axis Age, from German: Achsenzeit) is a term coined by German philosopher Karl Jaspers in the sense of a "pivotal age" characterizing the period of ancient history from about the 8th to the 3rd century BCE.
  
  During this period, according to Jaspers' concept, new ways of thinking appeared in Persia, India, China and the Greco-Roman world in religion and philosophy, in a striking parallel development, without any obvious direct cultural contact between all of the participating Eurasian cultures. Jaspers identified key thinkers from this age who had a profound influence on future philosophies and religions, and identified characteristics common to each area from which those thinkers emerged. Read more...
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  The term historical Jesus refers to attempts to reconstruct the life and teachings of Jesus by critical historical methods, in contrast to Christological definitions (the Christ of Christianity) and other Christian accounts of Jesus (the Christ of faith). It also considers the historical and cultural context in which Jesus lived.
  
  Virtually all scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus existed. Reconstructions of the historical Jesus are based on the Pauline epistles and the Gospels, while several non-Biblical sources also bear witness to the historical existence of Jesus. Since the 18th century, three separate scholarly quests for the historical Jesus have taken place, each with distinct characteristics and developing new and different research criteria. Read more...
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  The history of geography includes many histories of geography which have differed over time and between different cultural and political groups. In more recent developments, geography has become a distinct academic discipline. 'Geography' derives from the Greek γεωγραφία – geographia, a literal translation of which would be "to describe or write about the Earth". The first person to use the word "geography" was Eratosthenes (276–194 BC). However, there is evidence for recognizable practices of geography, such as cartography (or map-making) prior to the use of the term geography. Read more...
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  Archaeology is the study of human activity in the past, primarily through the recovery and analysis of the material culture and environmental data that they have left behind, which includes artifacts, architecture, biofacts (also known as eco-facts) and cultural landscapes (the archaeological record).
  
  The development of the field of archaeology has it roots with history and with those who were interested in the past, such as kings who wanted to show past glories of their respective nations. The 5th-century-BCE Greek historian Herodotus was the first scholar to systematically study the past and perhaps the first to examine artifacts. In the Song Empire (960–1279) of Imperial China, Chinese scholar-officials unearthed, studied, and cataloged ancient artifacts. The 15th and 16th centuries saw the rise of antiquarians in Renaissance Europe who were interested in the collection of artifacts. The antiquarian movement shifted into nationalism as personal collections turned into national museums. It evolved into a much more systematic discipline in the late 19th century and became a widely used tool for historical and anthropological research in the 20th century. During this time there were also significant advances in the technology used in the field. Read more...
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  The Parthenon in Athens

  
  
  The history of architecture traces the changes in architecture through various traditions, regions, overarching stylistic trends, and dates. The branches of architecture are civil, sacred, naval, military, and landscape architecture. Read more...
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  History of Hinduism denotes a wide variety of related religious traditions native to the Indian subcontinent. Its history overlaps or coincides with the development of religion in Indian subcontinent since the Iron Age, with some of its traditions tracing back to prehistoric religions such as those of the Bronze Age Indus Valley Civilization. It has thus been called the "oldest religion" in the world. Scholars regard Hinduism as a synthesis of various Indian cultures and traditions, with diverse roots and no single founder.
  
  The history of Hinduism is often divided into periods of development. The first period is the pre-Vedic period, which includes the Indus Valley Civilisation and local pre-historic religions, ending at about 1750 BCE. This period was followed in northern India by the Vedic period, which saw the introduction of the historical Vedic religion with the Indo-Aryan migrations, starting somewhere between 1900 BCE to 1400 BCE. The subsequent period, between 800 BCE and 200 BCE, is "a turning point between the Vedic religion and Hindu religions", and a formative period for Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism. The Epic and Early Puranic period, from c. 200 BCE to 500 CE, saw the classical "Golden Age" of Hinduism (c. 320-650 CE), which coincides with the Gupta Empire. In this period the six branches of Hindu philosophy evolved, namely Samkhya, Yoga, Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Mīmāṃsā, and Vedanta. Monotheistic sects like Shaivism and Vaishnavism developed during this same period through the Bhakti movement. The period from roughly 650 to 1100 CE forms the late Classical period or early Middle Ages, in which classical Puranic Hinduism is established, and Adi Shankara's Advaita Vedanta, which incorporated Buddhist thought into Vedanta, marking a shift from realistic to idealistic thought. Read more...
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  Linguistics is the scientific study of language. It involves an analysis of language form, language meaning, and language in context.
  
  Linguistic study was originally motivated by the correct description of classical liturgical language, notably that of Sanskrit grammar, or by the development of logic and rhetoric in ancient Greece, leading to a grammatical tradition in Hellenism.
  Beginning around the 4th century BCE, China also developed its own grammatical traditions. Traditions of Arabic grammar and Hebrew grammar developed during the Middle Ages, also in a religious context. Read more...
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  The Watt steam engine, a major driver in the industrial revolution, underscores the importance of engineering in modern history. This model is on display at the main building of the ETSIIM in Madrid, Spain

  
  The concept of engineering has existed since ancient times as humans devised fundamental inventions such as the pulley, lever, and wheel. Each of these inventions is consistent with the modern definition of engineering, exploiting basic mechanical principles to develop useful tools and objects.
  
  The term engineering itself has a much more recent etymology, deriving from the word engineer, which itself dates back to 1325,
  when an engine’er (literally, one who operates an engine) originally referred to "a constructor of military engines." In this context, now obsolete, an "engine" referred to a military machine, i. e., a mechanical contraption used in war (for example, a catapult). The word "engine" itself is of even older origin, ultimately deriving from the Latin ingenium (c. 1250), meaning "innate quality, especially mental power, hence a clever invention." Read more...
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  The history of creationism relates to the history of thought based on the premise that the natural universe had a beginning, and came into being supernaturally. The term creationism in its broad sense covers a wide range of views and interpretations, and was not in common use before the late 19th century. Throughout recorded history, many people have viewed the universe as a created entity. Many ancient historical accounts from around the world refer to or imply a creation of the earth and universe. Although specific historical understandings of creationism have used varying degrees of empirical, spiritual and/or philosophical investigations, they are all based on the view that the universe was created. The Genesis creation narrative has provided a basic framework for Jewish and Christian epistemological understandings of how the universe came into being – through the divine intervention of the god, Yahweh. Historically, literal interpretations of this narrative were more dominant than allegorical ones.
  
  From the 18th century on, various views aimed at reconciling the Abrahamic religions and Genesis with geology, biology and other sciences developed in Western culture. At this time, the word creationism referred to a doctrine of creation of the soul. Those holding that species had been created in a separate act, such as Philip Gosse in 1857, were generally called "advocates of creation", though they were also called "creationists" in private correspondence between Charles Darwin and his friends, dating from 1856. Read more...

Selected historical figures

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  Nnamdi Azikiwe, PC, (16 November 1904 – 11 May 1996), usually referred to as "Zik", was a Nigerian statesman who was Governor General of Nigeria from 1960 to 1963 and the first President of Nigeria from 1963 to 1966 (when Nigeria became a republic). Considered a driving force behind the nation's independence, he came to be known as the "father of Nigerian Nationalism".
  
  Born to Igbo parents in Zungeru in present-day Niger State, as a young boy he learned to speak Hausa (the main indigenous language of the Northern Region). Azikiwe was later sent to live with his aunt and grandmother in Onitsha (his parental homeland), where he learned the Igbo language. A stay in Lagos exposed him to the Yoruba language; by the time he was in college, he had been exposed to different Nigerian cultures and spoke three languages (an asset as president). Azikiwe traveled to the United States and attended Storer College, Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania and Howard University before returning to Africa in 1934, where he began work as a journalist in the Gold Coast. In British West Africa, he advocated Nigerian and African nationalism as a journalist and a political leader. Read more...
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  Alexander III of Macedon (Greek: Αλέξανδρος Γ΄ ὁ Μακεδών; 20/21 July 356 BC – 10/11 June 323 BC), commonly known as Alexander the Great (Ancient Greek: Ἀλέξανδρος ὁ Μέγας, translit. Aléxandros ho Mégas), was a king (basileus) of the ancient Greek kingdom of Macedon and a member of the Argead dynasty. He was born in Pella in 356 BC and succeeded his father Philip II to the throne at the age of 20. He spent most of his ruling years on an unprecedented military campaign through Asia and northeast Africa, and he created one of the largest empires of the ancient world by the age of thirty, stretching from Greece to northwestern India. He was undefeated in battle and is widely considered one of history's most successful military commanders.
  
  During his youth, Alexander was tutored by Aristotle until age 16. After Philip's assassination in 336 BC, he succeeded his father to the throne and inherited a strong kingdom and an experienced army. Alexander was awarded the generalship of Greece and used this authority to launch his father's pan-Hellenic project to lead the Greeks in the conquest of Persia. In 334 BC, he invaded the Achaemenid Empire (Persian Empire) and began a series of campaigns that lasted 10 years. Following the conquest of Anatolia, Alexander broke the power of Persia in a series of decisive battles, most notably the battles of Issus and Gaugamela. He subsequently overthrew Persian King Darius III and conquered the Achaemenid Empire in its entirety. At that point, his empire stretched from the Adriatic Sea to the Indus River. Read more...
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  Makeba during a performance

  
  Zenzile Miriam Makeba (4 March 1932 – 9 November 2008), nicknamed Mama Africa, was a South African singer, songwriter, actress, United Nations goodwill ambassador, and civil-rights activist. Associated with musical genres including Afropop, jazz, and world music, she was an advocate against apartheid and white-minority government in South Africa.
  
