October 8, 1871 is best known as the start date of the Great Chicago Fire, which leveled three square miles of property and claimed 300 lives. Yet the very same night the Windy City went up in flames, an even bigger and more devastating blaze tore through tiny Peshtigo, Wisconsin, a frontier boomtown located a few miles north of Green Bay. In just More

Legend has it that a young Isaac Newton was sitting under an apple tree when he was bonked on the head by a falling piece of fruit, More

As with the wheel, cities and law codes, the earliest examples of written literature appear to have originated in ancient Mesopotamia. The Sumerian civilization first developed writing around 3400 B.C., when they began making markings on clay tablets in a script known as cuneiform. More

China’s legendary Great Wall is actually a collection of stone, wood and earthen barricades that meander for thousands of miles from the Gobi Desert to the North Korean border. More

It’s been said that good fences make good neighbors, and it seems that many of history’s most famous civilizations would agree. Dating back to the ancient world, governments and militaries have constructed sprawling defensive walls to keep hostile enemies at bay, define their national borders and even prevent their own citizens from More

Among the key sources for Viking history are the sagas, tales of heroism, feuding and exploration that probably began in oral form before being written down, mainly in Iceland, around the 13th century. More

This early period of ‘taking of the land’ is described in the Landnámabók, a 13th-century compilation of earlier sources, which details the names, ancestry and notable deeds of the first settlers in each district. More

A schoolboy who fought on the Somme after lying about his age has been declared the youngest authenticated combatant of the First World War. More

The Allies’ war aims changed over the course of the conflict in response to military and diplomatic developments and to pressure from the United States to make them clear as a basis for negotiating peace. More

The First World War ended not through mutiny or popular uprising, but through decisive military defeat. Certainly, the major combatants were exhausted, and their peoples weary of the war, but the only country voluntarily to withdraw from the war was Bolshevik Russia. More

The fate of Musa bin Nusair and Muhammed bin Qasim is a lesson of historical importance. With the ascension of Muawiya, legitimacy of rule was no longer by consent of the masses; it was by force. Sultan after sultan arose and established himself by dictate or by virtue of inheritance from soldier-conquerors. When a ruler was competent and just, as More

The conquest of Sindh brought Islamic civilization face to face with the ancient Vedic civilization of the Indo-Gangetic Plains. In later centuries, there was much that Muslim scholarship would learn from India—mathematics, astronomy, iron smelting-to name but a few subjects. (Muslim scholarship has focused more on the interaction between Islam More