A Day In History

Ancient engagements in Ancient Greece were not really for romantic reasons, rather to create reciprocal relationships between the two families. Marriage transactions were often arranged by a woman’s male kin or kyrios and involved a series of property and dowry payment exchanges. They even had a name for it δoδωµι, a verb used to describe the process of giving brides to their new husband. This was...

Marriages in ancient Egypt were often arranged to strengthen connections between families or for financial advancement. All the same, romantic love was still important to Egyptians and celebrated in poetry from the age. The Chester Beatty Papyri date from 1200 BC and show a speaker praising the beauty of his lover, which demonstrates the idealised form of beauty at the time: “She radiates perfecti...

China is a unique nation and has been the most populous planet for the last few centuries. Considering ethnic Chinese living in other countries, it's estimated that about 1in5 people on the planet are Chinese. Twentypercent. The population of China in 2020 was 1.44 billion people. Recently it's been announced that India, whose population in 2020 was 1.38 billion people, will soon be the most popul...

The Roman Empire fell in the 5th century AD, prey to internal corruption, disputes, and many enemies on and within its borders. Despite being just a memory for over fifteen hundred years, the ancient Romans, whose territory included almost the entire coast of the Mediterranean even before an emperor ruled them, have cast a long shadow. The politics of many nations today are based upon many ancient...

The word “concubine” has several definitions and many connotations. The easiest way to define the Chinese type of concubinage, at least among the very rich and the Imperial family was that they were mistresses. Concubinage in China differed in many ways from that of other nations, though it did have similarities as well. At the very top, in the Imperial Household, there was sisterhood, rivalry, pa...

Today we shall dive deep into human evolution as we look at some of the most bizarre theories of how homo sapiens grew big brains with enhanced cognitive abilities! For the first twothirds of our evolution, homosapiens shared the same brain size of monkeys and other primates. It would take a groundbreaking discovery in 1924 at a quarry in Taung, South Africa, to first introduce this extraordinary...

In the 13th and 14 centuries, the Mongols established the largest land empire in human history. At its furthest extent, the Mongolian Empire stretched from the coast of China along the northern border of the Himalayas, encompassing much of today's Middle East from Persia to the Black Sea, much of southcentral Russia and Ukraine and Europe to the gates of Vienna. This was done on foot, wagon, and m...

For those of you new to this topic there were basically two types of Nazi camps: the “extermination camp”, for which the sole purpose was the mass killing of human beings. The German word for extermination camp is “Vernichtungs Lager”. The“Konzentrations Lager”, or concentration camp, was also a place of horror, but while in hundreds of thousands of cases, there was no real difference between the...

No one knows, probably not even the Russian government, exactly how many people perished as a result of the many purges, labor camps, and other punishments that occurred during the life of the Soviet Union, which existed from 19171991. Reliable estimates have put the number over ten million, and perhaps as high as twenty million or more. Most, but certainly not all of those deaths occurred during...

In 2014, the world came to know the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) as it exploded onto the global scene with bloody conquests in Iraq and the Middle East. ISIS became legendary for its barbarism: it beheaded prisoners, forced captives into slavery, and destroyed anything that conflicted with their extremist ideology. In August 2014, the small Yazidi ethnic group would face the full force o...

In this short historic documentary about Joseph Stalin, the leader of the USSR, we shall explore his final 24 hours. If you look at the reign of Joseph Stalin as the General Secretary of the Soviet Union, you get an image of Stalin as a ruthless, politically crafty, and dangerously paranoid individual. He held power in large part due to the fear he instilled. That insidious fear, not just of Stali...

Henry was never meant to become king of England. His older brother Arthur, Prince of Wales, had that role sewn up. Born at the Palace of Placentia in Greenwich on the 28th of June 1491, Henry was brought up to be an educated and strong princetalented at Latin, French and Italian as well as hunting, dancing and sports. He picked up his fair share of titles as a boyfrom Duke of York to Warden of the...

The word cannibalism originates from the Island Carib after unearthed 17th century legends suggested that the eating of human flesh was part of their culture (although this has since been debated).Instances of human cannibalism have been documented all over the world. It’s been practiced in countries like Great Britain, New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Fiji, the Amazon basin, the Congo and amongst...