  Born in Johannesburg to Swazi and Xhosa parents, Makeba was forced to find employment as a child after the death of her father. She had a brief and allegedly abusive first marriage at the age of 17, gave birth to her only child in 1950, and survived breast cancer. Her vocal talent had been recognized when she was a child, and she began singing professionally in the 1950s, with the Cuban Brothers, the Manhattan Brothers, and an all-woman group, the Skylarks, performing a mixture of jazz, traditional African melodies, and Western popular music. In 1959, Makeba had a brief role in the anti-apartheid film Come Back, Africa, which brought her international attention, and led to her performing in Venice, London, and New York City. In London, she met the American singer Harry Belafonte, who became a mentor and colleague. She moved to New York City, where she became immediately popular, and recorded her first solo album in 1960. Her attempt to return to South Africa that year for her mother's funeral was prevented by the country's government. Read more...
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  18th-century portrait of Maimonides

  
  Moses ben Maimon (Hebrew: מֹשֶׁה בֶּן־מַיְמוּן‬ Mōšeh ben-Maymūn; Arabic: موسى بن ميمون‎ Mūsā bin Maymūn), commonly known as Maimonides (/maɪˈmɒnɪdiːz/ my-MON-i-deez; Greek: Μαϊμωνίδης Maïmōnídēs; Latin: Moses Maimonides), and also referred to by the acronym Rambam (/ˌrɑːmˈbɑːm/; רַמְבַּ״ם‬, for Rabbeinu Mōšeh bēn Maimun, "Our Rabbi Moses, son of Maimon"), was a medieval Sephardic Jewish philosopher who became one of the most prolific and influential Torah scholars of the Middle Ages. In his time, he was also a preeminent astronomer and physician. Born in Córdoba, Almoravid Empire (present-day Spain) on Passover Eve, 1135 or 1138, he worked as a rabbi, physician, and philosopher in Morocco and Egypt. He died in Egypt on December 12, 1204, whence his body was taken to the lower Galilee and buried in Tiberias.
  
  During his lifetime, most Jews greeted Maimonides' writings on Jewish law and ethics with acclaim and gratitude, even as far away as Iraq and Yemen. Yet, while Maimonides rose to become the revered head of the Jewish community in Egypt, his writings also had vociferous critics, particularly in Spain. Nonetheless, he was posthumously acknowledged as among the foremost rabbinical arbiters and philosophers in Jewish history, and his copious work comprises a cornerstone of Jewish scholarship. His fourteen-volume Mishneh Torah still carries significant canonical authority as a codification of Talmudic law. He is sometimes known as "ha Nesher ha Gadol" (the great eagle) in recognition of his outstanding status as a bona fide exponent of the Oral Torah. Read more...
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  Fosse with Viveca Lindfors in the musical Pal Joey (1963)

  
  Robert Louis Fosse (June 23, 1927 – September 23, 1987) was an American dancer, musical theatre choreographer, director, and film director.
  
  He won eight Tony Awards for choreography, more than anyone else, as well as one for direction. He was nominated for four Academy Awards, winning for his direction of Cabaret. Read more...
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  Glass in Florence, 1993

  
  Philip Glass (born January 31, 1937) is an American composer. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential musicians of the late 20th century. Glass's work has been described as minimal music, having similar qualities to other "minimalist" composers such as La Monte Young, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley. Glass describes himself as a composer of "music with repetitive structures", which he has helped evolve stylistically.
  
  Glass founded the Philip Glass Ensemble, with which he still performs on keyboards. He has written numerous operas and musical theatre works, twelve symphonies, eleven concertos, eight string quartets and various other chamber music, and film scores. Three of his film scores have been nominated for Academy Awards. Read more...
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  Carroll in 1855

  
  Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (/ˈlʌtwɪdʒ ˈdɒdʒsən/; 27 January 1832 – 14 January 1898), better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English writer of world-famous children's fiction, notably Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass. He was noted for his facility at word play, logic and fantasy. The poems Jabberwocky and The Hunting of the Snark are classified in the genre of literary nonsense. He was also a mathematician, photographer, and Anglican deacon.
  
  Carroll came from a family of high church Anglicans, and developed a long relationship with Christ Church, Oxford, where he lived for most of his life as a scholar and teacher. Alice Liddell, daughter of the Dean of Christ Church, Henry Liddell, is widely identified as the original for Alice in Wonderland, though Carroll always denied this. Read more...
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  Dijkstra in 2002

  
  Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (/ˈdaɪkstrə/; Dutch: [ˈɛtsxər ˈʋibə ˈdɛikstra] (listen); 11 May 1930 – 6 August 2002) was a Dutch systems scientist, programmer, software engineer, science essayist, and pioneer in computing science. A theoretical physicist by training, he worked as a programmer at the Mathematisch Centrum (Amsterdam) from 1952 to 1962. A university professor for much of his life, Dijkstra held the Schlumberger Centennial Chair in Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin from 1984 until his retirement in 1999. He was a professor of mathematics at the Eindhoven University of Technology (1962–1984) and a research fellow at the Burroughs Corporation (1973–1984).
  
  One of the most influential figures of computing science's founding generation, Dijkstra helped shape the new discipline from both an engineering and a theoretical perspective. His fundamental contributions cover diverse areas of computing science, including compiler construction, operating systems, distributed systems, sequential and concurrent programming, programming paradigm and methodology, programming language research, program design, program development, program verification, software engineering principles, graph algorithms, and philosophical foundations of computer programming and computer science. Many of his papers are the source of new research areas. Several concepts and problems that are now standard in computer science were first identified by Dijkstra or bear names coined by him. As a foremost opponent of the mechanizing view of computing science, he refuted the use of the concepts of 'computer science' and 'software engineering' as umbrella terms for academic disciplines. Read more...
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  José Protasio Rizal Mercado y Realonda (Spanish pronunciation: [xoˈse riˈsal]; June 19, 1861 – December 30, 1896) was a Filipino nationalist and polymath during the tail end of the Spanish colonial period of the Philippines. An ophthalmologist by profession, Rizal became a writer and a key member of the Filipino Propaganda Movement which advocated political reforms for the colony under Spain.
  
  He was executed by the Spanish colonial government for the crime of rebellion after the Philippine Revolution, inspired in part by his writings, broke out. Though he was not actively involved in its planning or conduct, he ultimately approved of its goals which eventually led to Philippine independence. Read more...
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  A 17th century painting of Alauddin Khalji

  
  ʿAlāʾ ud-Dīn Khaljī (r. 1296–1316) was the second and the most powerful ruler of the Khalji dynasty that ruled the Delhi Sultanate in the Indian subcontinent.
  
  Born as Ali Gurshasp, Alauddin was a nephew and a son-in-law of his predecessor Jalaluddin. When Jalaluddin became the Sultan of Delhi after deposing the Mamluks, Alauddin was given the position of Amir-i-Tuzuk (equivalent to master of ceremonies). Alauddin obtained the governorship of Kara in 1291 after suppressing a revolt against Jalaluddin, and the governorship of Awadh in 1296 after a profitable raid on Bhilsa. In 1296, Alauddin raided Devagiri, and acquired loot to stage a successful revolt against Jalaluddin. After killing Jalaluddin, he consolidated his power in Delhi, and subjugated Jalaluddin's sons in Multan. Read more...
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  Albert Einstein in 1921

  
  Albert Einstein (/ˈaɪnstaɪn/ EYEN-styne; German: [ˈalbɛɐ̯t ˈʔaɪnʃtaɪn] (listen); 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the theory of relativity, one of the two pillars of modern physics (alongside quantum mechanics). His work is also known for its influence on the philosophy of science. He is best known to the general public for his mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc², which has been dubbed "the world's most famous equation". He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect", a pivotal step in the development of quantum theory.
  
  Near the beginning of his career, Einstein thought that Newtonian mechanics was no longer enough to reconcile the laws of classical mechanics with the laws of the electromagnetic field. This led him to develop his special theory of relativity during his time at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern (1902–1909), Switzerland. However, he realized that the principle of relativity could also be extended to gravitational fields, and he published a paper on general relativity in 1916 with his theory of gravitation. He continued to deal with problems of statistical mechanics and quantum theory, which led to his explanations of particle theory and the motion of molecules. He also investigated the thermal properties of light which laid the foundation of the photon theory of light. In 1917, he applied the general theory of relativity to model the structure of the universe. Read more...
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  Bradbury in 1975

  
  Ray Douglas Bradbury (/ˈbrædˌbɛri/; August 22, 1920 – June 5, 2012) was an American author and screenwriter. He worked in a variety of genres, including fantasy, science fiction, horror, and mystery fiction.
  
