In the 19th century, Russian intellectuals launched a search for historical evidence of their moral and military superiority. What they found drives what today some call "Russian aggression."
Agricultural Building at the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, Illinois, circa 1893.
University of Maryland Digital Collections
Two Italian scholars who fled fascism in the 1920s urgently warned that American democracy was vulnerable to the same gradual erosion as in Italy. Their message still rings true today.
The building in Braunau Am Inn, Austria, where Hitler was born.
AP Photo
Often it has been Ireland’s writers and artists that have called out the hopes and failures of national politics, holding the polity to account in the culture.
Günter Schabowski at his fateful press conference.
EPA
Günter Schabowski's press conference in November 1989 helped trigger the collapse of the Berlin wall. Was it really as much of an accident as we like to think?
While Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin openly draws on medieval and early modern history in the worlds of his books, his subversive depictions of witchcraft make his female characters both intriguing and powerful.
One of the stalagmites used in this study. The blue-green fluorescence is due to the light from the camera flash.
From Belgium to Moscow to Helmland: how one battle helped shape how we think of war.
When Vladimir Putin reviews the troops marking the 70th anniversary of Russia’s victory of Nazism, he won’t have many leaders of democratic nations to accompany him.
EPA/Alexey Druzhinin/ RIA NOVOSTI
Victory over Nazi Germany is one unambiguously positive accomplishment of the 20th century; and yet, constructing a positive narrative about the Soviet second world war has proven hard – largely because there are some stubborn facts to contend with.
A ‘view from tower’ reveals the long rows of huts at Holsworthy internment camp, where Germans were interned during the First World War.
Paul Dubotzki/Dubotzki Collection
Studying beads, shells and animal teeth – ornaments which carried deep cultural meaning to prehistoric man – reveals that northern Europeans resisted the spread of agriculture for centuries.