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This Day in World History – Control of the Roman Empire was in the balance when the armies of Constantine and his brother-in-law Maxentius clashed near the Milvian Bridge, north of Rome. Despite having a smaller army, Constantine triumphed—a victory made secure when Maxentius drowned in the Tiber River while trying to escape. Constantine’s victory left him in command of the western half of the Roman Empire—but it also had more significant consequences.
By Martin Evans
On 17 October 1961 at 5.30 am 30,000 unarmed Algerians converged on the centre of Paris in the light rain, flooding in from the surrounding shanty towns and poor suburbs – Nanterre, Colombe and Gennevilliers. Mostly made up of young men and women, but also a scattering of older people and some mothers with young children, the demonstration was organised by the National Liberation Front (FLN) which had been engaged in war for Algerian national independence against France since November 1954.
As head of the SS, chief of police, ‘Reichskommissar for the Consolidation of Germanness’, and Reich Interior Minister, Heinrich Himmler enjoyed a position of almost unparalleled power and responsibility in Nazi Germany. Perhaps more than any other single Nazi leader aside from Hitler, his name has become a byword for the terror, persecution, and destruction that characterized the Third Reich.
By Simon Glendinning
Not so long ago Europe was not merely a recurrent theme for philosophy; it was central to the traditional discourse of “philosophy of the history of the world”. Taking in work by such giants as Kant, Hegel, and Husserl, the basic idea was that the history of “Man” can be related as a movement between an original “savage” condition and a final “fully human” condition. This construal of human history was not only European in origin, but also “Eurocentric”. Its centre was the idea that the transition for “Man” in history is a movement towards an end with European humanity at the head.
By Richard Landes
In the years before 2000, as the director of the ephemeral Center for Millennial Studies, I scanned the global horizon for signs of apocalyptic activity, that is, for movements of people who believed that now was the time of a total global transformation. As I did so, I became aware of such currents of belief among Muslims, some specifically linked to the year 2000, all predominantly expressing the most dangerous of all apocalyptic
By D. M. Leeson
In September 2010, when my book was just about to enter production, my editor asked me if I had any ideas about an image for the cover.
Gerald Steinacher is the first person to uncover the full extent of the secret escape routes and hiding places ‘ratlines’ that smuggled Nazis out of Europe, through South Tyrol, across the Alps into Italy, and onward to Argentina and elsewhere. His ground-breaking research in the archives of the ICRC in Geneva brought to light the fact that the Red Cross supplied travel papers to war criminals – amongst them Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele.
By Helen Berry
I happened to be in New York at the end of June this year when the State legislature passed the Marriage Equality Act to legalise same-sex marriage. By coincidence, it was Gay Pride weekend, and a million people waved rainbow flags in the streets of Manhattan, celebrating this landmark ruling in the campaign for gay rights, and I was one of them.
What struck me as a visitor from the UK – where civil partnerships for same-sex couples have been legal since 2004 – was the way in which gay marriage is still such a divisive issue in American politics.
By Brooke Blower
Thanks to Woody Allen’s film Midnight in Paris and David McCullough’s book The Greater Journey, summer crowds are again satisfying their appetite for that guilty pleasure: the Americans-in-Paris romp. Such celebrations of the adventures of Americans in the City of Lights are certainly fun. But they evoke a version of the city that’s rooted as much in fantasy as fact. Like many
By Erik N. Jensen
Summer officially arrived on June 21, and as Americans anticipate lounging by pools and vacationing on beaches, they also look in the mirror and worry about how that midriff will look, once it’s squeezed into a swimsuit. Despite the country’s rising obesity rates, our society has not grown more accepting of different body types and sizes. We seem, if anything, to have become less accepting of them. Women in the 1950s and
As a proud potato-eater of Irish descent, I was often told by my grandmother Rafferty, “Eat all your potatoes if you want to grow tall and strong.” It seems my grandmother was on to something. Between 1000 and 1900, world population grew from under 300 million to 1.6 billion, and the share of population living in urban areas more than quadrupled, increasing from two to over nine percent. The increase in population accelerated dramatically over time and occurred almost entirely towards the end of the period. Many demographers, historians, and economists alike have speculated as to the reasons for such growth on a global scale. The authors of
By Gordon Thompson
To many adolescents fifty years ago, the future seemed bleak: the “King” had become preoccupied with refurbished Italian schmaltz while the world drew closer to Armageddon. But hope buzzed in the heart of an ungrounded amplifier in a West German high school.
Goodwill had floundered between the recently elected American president, John F. Kennedy and the Soviet Union’s premier, Nikita Khrushchev over the Soviet blockade of Berlin and America’s support of the failed
By David Wallace
Jewish and Christian traditions alike praise the strong woman, a colossus of work and ingenuity who, according to Proverbs 31, rises early and prepares food, plants vineyards, conveyances land, feeds the poor, manufactures and sells linen garments, weaves tapestries, and speaks wisdom.
By George Walden
Everything about Otto von Bismarck was off the scale: his rages, his disloyalty, his mendacity, his gargantuan appetite and his colossal chamber pots. So, too, was the political genius of the greatest, if least lovable, statesman 19th-century Europe had to offer.
In Dividing the Spoils: The War for Alexander’s Empire Robin Waterfield revives the memories of Alexander the Great’s Successors, whose fame has been dimmed only because they stand in Alexander’s enormous shadow. Alexander’s legacy was turmoil, and in the videos below Waterfield explains firstly what happened to the Empire after Alexander’s death and why the book came to be written, and secondly, the role of women in the war for Alexander’s Empire.
On April 26, 1986, the world’s worst nuclear power plant accident occurred at the Chernobyl nuclear power station. Now, 25 years later, the current crisis in Fukushima is being called the “worst since Chernobyl.” Will we avoid another disaster? And further more, in another 25 years, how will we feel about nuclear energy?