  Widely known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953), and his science-fiction and horror-story collections, The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Illustrated Man (1951), and I Sing the Body Electric (1969), Bradbury was one of the most celebrated 20th- and 21st-century American writers. While most of his best known work is in speculative fiction, he also wrote in other genres, such as the coming-of-age novel Dandelion Wine (1957) and the fictionalized memoir Green Shadows, White Whale (1992). Read more...
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  James Abbott McNeill Whistler (/ˈwɪslər/; July 11, 1834  – July 17, 1903) was an American artist, active during the American Gilded Age and based primarily in the United Kingdom. He was averse to sentimentality and moral allusion in painting, and was a leading proponent of the credo "art for art's sake". His famous signature for his paintings was in the shape of a stylized butterfly possessing a long stinger for a tail. The symbol was apt, for it combined both aspects of his personality: his art is characterized by a subtle delicacy, while his public persona was combative. He found a parallel between painting and music and entitled many of his paintings "arrangements", "harmonies", and "nocturnes", emphasizing the primacy of tonal harmony. His most famous painting is Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (1871), commonly known as Whistler's Mother, the revered and often parodied portrait of motherhood. Whistler influenced the art world and the broader culture of his time with his artistic theories and his friendships with leading artists and writers. Read more...
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  The Berlin Cleopatra, a Roman sculpture of Cleopatra wearing a royal diadem, mid-1st century BC (around the time of her visits to Rome in 46–44 BC), discovered in an Italian villa along the Via Appia and now located in the Altes Museum in Germany.

  
  Cleopatra VII Philopator (Ancient Greek: Κλεοπᾰ́τρᾱ Φιλοπάτωρ, translit. Kleopátrā Philopátōr; 69 – 10 or 12 August 30 BC) was the last active ruler of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt, nominally survived as pharaoh by her son Caesarion. She was also a diplomat, naval commander, linguist, and medical author. As a member of the Ptolemaic dynasty, she was a descendant of its founder Ptolemy I Soter, a Macedonian Greek general and companion of Alexander the Great. After the death of Cleopatra, Egypt became a province of the Roman Empire, marking the end of the Hellenistic period that had lasted since the reign of Alexander (336–323 BC). Her native language was Koine Greek and she was the first Ptolemaic ruler to learn the Egyptian language.
  
  In 58 BC, Cleopatra presumably accompanied her father Ptolemy XII during his exile to Rome, after a revolt in Egypt allowed his eldest daughter Berenice IV to claim the throne. The latter was killed in 55 BC when Ptolemy XII returned to Egypt with Roman military assistance. When Ptolemy XII died in 51 BC, he was succeeded by Cleopatra and her younger brother Ptolemy XIII as joint rulers, but a falling-out between them led to open civil war. After losing the 48 BC Battle of Pharsalus in Greece against his rival Julius Caesar in Caesar's Civil War, the Roman statesman Pompey fled to Egypt, a Roman client state. Ptolemy XIII had Pompey killed while Caesar occupied Alexandria in pursuit of Pompey. As consul of the Roman Republic, Caesar attempted to reconcile Ptolemy XIII with Cleopatra. However, Ptolemy XIII's chief adviser, Potheinos, viewed Caesar's terms as favoring Cleopatra, and so his forces, which eventually fell under the control of Cleopatra's younger sister, Arsinoe IV, besieged both Caesar and Cleopatra at the palace. The siege was lifted by reinforcements in early 47 BC. Ptolemy XIII died shortly thereafter in the Battle of the Nile, Arsinoe IV was eventually exiled to Ephesus, and Caesar, now an elected dictator, declared Cleopatra and her other younger brother Ptolemy XIV as joint rulers of Egypt. However, Caesar maintained a private affair with Cleopatra that produced a son, Caesarion (Ptolemy XV). Cleopatra traveled to Rome as a client queen in 46 and 44 BC, staying at Caesar's villa. When Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC, Cleopatra attempted to have Caesarion named as his heir, but this fell instead to Caesar's grandnephew Octavian (known as Augustus by 27 BC, when he became the first Roman emperor). Cleopatra then had Ptolemy XIV killed and elevated Caesarion as co-ruler. Read more...
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  Diego Maradona as the coach of Al Wasl

  
  Diego Armando Maradona (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈdjeɣo maɾaˈðona], born 30 October 1960) is an Argentine retired professional footballer and current manager of Mexican second division club Dorados. Many in the sport, including football writers, players, and fans, regard him as one of the greatest football players of all time. He was joint FIFA Player of the 20th Century with Pelé. Maradona's vision, passing, ball control and dribbling skills was combined with his small stature (1.65 m or 5 ft 5 in), giving him a low center of gravity which allowed him to maneuver better than most other football players; he would often dribble past multiple opposing players on a run. His presence and leadership on the field had a great effect on his team's general performance, while he would often be singled out by the opposition. A precocious talent, Maradona was given the nickname "El Pibe de Oro" ("The Golden Boy"), a name that stuck with him throughout his career.
  
  An advanced playmaker who operated in the classic number 10 position, Maradona was the first player in football history to set the world record transfer fee twice, first when he transferred to Barcelona for a then world record £5 million, and second, when he transferred to Napoli for another record fee £6.9 million. He played for Argentinos Juniors, Boca Juniors, Barcelona, Napoli, Sevilla and Newell's Old Boys during his club career, and is most famous for his time at Napoli and Barcelona where he won numerous accolades. Read more...
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  Edwards in 2009

  
  Sir Gareth Owen Edwards, CBE (born 12 July 1947) is a Welsh former rugby union player who played scrum-half and has been described by the BBC as "arguably the greatest player ever to don a Welsh jersey".
  
  In 2003, in a poll of international rugby players conducted by Rugby World magazine, Edwards was declared the greatest player of all time. In 2007, former England captain Will Carling published his list of the '50 Greatest Rugby players' in The Daily Telegraph, and ranked Edwards the greatest player ever, stating; "He was a supreme athlete with supreme skills, the complete package. He played in the 1970s, but, if he played now, he would still be the best. He was outstanding at running, passing, kicking and reading the game. He sits astride the whole of rugby as the ultimate athlete on the pitch". Read more...
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  The Supremes, L-R: Florence Ballard, Mary Wilson, and Diana Ross, performing "My World Is Empty Without You" on
  The Ed Sullivan Show (1966)

  
  The Supremes were an American female singing group and the premier act of Motown Records during the 1960s. Founded as The Primettes in Detroit, Michigan, in 1959, the Supremes were the most commercially successful of Motown's acts and are, to date, America's most successful vocal group with 12 number one singles on the Billboard Hot 100. Most of these hits were written and produced by Motown's main songwriting and production team, Holland–Dozier–Holland. At their peak in the mid-1960s, the Supremes rivaled the Beatles in worldwide popularity, and it is said that their success made it possible for future African American R&B and soul musicians to find mainstream success.
  
  Florence Ballard, Mary Wilson, Diana Ross, and Betty McGlown, the original group, are all from the Brewster-Douglass public housing project in Detroit. They formed the Primettes as the sister act to the Primes (with Paul Williams and Eddie Kendricks, who went on to form the Temptations). Barbara Martin replaced McGlown in 1960, and the group signed with Motown the following year as the Supremes. Martin left the act in early 1962, and Ross, Ballard, and Wilson carried on as a trio. Read more...
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  Archimedes Thoughtful
  by Domenico Fetti (1620)

  
  Archimedes of Syracuse (/ˌɑːrkɪˈmiːdiːz/; Greek: Ἀρχιμήδης; c. 287) was a Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, inventor, and astronomer. Although few details of his life are known, he is regarded as one of the leading scientists in classical antiquity. Generally considered the greatest mathematician of antiquity and one of the greatest of all time, Archimedes anticipated modern calculus and analysis by applying concepts of infinitesimals and the method of exhaustion to derive and rigorously prove a range of geometrical theorems, including the area of a circle, the surface area and volume of a sphere, and the area under a parabola.
  
  Other mathematical achievements include deriving an accurate approximation of pi, defining and investigating the spiral bearing his name, and creating a system using exponentiation for expressing very large numbers. He was also one of the first to apply mathematics to physical phenomena, founding hydrostatics and statics, including an explanation of the principle of the lever. He is credited with designing innovative machines, such as his screw pump, compound pulleys, and defensive war machines to protect his native Syracuse from invasion. Read more...
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  Statuette of Imhotep in the Louvre

  
  Imhotep (/ɪmˈhoʊtɛp/; Egyptian: ỉỉ-m-ḥtp *jā-im-ḥātap, in Unicode hieroglyphs: 𓇍𓅓𓊵:𓏏*𓊪, "the one who comes in peace"; fl. late 27th century BC) was an Egyptian chancellor to the pharaoh Djoser, probable architect of the step pyramid, and high priest of the sun god Ra at Heliopolis. Very little is known of Imhotep as a historical figure, but in the 3000 years following his death, he was gradually glorified and deified.
  
  Today, outside the Egyptological community, he is referred to as a polymath, poet, judge, engineer, magician, scribe, astronomer, astrologer, and especially a physician; indeed, some have considered Imhotep alongside Hippocrates and Charaka as the fathers of early medicine. These claims are founded on the legends that flourished in the millennia after his death, not on historical records. No text from his lifetime mentions these capacities and no text mentions his name in the first 1200 years following his death. Apart from the three short contemporary inscriptions that establish him as chancellor to the pharaoh, the first text to reference Imhotep dates to the time of Amenhotep III (c. 1391–1353 BC). It is addressed to the owner of a tomb, and reads: Read more...
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  Lewis at the Save The World Awards in July 2009

  
  Frederick Carlton "Carl" Lewis (born July 1, 1961) is an American former track and field athlete who won nine Olympic gold medals, one Olympic silver medal, and 10 World Championships medals, including eight gold. His career spanned from 1979 to 1996, when he last won an Olympic event. He is one of only three Olympic athletes who won a gold medal in the same individual event in four consecutive Olympic Games.
  
