Charles River Editors

On November 29, 1943, as the Allies’ primary leaders met in Tehran, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt described to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin his idea for the organization that would become the United Nations.

Since the early days of human warfare, which may date back to the Stone Age, combatants have sought to gain an advantage through the acquisition of secret information. With the growth of technology, a parallel advantage was sought through the application of numerous types of torture....

As a basic definition, it may be said that an Ice Age is simply a period of time during which thick ice sheets cover vast areas of land. These sheets have advanced and retreated, at times taking over the entire planet, and conversely disappearing nearly altogether.

In 1869, the Atlantic Monthly magazine published a new novella in serial form. This bizarre tale, The Brick Moon, was written by a historian (and Unitarian minister) named Edward Everett Hale, who had already written several well-received novels and articles.

The growing buzz of aircraft engines disturbed the Japanese military construction personnel hauling equipment ashore on the beige coral sand of Tulagi Island on May 4, 1942....

Today, the term "Philistine" is often used as a euphemism for a person who is particularly uncouth, uncultured, ignorant, and possibly violent....

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....

The Overland Campaign that pitted Robert E. Lee against Ulysses S. Grant is one of the most famous campaigns of the Civil War, and perhaps its greatest chess match. While Grant sought to destroy Lee's Army of Northern Virginia along the way to Richmond, Lee aimed to defend his capital....

The World War II era produced many leaders of titanic determination, men whose strengths and weaknesses left an extraordinary imprint on historical affairs....

"The golden age of piracy" generally refers to the era when history's most famous pirates roamed the seas of the West Indies from 1670-1720....

Worship of the Feathered Serpent can be traced back 2,000 years, and the Serpent’s cults appear all across Mesoamerica. The Olmec, the Aztec, and both the Yucatec and K’iche Mayans all had different names for this deity, including Kukulkan, Q’uq’umatz, and Tohil....

While Rome suffered defeats over the course of its long history, none of them were as disturbing for the Empire as the battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 CE....

When scholars study the history of the ancient Near East, several wars that had extremely brutal consequences (at least by modern standards) often stand out....

The saga of English predominance in Ireland began in the 12th century following the Norman invasion of England, when a band of Norman adventurers, established on the Welsh mainland, set off across the Irish Sea to test their prospects on the shores of England’s western neighbor....

Ancient Greece and its mythology has fascinated people for thousands of years, and few elements have intrigued people quite like the Eleusinian Mysteries....

The Boy Scouts: The History and Legacy of the World's Most Popular Youth Organization chronicles the history of the organization, and how it came to be so famous....

The spy novel emerged from the intrigues of the mid-20th century for good reason. The war with the Third Reich involved an unseen cloak-and-dagger struggle between the participants, but beyond that, an even larger and longer contest took place in the shadows....

Otherwise known as the “Roma” or by their popular misnomer “the gypsies”, the members of this highly undervalued and grossly misrepresented community have long been considered outcasts....

After the siege of Boston forced the British to evacuate that city in March 1776, Continental Army commander George Washington suspected that the British would move by sea to New York City....

The 19th century saw the rise of one of the largest, most powerful empires of the modern era. The sun never set on the British Empire, whose holdings spanned the globe, in one form or another....