Enderun Library, Topkapi Palace (Istanbul, 1719) Rabia rules the Ottoman Empire By 1703 AD, people were unhappy enough with Feyzullah Efendi that the Sultan killed him. Wait, who's Feyzullah Efendi? [...]
A big rubber tree in Mexico Olmec people, living in southern Mexico, invented rubber about 1600 BC. It was just as they were beginning to build their empire. Rubber starts out as [...]
A woman with typhus Nobody seems to have caught typhus before about 1450 AD, so the disease probably didn't exist until then. Typhus is an infection caused by tiny germs (bacteria) [...]
History of influenza: Influenza comes from chickens: this is a clay hen whistle from Mohenjo Daro (ca. 2700 BC, now in Brooklyn Museum) What is influenza? Influenza is a virus that mostly [...]
A Quaker wedding (1800s in England) In 1648 AD, some people in England felt unhappy with the way Puritan Christians were praying to God. So they started to do things their own way. [...]
Girls working in a mill, about 1900 AD By about 1900, though, cloth and clothing got cheap enough that there was a big change in how people thought about clothes. [...]
British cannon from the Hundred Years' War (now at Mont St. Michel) Not long before 1500 AD, everything medieval soldiers did in wars suddenly changed. First, Europeans learned how to make and use gunpowder from Central [...]
Poppies growing in a field This poem, written by John McCrae in May 1915, was one of the most famous poems of World War I. McCrae himself died in the war [...]
Jean-Paul Sartre - a French philosopher After World War I, many people in Europe felt that the old world had ended and a new world was beginning. Jean-Paul Sartre grew [...]
Simone de Beauvoir was a philosopher Simone de Beauvoir's childhood Simone de Beauvoir's family lost most of their money after World War I. But by the early 1900s, even struggling families [...]