  Lewis was a dominant sprinter and long jumper who topped the world rankings in the 100 m, 200 m and long jump events frequently from 1981 to the early 1990s. He set world records in the 100 m, 4 × 100 m and 4 × 200 m relays, while his world record in the indoor long jump has stood since 1984. His 65 consecutive victories in the long jump achieved over a span of 10 years is one of the sport's longest undefeated streaks. Over the course of his athletics career, Lewis broke ten seconds for the 100 meters 15 times and 20 seconds for the 200 meters 10 times. Lewis also long jumped over 28 feet 71 times. Read more...

Selected historical disciplines

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  Philosophy of history is the philosophical study of history and the past. The term was coined by Voltaire. Read more...
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  Social history, often called the new social history, is a field of history that looks at the lived experience of the past. In its "golden age" it was a major growth field in the 1960s and 1970s among scholars, and still is well represented in history departments in Britain, Canada, France, Germany, and the United States. In the two decades from 1975 to 1995, the proportion of professors of history in American universities identifying with social history rose from 31% to 41%, while the proportion of political historians fell from 40% to 30%. In the history departments of British and Irish universities in 2014, of the 3410 faculty members reporting, 878 (26%) identified themselves with social history while political history came next with 841 (25%). Read more...
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  Diplomatics (in American English, and in most anglophone countries), or diplomatic (in British English), is a scholarly discipline centred on the critical analysis of documents: especially, historical documents. It focuses on the conventions, protocols and formulae that have been used by document creators, and uses these to increase understanding of the processes of document creation, of information transmission, and of the relationships between the facts which the documents purport to record and reality.
  
  The discipline originally evolved as a tool for studying and determining the authenticity of the official charters and diplomas issued by royal and papal chanceries. It was subsequently appreciated that many of the same underlying principles could be applied to other types of official document and legal instrument, to non-official documents such as private letters, and, most recently, to the metadata of electronic records. Read more...
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  Diplomatic history deals with the history of international relations between states. Diplomatic history can be different from international relations in that the former can concern itself with the foreign policy of one state while the latter deals with relations between two or more states. Diplomatic history tends to be more concerned with the history of diplomacy, but international relations concern more with current events and creating a model intended to shed explanatory light on international politics. Read more...
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  World history or global history (not to be confused with diplomatic, transnational or international history) is a field of historical study that emerged as a distinct academic field in the 1980s. It examines history from a global perspective. It is not to be confused with comparative history, which, like world history, deals with the history of multiple cultures and nations, but does not do so on a global scale. World history looks for common patterns that emerge across all cultures. World historians use a thematic approach, with two major focal points: integration (how processes of world history have drawn people of the world together) and difference (how patterns of world history reveal the diversity of the human experiences). Read more...
• 

  

  Newton's reflector, the first reflecting telescope

  
  The history of science is the study of the development of science and scientific knowledge, including both the natural and social sciences (the history of the arts and humanities is termed history of scholarship). Science is a body of empirical, theoretical, and practical knowledge about the natural world, produced by scientists who emphasize the observation, explanation, and prediction of real-world phenomena. Historiography of science, in contrast, studies the methods employed by historians of science.
  
  The English word scientist is relatively recent—first coined by William Whewell in the 19th century. Previously, investigators of nature called themselves "natural philosophers". While empirical investigations of the natural world have been described since classical antiquity (for example, by Thales and Aristotle), and the scientific method has been employed since the Middle Ages (for example, by Ibn al-Haytham and Roger Bacon), modern science began to develop in the early modern period, and in particular in the scientific revolution of 16th- and 17th-century Europe. Traditionally, historians of science have defined science sufficiently broadly to include those earlier inquiries. Read more...
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  Urban history is a field of history that examines the historical nature of cities and towns, and the process of urbanization. The approach is often multidisciplinary, crossing boundaries into fields like social history, architectural history, urban sociology, urban geography, business history, and archaeology. Urbanization and industrialization were popular themes for 20th-century historians, often tied to an implicit model of modernization, or the transformation of rural traditional societies.
  
  The history of urbanization focuses on the processes of by which existing populations concentrate themselves in urban localities over time, and on the social, political, cultural and economic contexts of cities. Most urban scholars focus on the "metropolis," a large or especially important city. There is much less attention to small cities, towns or (until recently) to suburbs. However social historians find small cities much easier to handle because they can use census data to cover or sample the entire population. In the United States from the 1920s to the 1990s many of the most influential monographs began as one of the 140 PhD dissertations at Harvard University directed by Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. (1888-1965) or Oscar Handlin (1915-2011). The field grew rapidly after 1970, leading one prominent scholar, Stephan Thernstrom, to note that urban history apparently deals with cities, or with city-dwellers, or with events that transpired in cities, with attitudes toward cities – which makes one wonder what is not urban history. Read more...
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  A universal history is a work aiming at the presentation of the history of mankind as a whole, coherent unit.
  
  A universal chronicle or world chronicle traces history from the beginning of written information about the past up to the present.
  Universal history embraces the events of all times and nations in so far as scientific treatment of them is possible. Read more...
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  More probability density is found as one gets closer to the expected (mean) value in a normal distribution. Statistics used in standardized testing assessment are shown. The scales include standard deviations, cumulative percentages, Z-scores, and T-scores.

  
  Statistics is a branch of mathematics dealing with data collection, organization, analysis, interpretation and presentation. In applying statistics to, for example, a scientific, industrial, or social problem, it is conventional to begin with a statistical population or a statistical model process to be studied. Populations can be diverse topics such as "all people living in a country" or "every atom composing a crystal". Statistics deals with all aspects of data, including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments.
  See glossary of probability and statistics.
  
  When census data cannot be collected, statisticians collect data by developing specific experiment designs and survey samples. Representative sampling assures that inferences and conclusions can reasonably extend from the sample to the population as a whole. An experimental study involves taking measurements of the system under study, manipulating the system, and then taking additional measurements using the same procedure to determine if the manipulation has modified the values of the measurements. In contrast, an observational study does not involve experimental manipulation. Read more...
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  Radiocarbon dating (also referred to as carbon dating or carbon-14 dating) is a method for determining the age of an object containing organic material by using the properties of radiocarbon, a radioactive isotope of carbon.
  
  The method was developed in the late 1940s by Willard Libby, who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work in 1960. It is based on the fact that radiocarbon (¹⁴
  C) is constantly being created in the atmosphere by the interaction of cosmic rays with atmospheric nitrogen. The resulting ¹⁴
  C combines with atmospheric oxygen to form radioactive carbon dioxide, which is incorporated into plants by photosynthesis; animals then acquire ¹⁴
  C by eating the plants. When the animal or plant dies, it stops exchanging carbon with its environment, and from that point onwards the amount of ¹⁴
  C it contains begins to decrease as the ¹⁴
  C undergoes radioactive decay. Measuring the amount of ¹⁴
  C in a sample from a dead plant or animal such as a piece of wood or a fragment of bone provides information that can be used to calculate when the animal or plant died. The older a sample is, the less ¹⁴
  C there is to be detected, and because the half-life of ¹⁴
  C (the period of time after which half of a given sample will have decayed) is about 5,730 years, the oldest dates that can be reliably measured by this process date to around 50,000 years ago, although special preparation methods occasionally permit accurate analysis of older samples. Read more...
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  The Rosetta Stone in the British Museum

  
  Epigraphy (Ancient Greek: ἐπιγραφή, "inscription") is the study of inscriptions, or epigraphs, as writing; it is the science of identifying graphemes, clarifying their meanings, classifying their uses according to dates and cultural contexts, and drawing conclusions about the writing and the writers. Specifically excluded from epigraphy are the historical significance of an epigraph as a document and the artistic value of a literary composition.
  
  A person using the methods of epigraphy is called an epigrapher or epigraphist. For example, the Behistun inscription is an official document of the Achaemenid Empire engraved on native rock at a location in Iran. Epigraphists are responsible for reconstructing, translating, and dating the trilingual inscription and finding any relevant circumstances. It is the work of historians, however, to determine and interpret the events recorded by the inscription as document. Often, epigraphy and history are competences practised by the same person. Read more...
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  The German Hyghalmen Roll was made in the late 15th century and illustrates the German practice of repeating themes from the arms in the crest. (See Roll of arms).

  
  Heraldry (/ˈhɛrəldri/) is a broad term, encompassing the design, display, and study of armorial bearings (known as armory), as well as related disciplines, such as vexillology, together with the study of ceremony, rank, and pedigree. Armory, the best-known branch of heraldry, concerns the design and transmission of the heraldic achievement, more commonly known as the coat of arms. The coat of arms usually includes a shield, helmet, and crest, together with any accompanying devices, such as supporters, badges, heraldic banners, and mottoes.
  
  Although the use of various devices to signify individuals and groups goes back to antiquity, both the form and use of such devices varied widely, and the concept of regular, hereditary designs, constituting the distinguishing feature of heraldry, did not develop until the High Middle Ages. The use of helmets with face guards during this period made it difficult to recognize one's commanders in the field when large armies gathered together for extended periods, necessitating the development of heraldry as a symbolic language. Read more...
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  Venus de Milo, at the Louvre.

