A Day In History

From 16031854, Japan was a closed country. No one could leave the country, and foreigners were limited to a small port near Hiroshima. So when the American naval officer Matthew C. Perry forced Japan to open to trade and diplomacy with the outside world, the country was two hundred years behind the rest of the world economically, technologically, and militarily. Over the next forty to fifty years,...

Many people today remember the Ottoman Empire as the „Sick Man of Europe”, an epithet the collapsing empire earned during the 19th and early parts of the 20th century. The description was no doubt correct during the period it was invented, however, it is also misleading, as throughout most of its existence, the Ottomans were a formidable power, whose strength was feared in Europe and the Middle Ea...

The Jewish people have often been the target of persecution. There are several reasons for this, thoughmany of them do not make sense when looked at rationally. Later in this video, we will tell you howirrational fears and the misreading of history contributed to the hatred of the Jews, known as "antiSemitism." Before we do that, we'll tell you about two times the Jews were persecuted for moreunde...

In the year 395, the Roman Empire split into two parts: the Western Roman Empire, which included Rome, and the Eastern Roman Empire, sometimes called “The Byzantine Empire” after its capitol at Byzantium, and which became Constantinople during the reign of Emperor Constantine. The split of the most powerful empire in Western history happened for a number of reasons. One, it would be easier to admi...

For about ten years between 871881, a revolt in today’s southern Iraq destabilized an entire empire. The death toll resulting from this revolt may have been as “low” as 100,000 and as high as a million and a half; historians are not exactly sure and might never be. Some people today believe that “The Zanj Rebellion” was a revolt of enslaved African people against their Arab masters in a bid for fr...

“Our” pope, John XII, ruled over Western Christendom from 955963 some six hundred years afterPope Damasus. Damasus had been appointed by the Emperor Theodosius, but by the time of John XII,popes were elected by the people of Rome. Well, that's kind of misleading, for while the people of thecity did vote for the pope, the vast majority of those votes were bought by powerful families who eitherhad a...

Serial killers. Nations become glued to their televisions or news feeds when just the suspicion of a serial killer roams in their midst. The term serial killer has only been used since the late 1800s, and the term was used to describe the infamous and still unknown “Jack the Ripper” of Victorian England. Imagine a time when none of that existed, and where the upper class did not only live better,...

Hey, folks! Today we are going to dive into a disturbing topic that is rarely discussed and mostly left out of history books: Human Zoos. Most of you probably had no idea such a thing existed, and you cannot be blamed for it. It is certainly easier to forget than to remember and to face the shame of this abhorrent practice. One of the first people to host a human exhibition was a man called P.T. B...

Napoleon Bonaparte, born in then Italian Corsica in 1769, was the dominant personality of his time. He died in exile on the lonely British South Atlantic island of St. Helena in 1821. But though he was a shell of his former self living in isolation in the middle of nowhere, his life cast a long shadow, and his influence continued for decades after his death. His military philosophy and tactics are...

We hope you read more about Timur after you watch this video. There's so much more to learn. One of those things is easy: Timur is just one version of the name of the last great Mongol conqueror. His real name was "Tīmūr bin Taraghay Barlas," or "Timur, son of Taraghay of the Barlas Clan," but he is most often known in English as "Tamerlane," which is just a corruption of "Timurlenk," or "Timur th...

When we think about the Vikings, love, and marriage are usually not the first things that come to mind. However, we might occasionally think about the Vikings and sex when watching one of the many shows and movies about the Vikings in recent years. From TV and movies, you'd almost believe that all Vikings were attractive, always washed, and odorfree. However, it does seem that the Vikings did take...

One of the most tragic stories of WWII is that of the "comfort women", a polite name for the forced kidnapping or coercion of women and girls by the Japanese Army to "comfort" their soldiers. As in many war crimes cases, "comfort" is a euphemism, for this was just a polite term for "sexual slavery" on a mass scale. Though records exist in Japan, China, Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia,...

Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of Ancient China, is most famous for constructing the Great Wall that protected the Chinese realm against Mongolian incursions for millennia, and for the legions of Terracotta soldiers that guarded his tomb. Yet he was also one of their wackiest and most paranoid rulers, and a man so preoccupied with living forever that he cut his life short in the process. Let’s f...

