Early Balloons and Airships: The History of the City’s Underground Ossuaries and Burial Network looks at the development of the first balloons and airships, and how they were primarily used. You will learn about the first airships like never before.

Today, the Space Race is widely viewed poignantly and fondly as a race to the Moon that culminated with Apollo 11 “winning” the race for the United States. In fact, it encompassed a much broader range of competition between the Soviet Union and the United States that affected everything from military technology to successfully launching satellites that could land on Mars or orbit other planets in the Solar System.

On October 21, 1600, two massive Japanese armies, totaling an estimated 200,000 soldiers - armed to the teeth with swords, yari (spears), arrows, muskets, and cannons - faced off on a battlefield near the town of Sekigahara. A bitter fight to the death ensued, and the results would determine the course of Japanese history for the next 250 years.

The modern history of Africa was, until very recently, written on behalf of the indigenous races by the white man, who had forcefully entered the continent during a particularly hubristic and dynamic phase of European history. In 1884, Prince Otto von Bismarck, the German chancellor, brought the plenipotentiaries of all major powers of Europe together, to deal with Africa's colonization in such a manner as to avoid provocation of war. This event - known as the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 - galvanized a phenomenon that came to be known as the Scramble for Africa.

Sulla had become renowned in Rome as a general during the Jugurthine, Social, and Mithridatic Wars, but naturally he is now remembered for the gruesome acts committed during his tenure as Rome’s first lifelong dictator. Sulla’s unprecedented period of one-man rule is viewed by many historians as a means of re-establishing peace and order in Roman politics while safeguarding the Republican system from abuse by powerful individuals.

Despite all the accomplishments and widespread victories and conquests throughout the long history of Republican and Imperial Rome, general perception still deems the Romans to have failed in one crucial conquest: the subjugation of Germany. Indeed, historians have singled out this one failure as central to the ultimate downfall of the entire empire, as the constant wars against the Germanic tribes and the need to defend the frontier on the Rhine at great expense against those tribes, helped bring the empire to its knees.

Throughout history, walls have been constructed as part of nations’ and kingdoms’ defensive structures to keep barbarian hordes, marauding rebels, and recalcitrant tribes out of defined geographic areas. The Sasanians built an impressive wall in central Asia, one that was longer than Hadrian’s Wall and by all accounts just as effective. Throughout the centuries, the Sasanian wall has gone by several different names, but it is now known as the “Great Wall of Gorgan” due to its length and location near the city of Gorgan in the modern nation-state of Iran.  

The early history of our planet covers such vast stretches of time that years, centuries, and even millennia become virtually meaningless. Instead, paleontologists and scientists who study geochronology divide time into periods and eras. The current view of science is that planet Earth is around 4.6 billion years old. The first four billion years of its development are known as the Precambrian period.

For nearly a thousand years following its foundation, there was only one Christian church. Centered in the city of Rome, the church expanded and grew until it became the dominant religion in Europe and beyond. The early growth of the Church had been suppressed by the Romans until the Emperor Constantine became the first to convert the empire to Christianity. From that point forward, the growth of the Church was inextricably linked with the Roman Empire - the most powerful military, economic, and political force in the ancient world.

In 1938, the Soviet Union film company Mosfilm released the motion picture Alexander Nevsky, directed by Sergei Eisenstein. It is a historical drama depicting the defense of the Republic of Novgorod against an invasion of the Teutonic Knights in the mid-13th century. The eponymous hero of the story, the Prince of Novgorod, leads his troops against the German knights on a field of solid ice.

Standing in history like a milestone marking the boundary between one era and the next, the Potsdam Conference brought together the leaders of the three major Allied powers - the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom - for the last time at the end of World War II and at the threshold of the Cold War. A follow up to the Yalta Conference just five months earlier, Potsdam attempted to work out the contours of the postwar world.

If trench warfare was an inevitability during the war, it is only because the events leading up to the First Battle of the Marne were quite different. The armies at the beginning of the war moved quickly through the land, but the First Battle of the Marne devolved into a bloody pitched battle that led to the construction of trenches after the Germans retreated, blocked in their pursuit of Paris.

“Scotch-Irish” is an American term that became popular in the latter 1800s, referring to the largely Protestant immigrants to the United States originating in the northern Irish province of Ulster. The majority of Scotch-Irish were people intentionally settled in Ulster as a counter to the native Catholic Irish, who immigrated to Ulster from the lowlands of Scotland and the borderlands between England and Scotland. 

The split between the two forms of Islam was already in the process of forming upon the death of the Prophet Muhammad. Muhammad had constructed around himself not only a potent new religious movement but also a powerful young state called the Ummah (the "Community" for lack of a better translation). Amid the upheaval in the Islamic world following Muhammad’s death, the Umayyad Caliphate lasted for less than a century, but in that time it managed to become one of the most influential of the major caliphates established following him.

The history of Ukraine is a fascinating story of how cultures, political systems, religions, and power have met, intersected, morphed, and expanded. The region was relatively sparsely populated for much of ancient history, a wilderness of rivers, forests, and steppes, but that does not detract from the rich historical development of the region. This geographical formation has influenced some of the country’s key historical developments, as well as the location of its major settlements.