  
  
  Art history is the study of objects of art in their historical development and stylistic contexts; that is genre, design, format, and style. The study includes painting, sculpture, architecture, ceramics, furniture, and other decorative objects.
  
  Art history is the history of different groups of people and their culture represented throughout their artwork. Art historians compare different time periods in art history. Such as a comparison to Medieval Art to Renaissance Art. This history of cultures is shown in their art work in different forms. Art can be shown by attire, architecture, religion, sports. Or more visual pieces of art such as paintings, drawings, sculptures. Read more...
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  Diana and Actaeon, Titian, 1556–1559, a classic history painting, showing a dramatic moment in a mythological story, with elements of figure painting, landscape painting and still-life.

  
  History painting is a genre in painting defined by its subject matter rather than artistic style. History paintings usually depict a moment in a narrative story, rather than a specific and static subject, as in a portrait. The term is derived from the wider senses of the word historia in Latin and Italian, meaning "story" or "narrative", and essentially means "story painting". Most history paintings are not of scenes from history, especially paintings from before about 1850.
  
  In modern English, historical painting is sometimes used to describe the painting of scenes from history in its narrower sense, especially for 19th-century art, excluding religious, mythological and allegorical subjects, which are included in the broader term history painting, and before the 19th century were the most common subjects for history paintings. Read more...
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  William Shakespeare's will, written in secretary hand

  
  Palaeography (UK) or paleography (US; ultimately from Greek: παλαιός, palaiós, "old", and γράφειν, graphein, "to write") is the study of ancient and historical handwriting (that is to say, of the forms and processes of writing; not the textual content of documents). Included in the discipline is the practice of deciphering, reading, and dating historical manuscripts, and the cultural context of writing, including the methods with which writing and books were produced, and the history of scriptoria.
  
  The discipline is important for understanding, authenticating, and dating ancient texts. However, it cannot in general be used to pinpoint dates with high precision. Read more...
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  Clio by Pierre Mignard, oil on canvas, 1689

  
  Cliometrics (klīəˈmetriks), sometimes called new socialhistory, or econometric history, is the systematic application of economic theory, econometric techniques, and other formal or mathematical methods to the study of history (especially social and economic history). It is a quantitative (as opposed to qualitative or ethnographic) approach to economic history. The term cliometrics comes from Clio, who was the muse of history, and was originally coined by the mathematical economist Stanley Reiter in 1960. There has been a revival in 'new economic history' since the late 1990s. Read more...
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  Political history is the narrative and analysis of political events, ideas, movements, organs of government, voters, parties and leaders. It is interrelated to other fields of history, especially diplomatic history, as well as constitutional history and public history.
  
  Political history studies the organization and operation of power in large societies. By focusing on the elites in power, on their impact on society, on popular response, and on the relationships with the elites in other social history, which focuses predominantly on the actions and lifestyles of ordinary people, or people's history, which is historical work from the perspective of the common people. Read more...
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  Economic history is the study of economies or economic phenomena of the past. Analysis in economic history is undertaken using a combination of historical methods, statistical methods and the application of economic theory to historical situations and institutions. The topic includes financial and business history and overlaps with areas of social history such as demographic and labor history. The quantitative—in this case, econometric—study of economic history is also known as cliometrics. Read more...
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  Archontology is the study of historical offices and important positions in state, international, political, religious and other organizations and societies. It includes chronology, succession of office holders, their biographies and related records. Read more...

Did you know...

• ... that Benjamin Franklin was one of the first five historical figures to appear on a Panama Canal Zone postage stamp?
• ... that the history of the Jews in Atlanta dates to 1845, the same year the city changed its name from Marthasville?
• ... that despite never completing his university studies, R. H. Wilenski was appointed a special lecturer in the history of art at the University of Manchester?
• ... that Huang Zongying and her husband Zhao Dan were both named among the best 100 actors in the history of Chinese cinema?
• ... that the 1973 Belmont Stakes was won by Secretariat, whose 31-length lead was the largest margin of victory in the history of the race?
• ... that the book Bananas, Beaches and Bases argues that banana sales have a "gendered history"?

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Selected historical concepts

• 

  Human prehistory is the period between the use of the first stone tools c. 3.3 million years ago by hominins and the invention of writing systems. The earliest writing systems appeared c. 5,300 years ago, but it took thousands of years for writing to be widely adopted and it was not used in some human cultures until the 19th century or even until the present. The end of prehistory therefore came at very different dates in different places, and the term is less often used in discussing societies where prehistory ended relatively recently.
  
  Sumer in Mesopotamia, the Indus valley civilization and ancient Egypt were the first civilizations to develop their own scripts, and to keep historical records; this took place already during the early Bronze Age. Neighboring civilizations were the first to follow. Most other civilizations reached the end of prehistory during the Iron Age. The three-age system of division of prehistory into the Stone Age, followed by the Bronze Age and Iron Age, remains in use for much of Eurasia and North Africa, but is not generally used in those parts of the world where the working of hard metals arrived abruptly with contact with Eurasian cultures, such as the Americas, Oceania, Australasia and much of Sub-Saharan Africa. These areas also, with some exceptions in Pre-Columbian civilizations in the Americas, did not develop complex writing systems before the arrival of Eurasians, and their prehistory reaches into relatively recent periods; for example 1788 is usually taken as the end of the prehistory of Australia. Read more...
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  An Evergreen Protective Association volunteer recording an oral history at Greater Rosemont History Day.

  
  Oral history is the collection and study of historical information about individuals, families, important events, or everyday life using audiotapes, videotapes, or transcriptions of planned interviews. These interviews are conducted with people who participated in or observed past events and whose memories and perceptions of these are to be preserved as an aural record for future generations. Oral history strives to obtain information from different perspectives and most of these cannot be found in written sources. Oral history also refers to information gathered in this manner and to a written work (published or unpublished) based on such data, often preserved in archives and large libraries. Knowledge presented by Oral History (OH) is unique in that it shares the tacit perspective, thoughts, opinions and understanding of the interviewee in its primary form.
  
  The term is sometimes used in a more general sense to refer to any information about past events that people who experienced them tell anybody else, but professional historians usually consider this to be oral tradition. However, as the Columbia Encyclopedia explains:
  

  Primitive societies have long relied on oral tradition to preserve a record of the past in the absence of written histories. In Western society, the use of oral material goes back to the early Greek historians Herodotus and Thucydides, both of whom made extensive use of oral reports from witnesses. The modern concept of oral history was developed in the 1940s by Allan Nevins and his associates at Columbia University.

  Read more...
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  The family tree of Ludwig Herzog von Württemberg (ruled 1568–1593)

  
  Genealogy (from Greek: γενεαλογία genealogia from γενεά genea, "generation" and λόγος logos, "knowledge"), also known as family history, is the study of families and the tracing of their lineages and history. Genealogists use oral interviews, historical records, genetic analysis, and other records to obtain information about a family and to demonstrate kinship and pedigrees of its members. The results are often displayed in charts or written as narratives.
  
  The pursuit of family history and origins tends to be shaped by several motives, including the desire to carve out a place for one's family in the larger historical picture, a sense of responsibility to preserve the past for future generations, and a sense of self-satisfaction in accurate storytelling. Read more...
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  Historical thinking is a set of critical literacy skills for evaluating and analyzing primary source documents to construct a meaningful account of the past.
  
  Sometimes called historical reasoning skills, historical thinking skills are frequently described in contrast to history content such as names, dates, and places. This dichotomous presentation is often misinterpreted as a claim for the superiority of one form of knowing over the other. In fact, the distinction is generally made to underscore the importance of developing thinking skills that can be applied when individuals encounter any history content. Most educators agree that together, history content—or facts about the past—and historical thinking skills enable students to interpret, analyze and use information about past events. In doing so, students will realize the complexity of history with all of the pieces and perspectives that cannot be captured through one narrative. Furthermore, as described by Dr. T. Mills Kelly, characteristics of historical thinking develop sourcing skills, the ability to construct and support an argument, and, "the ability to present the past in clear ways, whether in writing or in other media, saying what can be said and not saying what cannot." Read more...
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  The present is a moment in time discernible as intermediate between past and future.

  
  
  The present (or here and now) is the time that is associated with the events perceived directly and in the first time, not as a recollection (perceived more than once) or a speculation (predicted, hypothesis, uncertain). It is a period of time between the past and the future, and can vary in meaning from being an instant to a day or longer. In radiocarbon dating, the "present" is defined as AD 1950.
  
  It is sometimes represented as a hyperplane in space-time, typically called "now", although modern physics demonstrates that such a hyperplane cannot be defined uniquely for observers in relative motion. The present may also be viewed as a duration (see specious present). Read more...
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  A future history is a postulated history of the future and is used by authors of science fiction and other speculative fiction to construct a common background for fiction. Sometimes the author publishes a timeline of events in the history, while other times the reader can reconstruct the order of the stories from information provided therein. Read more...
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  Landscape history is the study of the way in which humanity has changed the physical appearance of the environment – both present and past. It is sometimes referred to as landscape archaeology. It was first recognised as a separate area of study during the 20th century and uses evidence and approaches from other disciplines including archaeology, architecture, ecology, aerial photography, local history and historical geography. Read more...
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  A diagram of the Big Bang expansion according to NASA

  
  Big History is an academic discipline which examines history from the Big Bang to the present. Big History resists specialization, and searches for universal patterns or trends. It examines long time frames using a multidisciplinary approach based on combining numerous disciplines from science and the humanities, and explores human existence in the context of this bigger picture. It integrates studies of the cosmos, Earth, life, and humanity using empirical evidence to explore cause-and-effect relations, and is taught at universities and secondary schools often using web-based interactive presentations.
  