The Cold War was the period of great tension between the United States and the Soviet Union, which lasted from 1945 until the fall of the Soviet Union, or "USSR," in 1991. The greatest fear of the Cold War period was that tensions between the two superpowers would become so great that the "war" between the two rival nations would turn "hot" and lead to a nuclear exchange that would end human civil...

Mehmed the Conqueror was a fearsome ruler that transformed the Ottoman Empire with his ambitious war plans and inflicting terror throughout his campaigns to the east. Europeans in the west were terrified of this Ottoman ruler and subsequently celebrated his death. Stick around to learn more about this Sultan and the many ways he destroyed his enemies, in this video of a Day in History. Mehmed the...

One of the things that often stuns people learning about the Nazis for the first time is the sheer amount of information available to us about them – authored by the Nazis. In this video, we will tell you about five infamous documents detailing the evil of the Nazi regime. One of these documents isn't on paper. Instead, it's on audio tape, recorded in October 1943 in Poznan, Poland. The recording...

In 1940, the Bolshevik revolutionary and first head of the Red Army, Leon Trotsky, was offed in Mexico City. Trotsky fled the Soviet Union in 1928 after he came out at the bottom of a power struggle with Josef Stalin, a position many people had found themselves in. The offing of real and imagined foes had a long history in Russia. Still, it was during the early Soviet era when an entire branch of...

In February 2022, Netflix premiered the sequel to History Channel's "Vikings," called "Vikings: Valhalla." Two main characters are the famous Leif Eriksson and his sister, Freydis Eriksdotter. As you may know, Leif is reputed to have arrived in North America centuries before Christopher Columbus. Some accounts in the Norse sagas include a couple of tales of Leif's sister, Freydis – but in one of t...

Grab Atlas VPN for just $1.99/mo before the deal expires: https://get.atlasvpn.com/DayHistoryHave you ever asked your school teacher for permission to get married? No? Well, if you'd beenan Aztec, this would be just one of many things you'd have to do if you wanted to settle down! And did you know the saying Tying the Knot originates in a literal Aztec wedding tradition? Welcome to A Day in Histor...

The Brutal Things Russian Tsars Did During Their ReignBefore Putin, the Soviet Union, Stalin, and Lenin, Russia was governed by the Tsars, an eccentric bunch of emperors and empresses who ruled the Slavic realm with an iron grip for nearly 400 years. As figureheads with unlimited power, and whose every word was tinged with absolute authority, it comes as no surprise that Russian kings and queens h...

“From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli...” are the beginning lines from the United States Marine Corps Hymn, and the “Tripoli” that's mentioned is the largest city in today's Libya. The hymn was written sometime after 1867, and these lines commemorate two of the Marine Corps' most famous battles “the halls of Montezuma referring to the MexicanAmerican War of 184648, and “the shores...

Augustus, the first ever emperor of Rome, is most famous for his countless military successes during his long and tyrannical tenure. Yet, in 21 BC, at the height of his power, he was completely embarrassed by the most unlikely of leaders. Amanirenas of the Kush was not only a woman of colour but also disabled, possessing only one working eye. Thanks to her efforts, Augustus, the selfproclaimed ‘so...

China is an ancient civilization that has existed for nearly 4000 years, responsible for some of the most important inventions ever conceived, such as the compass, gunpowder, paper, and printing. Yet China is also the place where some of the most wicked emperors to ever rule were able to order and perform acts so brutal and savage they defy belief. Here are some of the worst examples. Gao Yang was...

Commodus had ruled Rome from 177. For the first three years of his reign, he was actually "coEmperor" with his illustrious father, Marcus Aurelius. Marcus Aurelius is wellknown today for the collection of his writings entitled "The Reflections of Marcus Aurelius," a virtual handbook for those who wish to live a calm, stoic life of moderation. Marcus Aurelius was a revered figure in his time, and i...

Just under half a million women served in the Soviet Red Army in WWII, or as it is known in the former Soviet countries, "The Great Patriotic War".The most famous of them were snipers, but as far as we can tell from what Soviet records were made public after the fall of the USSR, only about 2,000 of them served as snipers on the front line, or at least, those were the women who received formal tra...