Mary Astell Mary Astell's backstory Unlike the slightly older Masham, and most other Enlightenment philosophers, Mary Astell was not from a really rich family. Who was Damaris Masham? Enlightenment philosophers European philosophers [...]
Queen Elizabeth I of England (1500s AD) Renaissance women in power As in the Middle Ages, European women held a lot of political power in the 1500s and 1600s AD. In [...]
William Shakespeare Who was William Shakespeare? Little Shakespeare was born in England, in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon, in 1564 AD. His family was pretty well off, and he probably went to [...]
Reproduction of a press from Gutenberg's time The invention of the European printing press with moveable type in northern Europe in the late 1400s AD was no accident: publishers had set out to find [...]
Unemployed people in Germany (1930s) Why did World War II start? The Depression left everyone in Europe feeling angry and upset, because so many people were poor. People were especially upset in [...]
A Russian machine gun from World War I What led up to World War I? At the end of the 1800s, many countries around the world were angry. France, Britain, and [...]
Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom When the King of England, William IV, died in 1837, his niece Victoria became queen of England. She was also the queen of many other [...]
Philip V of Spain Austria and France fight over Spain The War of the Spanish Succession was a war between Austria and France. They were fighting over which of them [...]
Maria Christina Spain was among the first Western countries to get colonies in the 1500s, and it was among the first to lose its colonies in the 1800s. In 1810, Chile [...]
Charles Quint (by Titian, 1548) The Ottomans terrify Europe The biggest worry that people had in the early 1500s AD in Europe was that the Ottoman Empire was going to conquer Europe. Would Europe [...]