  Historian David Christian has been credited with coining the term "Big History". Some historians have expressed skepticism towards "scientific history" and argue that the claims of Big History are unoriginal. Others support the scientific merit but point out that cosmology and natural history have been studied since the Renaissance, and that the new term, Big History, continues such work. Read more...
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  A chronicle (Latin: chronica, from Greek χρονικά chroniká, from χρόνος, chrónos – "time") is a historical account of facts and events arranged in chronological order, as in a time line. Typically, equal weight is given for historically important events and local events, the purpose being the recording of events that occurred, seen from the perspective of the chronicler. This is in contrast to a narrative or history, which sets selected events in a meaningful interpretive context and excludes those the author does not see as important.
  
  Chronicler information sources vary; some chronicles are written from first-hand knowledge, some are from witnesses or participants in events, still others are accounts passed mouth to mouth prior to being written down. Some used written material: Charters, letters, or the works of earlier chroniclers. Still others are tales of such unknown origins so as to hold mythical status. Copyists also affected chronicles in creative copying, making corrections or in updating or continuing a chronicle with information not available to the original author(s). The reliability of a particular chronicle is an important determination for modern historians. Read more...
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  The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows Scrooge his future in Dickens' A Christmas Carol.

  
  The future is what will happen in the time after the present. Its arrival is considered inevitable due to the existence of time and the laws of physics. Due to the apparent nature of reality and the unavoidability of the future, everything that currently exists and will exist can be categorized as either permanent, meaning that it will exist forever, or temporary, meaning that it will end. In the Occidental view, which uses a linear conception of time, the future is the portion of the projected time line that is anticipated to occur. In special relativity, the future is considered absolute future, or the future light cone.
  
  In the philosophy of time, presentism is the belief that only the present exists and the future and the past are unreal. Religions consider the future when they address issues such as karma, life after death, and eschatologies that study what the end of time and the end of the world will be. Religious figures such as prophets and diviners have claimed to see into the future.
  Future studies, or futurology, is the science, art and practice of postulating possible futures. Modern practitioners stress the importance of alternative and plural futures, rather than one monolithic future, and the limitations of prediction and probability, versus the creation of possible and preferable futures. Read more...
• 

  A decade is a period of 10years. The word is derived (via French and Latin) from the Ancient Greek: δεκάς, translit. dekas), which means a group of ten. Other words for spans of years also come from Latin: biennium (2 years), triennium (3 years), quadrennium (4 years), lustrum (5 years), century (100 years), millennium (1000 years). Read more...
• 

  The history of science and technology (HST) is a field of history which examines how humanity's understanding of the natural world (science) and ability to manipulate it (technology) have changed over the centuries. This academic discipline also studies the cultural, economic, and political impacts of scientific innovation.
  
  Histories of science were originally written by practicing and retired scientists, starting primarily with William Whewell, as a way to communicate the virtues of science to the public. In the early 1930s, after a famous paper given by the Soviet historian Boris Hessen, was focused into looking at the ways in which scientific practices were allied with the needs and motivations of their context. After World War II, extensive resources were put into teaching and researching the discipline, with the hopes that it would help the public better understand both Science and Technology as they came to play an exceedingly prominent role in the world. In the 1960s, especially in the wake of the work done by Thomas Kuhn, the discipline began to serve a very different function, and began to be used as a way to critically examine the scientific enterprise. At the present time it is often closely aligned with the field of science studies. Read more...
• 

  Social history, often called the new social history, is a field of history that looks at the lived experience of the past. In its "golden age" it was a major growth field in the 1960s and 1970s among scholars, and still is well represented in history departments in Britain, Canada, France, Germany, and the United States. In the two decades from 1975 to 1995, the proportion of professors of history in American universities identifying with social history rose from 31% to 41%, while the proportion of political historians fell from 40% to 30%. In the history departments of British and Irish universities in 2014, of the 3410 faculty members reporting, 878 (26%) identified themselves with social history while political history came next with 841 (25%). Read more...
• 

  

  Petrarch conceived of the idea of a European "Dark Age" which later evolved into the tripartite periodization of Western history into Ancient, Middle Ages and Modern.

  
  Periodization is the process or study of categorizing the past into discrete, quantified named blocks of time. This is usually done in order to facilitate the study and analysis of history, understanding current and historical processes, and causality that might have linked those events.
  
  This results in descriptive abstractions that provide convenient terms for periods of time with relatively stable characteristics. However, determining the precise beginning and ending to any "period" is often arbitrary, since it has changed over time over the course of history. Read more...
• 

  Counterfactual history, also sometimes referred to as virtual history, is a form of historiography that attempts to answer "what if" questions known as counterfactuals. Black and MacRaild provide this definition: "It is, at the very root, the idea of conjecturing on what did not happen, or what might have happened, in order to understand what did happen." The method seeks to explore history and historical incidents by means of extrapolating a timeline in which certain key historical events did not happen or had an outcome which was different from that which did in fact occur. It has produced a literary genre which is variously called alternative history, speculative history, or hypothetical history.
  
  One goal is to estimate the relative importance of a specific event, incident or person. For instance, to the counterfactual claim "What would have happened had Hitler drunk coffee instead of tea on the afternoon he committed suicide?", the timeline would have remained unchanged—Hitler in all likelihood still would have committed suicide on April 30, 1945, regardless of what he had to drink that afternoon. However, to the counterfactual "What would have happened had Hitler died in the July 1944 assassination attempt?", all sorts of possibilities become readily apparent, starting with the assumption that the German generals, had they been able to consolidate power over remaining Nazi functionaries such as Goebbels and Himmler, would probably have sued for peace, bringing an early end to World War II. (Historians generally feel popular support for the Party was still very strong in July 1944, and the party apparatus of Himmler, Goebbels, Speer, Bormann, Göring etc. would survive even an assassination of Hitler.) Thus, the counterfactual brings into sharp relief the question of how important Hitler was as an individual and how his personal fate shaped the course of the war and, ultimately, of world history. Read more...
• 

  In sociology and anthropology, time discipline is the general name given to social and economic rules, conventions, customs, and expectations governing the measurement of time, the social currency and awareness of time measurements, and people's expectations concerning the observance of these customs by others.
  
  The concept of "time discipline" as a field of special attention in sociology and anthropology was pioneered by E. P. Thompson in Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism, published in 1967. Coming from a Marxist viewpoint, Thompson argued that observance of clock-time is a consequence of the European industrial revolution, and that neither industrial capitalism nor the creation of the modern state would have been possible without the imposition of synchronic forms of time and work discipline. The new clock time imposed by government and capitalist interests replaced earlier, collective perceptions of time that Thompson believed flowed from the collective wisdom of human societies. While in fact it appears likely that earlier views of time were imposed instead by religious and other social authorities prior to the industrial revolution, Thompson's work identified time discipline as an important concept for study within the social sciences. Read more...
• 

  Pseudohistory is a form of pseudoscholarship that attempts to distort or misrepresent the historical record, often using methods resembling those used in legitimate historical research. Pseudohistory frequently presents a big lie or sensational claims about historical facts which would require the revision (re-writing) of the historical record. The related term cryptohistory applied to a pseudohistory based upon or derived from the superstitions inherent to occultism. Pseudohistory is related to pseudoscience and pseudoarchaeology and usage of the terms may occasionally overlap. Read more...
• 

  The categorization of the past into discrete, quantified named blocks of time is called periodization. This is a list of such named time periods as defined in various fields of study. Major categorization systems include cosmological (time periods in the origin and mass evolution of the universe), geological (time periods in the origin and evolution of the Earth), anthropological (time periods in the origin and evolution of humans) and historical (written history). Read more...
• 

  A century (from the Latin centum, meaning one hundred; abbreviated c.) is a period of 100 years. Centuries are numbered ordinally in English and many other languages.
  
  A centenary is a hundredth anniversary, or a celebration of this, typically the remembrance of an event which took place a hundred years earlier. Read more...
• 

  Marxist historiography, or historical materialist historiography, is a school of historiography influenced by Marxism. The chief tenets of Marxist historiography are the centrality of social class and economic constraints in determining historical outcomes.
  
  Marxist historiography has made contributions to the history of the working class, oppressed nationalities, and the methodology of history from below. The chief problematic aspect of Marxist historiography has been an argument on the nature of history as determined or dialectical; this can also be stated as the relative importance of subjective and objective factors in creating outcomes. Read more...
• 

  

  Herodotus (c. 484–c. 425 BC) was a Greek historian who lived in the 5th century BC and one of the earliest historians whose work survives.

  
  
  A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past, and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is concerned with events preceding written history, the individual is a historian of prehistory. Some historians are recognized by publications or training and experience. "Historian" became a professional occupation in the late nineteenth century as research universities were emerging in Germany and elsewhere. Read more...
• 

  

  William Shakespeare's will, written in secretary hand

  
  Palaeography (UK) or paleography (US; ultimately from Greek: παλαιός, palaiós, "old", and γράφειν, graphein, "to write") is the study of ancient and historical handwriting (that is to say, of the forms and processes of writing; not the textual content of documents). Included in the discipline is the practice of deciphering, reading, and dating historical manuscripts, and the cultural context of writing, including the methods with which writing and books were produced, and the history of scriptoria.
  