As well as stinky hygiene practices, plagues and farming, the medieval era was known for some truly weird weaponry. Across the era, humans developed interesting and inventive ways of poking holes in each other, and some were more gruesome than you might expect. The medieval times had some horrific and creative weaponry that served as an inspiration for a lot of modern weapons. Lets look at today's...

The story of Japanese Prisoner of War camps is a particularly harrowing example of the extreme degree of inhumanity so often present in war. Allied soldiers captured by Japanese forces experienced an almost unimaginable scale of depravity. However, this story also highlights the resilience of the human spirit as they resisted the cruelty they faced, adopting various strategies to preserve not only...

The Mughal Empire was a Muslim kingdom that spread out of the southern area of today's Uzbekistan in the early 1500s. Within a relatively short time, the Mughals, under their first emperor, Babur, had expanded to include presentday Afghanistan, Kashmir, and most of modern Pakistan, as well as the area around the Indian city of Delhi down the Ganges River to the border of what is now Bangladesh. Ov...

Traditional, or perhaps more precisely previous, hypothesis has the appearance of modern humans, Homo sapiens, at around 200,000 years ago in the eastern part of Africa, plus or minus 50,000 years. However discoveries have muddied the already stygian depths on this topic, and we might have H. Sapiens ancestors much older, and more widespread, than that. That was until specimens showed up in Jebel...

The Ottoman Empire began in the 13th century with Osman the 1st. Gaining land and power the Ottomans, named after Osman via anglicization and some language hopping, would soon conquer the ancient city of Constantinople. This would bring about an influx of Greek and Roman culture that was the backbone of the Byzantines. The Ottoman Empire reached far and wide, and it was reflected everywhere in the...

The Bengal famine of 1943 serves as an example of one of the worst and most fatal atrocities in Modern History. It is also the only famine in India that is recognised to be caused by manmade factors; greed, complacency, and even racism all played a role. It claimed the lives of 24 million Bengalis. It reduced the appearance of otherwise healthy men, women, and children to skeletons. Like life, His...

Back in the fourteenth century, Mansa Musa was the ruler of a West African Empire and was said to be worth more than double that: around 400 billion dollars by today’s money, accounting for inflation. Such wealth is often hard to imagine, so for context, this figure is the same as the national gross domestic product of Norway. Musa was so wealthy that his lavish gifting crashed a regional gold mar...

Holodomor can be literally translated to “death by hunger”. It’s a horrifying fate that between 7 and 10 million people suffered in Ukraine between 1932 and 1933 thanks to the Soviet Union’s harsh grain quotas and Joseph Stalin’s underlying desire to totally subdue the Ukrainian population. In recent years, with further evaluation of Joseph Stalin’s methods in Ukraine that led to this mass famine,...

Neanderthals, or Homo neanderthalensis, are possibly our most famous ancestors. They walked, talked, fought, loved, and suffered just like us. Modern humans shared so much with Neanderthals. Their homes, ranges, hunting grounds, and even their cemeteries were left, or ceded, to us over Europe, Asia, and some parts of Africa. When we discovered the Neanderthal’s disappearance from the fossil record...

The horrors and tragedy of World War II are years before most of us were born, and even though the destruction of the war and the aftermath of it set the stage for major events even now some 8 decades later, many people don’t understand how the echoes of the war haunted the world for lifetimes. The scars left by World War II, emotional and physical, took many long years to fade. Some wounds never...

Civilizations such as the Greek, Egyptians, Romans, Vikings and Chinese dynasties amongst others had slaves who largely slotted into one of four categories: chattel, bonded, forced labour etc. As long as we have written records of humanity, we have evidence of slavery. From ancient civilizations to modernday, humans have always subjugated and enslaved one another. Whether it's because of the colou...

The Americans have long been thought to be the latecomers to the habituation of modern humans. But what if that wasn’t true, and humans were in North and South America tens of thousands of years before we thought they were. What kind of lives did they lead, where did they come from, where did they go, why aren’t they still here? These are huge questions and maybe we will find some answers as we tr...