Showing results by author "Charles River Editors" in All Categories

During the 19th century, Japan severely limited contact with the rest of the world, although it was not the total isolation sometimes presumed. The government was quite aware of what was happening in the rest of the world. The Japanese also left a window open to Europe, in the form of a small and highly restricted Dutch presence on an artificial island in Nagasaki harbor - a presence that lasted more than 200 years.

Americans had few things to celebrate during the War of 1812, and fighting on the frontier against the British and their native allies didn’t go any better than the conflict did in other theaters, but one of the only major victories the Americans won came at the Battle of Lake Erie in September 1813. That action made Oliver Hazard Perry, a veteran of the Barbary Wars and commander of the USS Lawrence, a legend whose name has endured for over 200 years.

It all began on Memorial Day, May 31, 1921. Around or after 4:00 p.m. that day, a clerk at Renberg’s clothing store on the first floor of the Drexel Building in Tulsa heard a woman scream. Turning in the direction of the scream, he saw a young black man running from the building. Going to the elevator, the clerk found the white elevator operator, 17-year-old Sarah Page, crying and distraught. The clerk concluded that she had been assaulted by the black man he saw running a few moments earlier and called the police.

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.

With the end of the war, concern over German subversives was replaced with concerns over communist subversives. In this powder keg, all that was needed was a spark to create full-blown hysteria, and the spark came on June 2, 1919, when the home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer was bombed, injuring Palmer and killing the bomber. The anarchist leaflets he was carrying were scattered in the bomb debris, and this attack on his home prompted Palmer, who had been a reformist Quaker, to launch an all-out war against left-wing radicals. The Red Scare had begun in earnest.

The Battle of Red Cliffs changed Chinese history. It marked the end of the Han Dynasty, one of the greatest in China’s history, and pushed China into the era of the Three Kingdoms, an era of perpetual warfare and chaos. Furthermore, the battle also had a dramatic effect on Chinese culture, media, and literature, and the battle and its major participants remain legendary in China.

Walt Whitman was a great American poet, but many people did not get him when he was alive. His family was like most other families, but his friends were different from most other people living then. He was a teacher and reporter, and then he worked for the government. When he was a young man, he was very serious, but when he was older he liked to play around and have fun. Walt Whitman wrote many poems about America, and his most famous work was Leaves of Grass. It was a lot of poems that took him many years to finish.

The Dreyfus Affair: The History and Legacy of France’s Most Notorious Antisemitic Political Scandal examines the chain of events that produced one of the most notorious episodes in modern French history. A case was built with the central objective of protecting the integrity of French military establishment, and in the process, the relatively muted anti-Semitism in France (at least in comparison to other European nations) was transformed into an era of virulent and violent Jew-hatred that characterized and sullied the final decade of the 19th century in France.

At the start of the 1840s, the Oregon Country had no political boundaries or effective government. The first to begin showing up in large numbers were missionaries...Narcissa Prentiss Whitman became the first white women to cross the Rocky Mountains...A teacher and missionary, she accomplished the journey with her like-minded husband, Dr. Marcus Whitman. Their history-making tenure in the northwestern wilderness caused them to become one of the most well-known couples of the 19th century, and their story was soon known to the entire nation.

While the battle had a profound impact, it has also been romanticized and mythologized beyond even epic proportions. Though often forgotten today (more than 250 years after the battle), the Battle of the Plains of Abraham was the culmination of a long siege, and the decisive action itself was an incredibly short affair at less than half an hour. Despite that brevity, both commanding generals were mortally wounded in the exchange, making British General James Wolfe a national hero on both sides of the Atlantic and French General Louis-Joseph de Montcalm a convenient scapegoat.

It would be hard if not outright impossible to overstate the impact Roman Emperor Constantine I had on the history of Christianity, Ancient Rome, and Europe as a whole. Best known as Constantine the Great, the kind of moniker only earned by rulers who have distinguished themselves in battle and conquest, Constantine remains an influential and controversial figure to this day.

Pergamon reached the height of its power during the Hellenistic period, becoming the capital of the Attalid kings, which ruled during the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE. During the Roman period, the city was the first capital of the Asian province, but it ultimately lost this status to its local rival, Ephesus. Thanks to its royalty-decreed monopoly on parchment fabrication (“pergamon” in the Ancient Greek language) and tissues and its transnational commercial activity, the city became an important multicultural center for the entire empire.

The Step-By-Step Guide to Yoga for Stress Relief can help people of all ages and backgrounds manage and reduce their stress, and it is designed for all experience levels, whether you are a beginner or a frequent practitioner of yoga. Over 40 different postures and yogic practices are accompanied with photographs of the proper poses and explanations to make sure you’re practicing yoga correctly.

Los neandertales: la historia de los humanos extintos que fueron contemporáneos del Homo Sapiens en Europa da un vistazo a la evolución de los neandertales y examina las teorías sobre su extinción.

The Cro-Magnon were Homo sapiens, and the most defining characteristics of the species are the cultural traits that begin to show in the archaeological record. Tools were beginning to be made from multiple materials, and these people would often travel long distances or trade to acquire specific materials for tools. Symbolic material became increasingly common among them, as cave paintings, figurines, shell beads, pendants, and even early burials were more common with modern humans than Neanderthals.

The Olmec people are widely recognized as the first major civilization of Mexico and are thus generally regarded as the mother civilization of Mesoamerica, making them the people from which all subsequent Mesoamerican cultures derived. Learn about the Olmec, Mayans, Aztecs, and other Mesoamerican cultures in this audiobook

On September 5, 1972, eight Palestinian terrorists belonging to the Black September faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) entered the Olympic Village in Munich, West Germany, and took 11 Israeli athletes and team members hostage. After a lengthy standoff and a bungled rescue operation, all 11 were killed. While today, Israel is one of the most divisive political subjects across the world, the Munich Massacre and the Israeli operations in response all came about entirely because of the emotional power inherent in the Israeli-Arab conflict.

La Compañía Británica de las Indias Orientales fue uno de los factores clave en la formación del Imperio Británico. Desde sus orígenes como compañía comercial luchando por mantenerse a la altura de sus superiores competidores holandeses, portugueses y españoles, a su ejercicio como la autoridad gobernante del subcontinente indio a su espectacular caída final, la Compañía de las Indias Orientales sirve como un lente a través del cual se puede explorar las fuerzas económicas y sociales que moldearon la formación del Imperio Británico global.

The British East India Company served as one of the key players in the formation of the British Empire. From its origins as a trading company struggling to keep up with its superior Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish competitors ,to its tenure as the ruling authority of the Indian subcontinent, to its eventual hubristic downfall, the East India Company serves as a lens through which to explore the much larger economic and social forces that shaped the formation of a global British Empire.

Everything You Need to Know About The Divine Comedy is a comprehensive guide that provides a synopsis, a description of the characters, and a summary and analysis of every chapter. You can use this as a guide while you listen, or as a way to brush up on everything you once knew and since forgot.