  The discipline is important for understanding, authenticating, and dating ancient texts. However, it cannot in general be used to pinpoint dates with high precision. Read more...
• 

  

  The Civil Rights Movement in the United States is an example of a social movement. Pictured are marchers at the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in Washington, D.C. on August 28, 1963.

  
  
  Social change involves alteration of the social order of a society. It may include changes in social institutions, social behaviours or social relations. Read more...
• 

  This is a timeline of pure and applied mathematics history. Read more...
• 

  A narrative is a report of connected events, real or imaginary, presented in a sequence of written or spoken words, or still or moving images, or both. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to tell", which is derived from the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled".
  
  Narrative can be organized in a number of thematic or formal categories: non-fiction (such as definitively including creative non-fiction, biography, journalism, transcript poetry, and historiography); fictionalization of historical events (such as anecdote, myth, legend, and historical fiction); and fiction proper (such as literature in prose and sometimes poetry, such as short stories, novels, and narrative poems and songs, and imaginary narratives as portrayed in other textual forms, games, or live or recorded performances). Read more...
• 

  In historiography, the term historical revisionism identifies the re-interpretation of the historical record. It usually means challenging the orthodox (established, accepted or traditional) views held by professional scholars about a historical event, introducing contrary evidence, or reinterpreting the motivations and decisions of the people involved. The revision of the historical record can reflect new discoveries of fact, evidence, and interpretation, which then provokes a revised history. In dramatic cases, revisionism involves a reversal of older moral judgments.
  
  At a basic level, legitimate historical revisionism is a common and not especially controversial process of developing and refining the writing of history. Much more controversial is the reversal of moral findings, in which what had been considered to be positive forces are depicted as being negative. This revisionism is then challenged by the supporters of the previous view, often in heated terms, and becomes an illegitimate form of historical revisionism known as historical negationism if it involves inappropriate methods such as the use of forged documents or implausible distrust of genuine documents, attributing false conclusions to books and sources, manipulating statistical data and deliberately mis-translating texts. This type of historical revisionism presents a re-interpretation of the moral meaning of the historical record. Read more...
• 

  

  Joseph Scaliger's De emendatione temporum (1583) began the modern science of chronology

  
  
  Chronology (from Latin chronologia, from Ancient Greek χρόνος, chrónos, "time"; and -λογία, -logia) is the science of arranging events in their order of occurrence in time. Consider, for example, the use of a timeline or sequence of events. It is also "the determination of the actual temporal sequence of past events".
  
  Chronology is a part of periodization. It is also a part of the discipline of history including earth history, the earth sciences, and study of the geologic time scale. Read more...
• 

  A timeline of atomic and subatomic physics. Read more...
• 

  

  The family tree of Ludwig Herzog von Württemberg (ruled 1568–1593)

  
  Genealogy (from Greek: γενεαλογία genealogia from γενεά genea, "generation" and λόγος logos, "knowledge"), also known as family history, is the study of families and the tracing of their lineages and history. Genealogists use oral interviews, historical records, genetic analysis, and other records to obtain information about a family and to demonstrate kinship and pedigrees of its members. The results are often displayed in charts or written as narratives.
  
  The pursuit of family history and origins tends to be shaped by several motives, including the desire to carve out a place for one's family in the larger historical picture, a sense of responsibility to preserve the past for future generations, and a sense of self-satisfaction in accurate storytelling. Read more...
• 

  In his "Society must be Defended", Michel Foucault posited that the victors of a social struggle use their political dominance to suppress a defeated adversary's version of historical events in favor of their own propaganda, which may go so far as historical revisionism. (See Michel Foucault's analysis of historical and political discourse above.) Nations adopting such an approach would likely fashion a "universal" theory of history, a manifest destiny in the US, to support their aims, with a teleological and deterministic philosophy of history used to justify the inevitableness and rightness of their victories.
  
  Wolfgang Schivelbusch's Culture of Defeat took a completely different view—according to him, defeat is a major driver for the defeated to reinvent himself, while the victor—confirmed in his attitudes and methods, dissatisfied by the high losses and paltry gains made, may be less creative and fall back. The concept evokes Hegel's Master–slave dialectics—the master is dependent of the work of the slave, the slave has to take his master's and his own interests into account, gets more knowledge and more insight as the master; and in realising that the world around him was created by his own hands he may gain self-consciousness and emancipation. Schivelbusch worked on three basic examples, the South and its Lost cause after the Civil War, France after the Franco-Prussian War 1870/71, and Germany following World War I. Wolfgang Schivelbusch view includes complex psychological and cultural responses of vanquished nations, from every level of society and sees a need and rise of creativity and various narratives for the defeated. Read more...
• 

  

  Cultural identity can be expressed through certain styles of clothing or other aesthetic markers

  
  Cultural identity is the identity or feeling of belonging to a group. It is part of a person's self-conception and self-perception and is related to nationality, ethnicity, religion, social class, generation, locality or any kind of social group that has its own distinct culture. In this way, cultural identity is both characteristic of the individual but also of the culturally identical group of members sharing the same cultural identity or upbringing. Read more...
• 

  Historical classification groups the various history topics into different categories according to subject matter as shown below. Read more...
• 

  Timeline of electromagnetism and classical optics lists, within the history of electromagnetism, the associated theories, technology, and events. Read more...
• 

  A millennium (plural millennia or millenniums) is a period equal to 1000 years, also called kiloyears. It derives from the Latin mille, thousand, and annus, year. It is often, but not always, related to a particular dating system.
  
  Sometimes, it is used specifically for periods of a thousand years that begin at the starting point (initial reference point) of the calendar in consideration (typically the year "1"), or in later years that are whole number multiples of a thousand years after it. The term can also refer to an interval of time beginning on any date. Frequently in the latter case (and sometimes also in the former) it may have religious or theological implications (see millenarianism). Read more...
• 

  The timeline of historic inventions is a chronological list of particularly important or significant technological inventions and the people who created the inventions.
  
  Note: Dates for inventions are often controversial. Inventions are often invented by several inventors around the same time, or may be invented in an impractical form many years before another inventor improves the invention into a more practical form. Where there is ambiguity, the date of the first known working version of the invention is used here. Read more...

On this day

February 22

Robert II of Scotland

• 1371 – Robert II (pictured) became King of Scots as the first monarch of the House of Stuart.
• 1744 – War of the Austrian Succession: British ships began attacking the Spanish rear of a Franco-Spanish combined fleet in the Mediterranean Sea off the French coast near Toulon.
• 1899 – Philippine–American War: Filipino forces launched their first counterattack in a failed attempt to recapture Manila from the Americans.
• 1959 – Lee Petty won the first Daytona 500 NASCAR auto race at the Daytona International Speedway in Daytona Beach, Florida.
• 2012 – A train failed to apply its brakes and crashed through a buffer stop at Once Station in Buenos Aires, resulting in 51 deaths and more than 700 injuries.

Charles-Nicolas Cochin (b. 1715) · Anna Kingsford (d. 1888) · Drew Barrymore (b. 1975)

More anniversaries:

• February 21
• February 22
• February 23

History in the making...

19 February 2019 – Insurgency in Egypt (2013–present)

Sixteen militants are killed in two different raids in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula. A number of weapons and explosives are also found in the raids. (Al Jazeera)

19 February 2019 –

A house fire in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, kills seven children from a Syrian family. (BBC)

19 February 2019 – 2020 United States presidential election, 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries

Vermont Senator and 2016 presidential candidate Bernie Sanders announces on Vermont Public Radio that he is running for President of the United States as a Democrat in 2020. (NPR)

18 February 2019 – Kashmir conflict

Two reported Jaish-e-Mohammed militants, one civilian and four Indian soldiers are killed in a skirmish in the Pulwama district of Indian-administered Kashmir as police search for suspects in Thursday's suicide attack that killed 40 Indian paramilitary police. (arynews)

18 February 2019 –

A suicide bombing kills the bomber and three police officers in Cairo, Egypt. Two others are injured. (Wall Street Journal)

18 February 2019 – List of mass shootings in the United States in 2019

Four people are killed in a shooting at a home in Solon Township, Kent County, Michigan, United States, with police investigating it as a possible murder–suicide. (NBC News) (CBS News)

18 February 2019 – National Emergency Concerning the Southern Border of the United States

Sixteen states sue U.S. President Donald Trump, calling his national emergency declaration made last week "unlawful and unconstitutional". (USA Today)

18 February 2019 – 2019 Venezuelan presidential crisis

In a speech, U.S. President Donald Trump urges the Venezuelan military to abandon Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro or "lose everything". (Reuters)

18 February 2019 –

United States Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is reported to be stepping down from his position in mid-March. (Reuters), (Fox News)

17 February 2019 –

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison announces the country's major political parties computer networks had been hacked by a "sophisticated state actor." (BBC)

17 February 2019 – 2019 Daytona 500

Denny Hamlin wins the 2019 Daytona 500. It is his second win in the event, the first coming in 2016. (Fox News)

