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Today, the world is in the midst of the transformative and ever-developing Digital Age, otherwise referred to as the “Age of Information.” It has been an unprecedented, remarkable, and explosive era marked by social media and computer-generated imagery (and with it, deep fakes), among other novel, previously unimaginable concepts. The bulky monitors and blocky towers of personal computers and laptops, which were once upon a time considered fashionable, futuristic contraptions, have since been replaced with a sleek and stylish array.

When one thinks of the world’s first cities, Sumer, Memphis, and Babylon are some of the first to come to mind, or if the focus then shifts to India, then Harappa and Mohenjo-daro will likely come up. But archaeologists recently uncovered a site thousands of years older than any of those, marking one of the oldest settled sites in the world.

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.

Over the course of the 19th century, the people of Sicily found themselves at the center of a struggle for freedom, one that ended up being long and often very bloody. It was during these crucial years of struggle that the Sicilian mafia, La Cosa Nostra ("Our Thing"), started to take shape. Cosa Nostra: The Notorious History and Legacy of the Sicilian Mafia examines how the world’s most famous mob formed, its inner workings, and the events that made it feared around the world.

On New Year’s Day 1993, Czechoslovakia broke into two separate countries, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Thus ended one of the creations brought about by the Treaty of Versailles after World War I, and as a country that had existed for just under 75 years, Czechoslovakia spent most of its time under the tyranny of fascism or communism.

Operation Condor: The History of the Notorious Intelligence Operations Supported by the United States to Combat Communists Across South America looks at the various intelligence operations and the winding chain of events that brought about conflicts in the region.

Despite losing the 1948 War, Arab nations throughout the Middle East had still refused to recognize Israel’s right to exist. After the Suez Crisis, Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser envisioned creating a unified Arab world, commonly referred to as pan-Arabism. Nasser was the consummate pan-Arab leader in the 1960s, positioning himself as the leader of the Arab world through increasing incitement against Israel with rhetoric. Israel found itself in possession of more land after 1948 than envisioned by the U.N. Partition Plan.

Located in the center of Beijing, the Forbidden City served as the palace for the emperor of China from 1420 to 1912 CE, a period encompassing the Ming and Qing dynasties. It was home to the celestial leaders of China, men that possessed the Mandate of Heaven. A total of 24 emperors lived and ruled from the vast and magnificent complex for almost 500 years, until the last Chinese dynasty was overthrown in 1912 with the abdication of Emperor Xuantong, more commonly known as Puyi.

Mosby, the "Gray Ghost" of the Confederate lore that celebrates the Lost Cause, has an image that has proven nearly impossible to corrupt or change, and time has done little good against it. Unlike the vanished 19th century code of honor that he represented, Mosby has retained the image and all its connotations. But that image, which he helped fashion, was mostly an invention

Years before comedians like Chris Farley made their reputations with a particularly physical form of humor, there was John Belushi, the legendary comedian known for iconic performances in Animal House, The Blues Brothers, and as one of the original cast members of Saturday Night Live. Not surprisingly, posters of Belushi as Bluto Blutarsky wearing a shirt that simply says "College" still adorn the walls of countless dorm rooms over 35 years after Animal House came out, and The Blues Brothers is still a cult classic.

If one assembled a list of the most iconic actors of the film noir genre, Robert Mitchum would surely rank at the top of the list. With his deadpan façade and slow, monotone verbal delivery, Mitchum encapsulated the disillusioned hero of the postwar crime genre.

In their long history of suffering, nothing was ever so terrible as what the Irish endured during the Great Potato Famine that struck the country in the 1840s. It produced massive upheaval for several years. While countless numbers of Irish starved, the famine also compelled many to leave. And all the while, the British were exporting enough food from Ireland on a daily basis to prevent the starvation.

John Dee was one of the greatest scientific minds of his time, but also one of the most controversial. He was a learned man in fields as varied as mathematics and astronomy, centuries before they became formalized fields of study, but he is better remembered for performing magic and alchemy. Instead of astronomy, he became renowned across England for astrology, and he was one of the country’s most notorious occult writers during his life.

It sounds like a modern day Lifetime movie: two talented, popular and wealthy men both fall in love with the same beautiful but somewhat tarnished girl. One had a long history of mental illness, the other was considered an architectural genius. The inevitable showdown, complete with a very public murder, took place in one of the most fashionable restaurants in the world.

The first aircraft to appear in the skies over the battlefields of World War I showed few signs of the dominant future of airplanes in warfare. Small, fragile, and slow, they provided no hint of the sleek jet fighters that would one day slash across the skies of Earth faster than sound to unleash the lethal blast and fire of sophisticated missiles, or the bombers able to level an entire city with one nuclear bomb. That said, they did not represent a complete novelty in warfare either, at least not during the early months of World War I.

It goes without saying that the most enduring image of Gloria Swanson is the famous shot of her in Sunset Boulevard (1950), head tilted backward, stating, "Alright, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close up." Indeed, for many, the very mention of "Gloria Swanson" conjures the name of "Norma Desmond," her character in Sunset Boulevard, directed by Billy Wilder.

The vast expanses of southern Russia and the Ukraine provided the Eastern Front arena where the armies of Third Reich dictator Adolf Hitler and Soviet dictator Josef Stalin wrestled lethally for supremacy in 1943. Endless rolling plains - ideal "tank country" - vast forests, sprawling cities, and enormous tracts of agricultural land formed the environment over which millions of men and thousands of the era's most formidable military vehicles fought for their respective overlords and ideologies.

Tens of millions died during World War II as the warring powers raced to create the best fighter planes, tanks, and guns, and eventually that race extended to bombs which carried enough power to destroy civilization itself. While the war raged in Europe and the Pacific, a dream team of Nobel Laureates was working on the Manhattan Project, a program kept so secret that Vice President Harry Truman didn’t know about it until he took the presidency after FDR’s death in April 1945.

James Meredith’s struggle to integrate the University of Mississippi in 1962 is still remembered vividly, but the Little Rock Nine are frequently overlooked when it comes to discussing the Civil Rights Movement, despite attempting to integrate Little Rock Central High School five years earlier. For millions of kids, high school is a tumultuous time, but for the Little Rock Nine, the first African American students to attend a previously segregated high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, those years were nightmarish.

The phrase a "Pyrrhic victory" is often used to denote a win that costs the victor more than the loser, but few have any notion of how the term came into use. Indeed, it would probably come as a surprise to many that it derives from a remark made by Pyrrhus of Epirus after a battle in which he had defeated his Roman enemies at Asculum. In the wake of the battle, Pyrrhus reportedly said, "If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans we shall be utterly ruined."