During the Golden Age of Piracy, from about 1650 to 1730, pirates roamed much of the world’s seas, stealing valuable cargo ...

Spiritual alchemy is an ancient practice aimed at achieving spiritual, rather than material, transformation. On the other hand, the occult science of physical alchemy deals with chemistry, and ...

Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck with a detail view of the convex mirror, 1434, via The National Gallery, London The name Arnolfini became attached to this painting from the records of its previous ...

Italian American sculptor Bruno Lucchesi (1926 to 2026) was a classical master known for preserving Renaissance figurative ...

Challenging the popular belief about where the words “crap” and “crapper” come from, reality holds a few surprises!

Horus Falcon with Crown of Upper and Lower Egypt and Uraeus, Egyptian, c. 7th-6th centuries BCE. Source: Harvard Art Museums When Hatshepsut came to the throne in the 15th century BCE, she was the ...

The C-47 Skytrain featured intelligent design features that made it an integral part of World War II’s Allied military ...

Pollice Verso (the Turned Tumb), by Jean-Leon Gerome, 1872, via Columbia College The Amphiteatrum Flavium, or the Colosseum, was built during the reign of the Flavian Roman emperors Vespasian (69-79 ...

The fighting of the American Civil War ultimately reached nearly every state in the Northern and Southern territories, with key battles fought in places like Pennsylvania, Virginia, and South Carolina ...

Map showing the Delian League and Peloponnesian League before the Peloponnesian War, W.L. Westermann, 1912. Source: Wikimedia Commons After the second Persian invasion of Greece, the allied Greek ...

In the 16th century, ruthless Cossack mercenaries spearheaded Imperial Russia's bloody conquest of Siberia, driven by the ...

The “Reconquest” of the Roman West was one of the major accomplishments of Emperor Justinian I (527-565). Following a series of successful campaigns – the “Justinian Reconquest” – the Roman Empire ...