16 February 2019 – Sinai insurgency

Militants attacked an army checkpoint in Sinai Peninsula killing and injuring 15. It is believed that 11 were killed but that has not been confirmed. Seven militants also died in the attack. (The National) (The Times of Israel)

16 February 2019 – Afghanistan War

32 Afghan border security troops are killed by a Taliban attack in Kandahar, Afghanistan. (The New York Times)

15 February 2019 – 2019 Kaduna State massacre

66 people were killed by gunmen in Nigeria's Kaduna State including 34 victims being either women or children. The attack happened one day before the scheduled election before it was delayed another week. (Al Jazeera) (BBC)

15 February 2019 – Amazon HQ2

After announcing that it was canceling its New York City headquarters plans the day before, Amazon announces that it will keep its second headquarters in Virginia. (CNET)

15 February 2019 – Aurora, Illinois shooting

Five people are dead and six others are injured during a mass shooting in Aurora, Illinois. The suspected shooter was later killed by police. (CBS Chicago)

15 February 2019 – Brumadinho dam disaster

Eight Vale employees from Minas Gerais are arrested over alleged involvement in a dam collapse that killed at least 166 people. (Financial Times) (The Wall Street Journal)

15 February 2019 – United States–Mexico barrier, Trump wall

U.S. President Donald Trump declares a National Emergency Concerning the Southern Border of the United States. (Fox News)

The American Civil Liberties Union and watchdog group Public Citizen announced they will file lawsuits challenging the legality of President Trump’s emergency declaration. (Time) (CBS News)

15 February 2019 – 2020 United States presidential election, 2020 Republican Party presidential primaries

Former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld announces the launching of a presidential exploratory committee to run for President of the United States in the 2020 United States presidential election. (CNN)

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Suboutlines

History (timelines) – records of past events and the way things were. It is also a field responsible for the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about the past.

• History, by period (See also Timeline of world history)
  • Prehistory – events occurring before recorded history (that is, before written records).
    • Colorado prehistory –
    • Prehistoric technology – technologies that emerged before recorded history (i.e., before the development of writing).
  • Ancient history (timeline) – from ≈3350 BCE to ≈500 CE
    • Ancient West
      • Classical antiquity (timeline) – long period of cultural history in the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea, comprising the Greco-Roman world.
        • Ancient Greece (timeline) – period of Greek history lasting from the Greek Dark Ages (ca. 1100 BC) to 146 BC and the Roman conquest of Greece. It was the seminal culture which provided the foundation of Western civilization.
        • Ancient Rome (timeline) – civilization that started on the Italian Peninsula and lasted from as early as the 10th century BC to the 5th century AD. Over centuries it shifted from a monarchy to a republic to an empire which dominated South-Western Europe, South-Eastern Europe/Balkans and the Mediterranean region.
        • Classical architecture – architecture of classical antiquity, that is, ancient Greek architecture and the architecture of ancient Rome. It also refers to the style or styles of architecture influenced by those.
    • Ancient East
      • Ancient China – China from about 2070 to 221 BC, spanning the Xia Dynasty, Shang Dynasty, Zhou Dynasy, the Spring and Autumn period, to the end of the Warring States period.
      • Ancient Egypt – ancient civilization of eastern North Africa, along the lower reaches of the Nile River starting about 3150 BC, in what is now the modern country of Egypt.
      • Ancient India – India as it existed from pre-historic times (c. 7000 BCE or earlier) to the start of the Middle Ages (c. 500 CE).
  • Middle Ages (Medieval history) (timeline) – historical period following the Iron Age, fully underway by the 5th century and lasting to the 15th century and preceding the early Modern Era. It is the middle period in a three-period division of history: Classic, Medieval, and Modern.
  • Renaissance – cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Florence in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. It encompassed a flowering of literature, science, art, religion, and politics, and gradual but widespread educational reform.
  • Early modern history – from 1500 to 1899
  • Modern history – since 1900.
  • Globalization – progression towards the development of an integrated world community, from ancient times to the present
• History, by region
  • History of South Asia (timeline)
  • History of Western civilization
  • History of existing states
    • United States history (timeline)
      • History of U.S. states
        • History of Alabama • History of Alaska • History of Arizona • History of Arkansas • History of California • History of Colorado • History of Connecticut • History of Delaware • History of Florida • History of Georgia • History of Hawaii • History of Idaho • History of Illinois • History of Indiana • History of Iowa • History of Kansas • History of Kentucky • History of Louisiana • History of Maine • History of Maryland • History of Massachusetts • History of Michigan • History of Minnesota • History of Mississippi • History of Missouri • History of Montana • History of Nebraska • History of Nevada • History of New Hampshire • History of New Jersey • History of New Mexico • History of New York • History of North Carolina • History of North Dakota • History of Ohio • History of Oklahoma • History of Oregon • History of Pennsylvania • History of Rhode Island • History of South Carolina • History of South Dakota • History of Tennessee • History of Texas • History of Utah • History of Vermont • History of Virginia • History of Washington • History of West Virginia • History of Wisconsin • History of Wyoming
  • Historical states
    • Ancient Egypt – ancient civilization of eastern North Africa, along the lower reaches of the Nile River starting about 3150 BC, in what is now the modern country of Egypt.
    • Ancient Rome (timeline) – civilization that started on the Italian Peninsula and lasted from as early as the 10th century BC to the 5th century AD. Over centuries it shifted from a monarchy to a republic to an empire which dominated South-Western Europe, South-Eastern Europe/Balkans and the Mediterranean region.
      • The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – six-volume work authored by the celebrated English historian Edward Gibbon (1737–1794).
    • Byzantine Empire (timeline) – the Eastern Roman Empire that existed throughout Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Known simply as the Roman Empire or Romania by its inhabitants and neighbors, the empire was centered on the capital of Constantinople and was the direct continuation of the Ancient Roman State. Byzantium, however, was distinct from ancient Rome, in that it was Christian and predominantly Greek-speaking, being influenced by Greek, as opposed to Latin, culture.
    • Ottoman Empire (timeline) – historical Muslim empire, also known by its contemporaries as the Turkish Empire or Turkey. At its zenith in the second half of the 16th century it controlled Southeast Europe, Southwest Asia and North Africa.
    • Soviet Union – socialist state on the Eurasian continent that existed from 1922 to 1991. A union of multiple subnational Soviet republics, its government and economy were highly centralized. The Soviet Union was a one-party state, governed by the Communist Party with Moscow as its capital. It was a major ally during World War II, a main participant in the Cold War, and it grew in power to become one of the world's two superpowers (the other being the United States). The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
• History, by subject
  • History, by field
    • History of art (timeline)
      • History of painting
    • History of business
    • History of geography
    • History of mathematics (timeline)
    • History of political science (timeline)
    • History of science (timeline)
    • History of technology (timeline)
      • Prehistoric technology
  • Historical sciences – fields dealing with history
    • Archaeology (timeline)
    • Geology (timeline)
      • Geological history
    • Biology (timeline)
    • Astronomy (timeline)
  • History of terrorism
    • Terrorism in the United States
      • September 11 attacks
  • Wars
    • American Civil War – civil war in the United States of America from 1861–1865 in which 11 Southern slave states tried to secede.
    • World War I (timeline) – major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918. It involved all the world's great powers,[1] which were assembled in two opposing alliances: the Allies (centred on the Triple Entente of Britain, France and Russia) and the Central Powers (originally centred on the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy).
    • World War II (timeline) – global military conflict from 1939 to 1945, which involved most of the world's nations forming two opposing military alliances, the Allies and the Axis. It was the most widespread, largest, most costly, and deadliest war in history.
    • Cold War (timeline) – period of political and military tension between the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc, accentuated by the rivalry between the two superpowers at that time: America (U.S.) and the Soviet Union (U.S.S.R.).
      • Vietnam War – Cold War era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of South Vietnam, supported by the United States and other anti-communist nations.

Subtopics

Main articles: News, History, History of the world, History of the Earth, and Historiography

History by region – Ancient Egypt • Ancient Greece • Ancient Rome • History of China • History of the Middle East • History of Mesoamerica • History of India

History by continent – Africa • The Americas • Antarctica • Asia • Australia • Eurasia • Europe • North America • Oceania • South America

List of time periods – Prehistory • Protohistory • Ancient history • Modern history • Future history

The Ages of history – Stone Age • Copper Age • Bronze Age • Iron Age • Dark Ages (historiography) • Middle Ages • Age of Discovery • Renaissance • Age of Enlightenment • Industrial Age • Space Age • Information Age

History by subject

Cultural history – Money • Sport

History of art – Dance • Film • Music • Painting • Theatre

History of philosophy – Ancient • Medieval • Modern • Contemporary

History of logic

History of science – Theories/sociology • Historiography • Mathematics • Pseudoscience • Scientific method

History of the natural sciences – Astronomy • Biology • Chemistry • Ecology • Geography • Physics • Geology

History of the social sciences – Anthropology • Economics • Education • Geography • Linguistics • Political science • Psychology • Sociology

History of science by era – In early cultures • In Classical Antiquity • In the Middle Ages • In the Renaissance • Scientific Revolution

History of technology – Agriculture & agricultural science • Architecture • Biotechnology • Chemical engineering • Communication • Computing (Computer science, Software engineering) • Electrical engineering • Invention • Materials science • Measurement • Medicine • Military technology • Transport

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