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1) Shays' Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion: The History and Legacy of Early America's Domestic In
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Even as the young United States successfully secured its independence, the new nation was beset by problems. The drafters of the Articles of Confederation had deliberately avoided giving the national legislature the power to tax, because Parliament had so abused that authority against the colonies, but this proved to be a severe limitation on the national government. Besides hampering the Continental Army, the inability of the national government...
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While Nat Turner's rebellion remains famous today, a far larger uprising took place a generation earlier. In January 1811, hundreds of slaves in Louisiana attempted to make a new beginning for themselves or die trying. Armed with muskets, cane knives, and axes, and wearing stolen United States militia uniforms, they set out to conquer the city of New Orleans. The goal was to establish a free republic where slavery was outlawed and blacks had control...
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By the time the Pleistocene Epoch ended around 12,000 years ago, Homo sapiens had become one of the most significant species on the planet. It was also near the end of that period of time that modern humans began to gradually populate what would become Europe, Asia, and the Americas, eventually becoming the inheritors of the Paleolithic era and the only human species to make it into the Neolithic era. The cold Pleistocene temperatures lowered water...
4) The Chisholm Trail: The History and Legacy of 19th Century America's Most Famous Cattle Drive Route
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Around the time that the Civil War ended in 1865, the open ranges of south Texas were full of the cattle, known as longhorns. Hundreds of thousands of the distinctive steer, with their horns spanning as much as seven feet from tip to tip, roamed free on the range, so cattle ranchers took advantage of the bounty and claimed the wild longhorns as their own. With a beef shortage on the East Coast, the demand for cattle was high, so the ranchers just...
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At one point in antiquity, the Achaemenid Persian Empire was the largest empire the world had ever seen, but aside from its role in the Greco-Persian Wars and its collapse at the hands of Alexander the Great, it has been mostly overlooked. When it has been studied, the historical sources have mostly been Greek, the very people the Persians sought to conquer. Needless to say, their versions were biased, and attitudes about the Persians were only exacerbated...
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"They have soldiers. We only have arguments." — French Foreign Minister Théophile Delcassé Near the end of the 19th century, 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....
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As Earth entered the Cambrian Period, there was a relatively sudden increase in life form diversity throughout the oceans. Completely new forms of life, more complex and more diverse than anything that had been seen before, began to spread. This acceleration in the evolution of new forms of life was so dramatic that this has come to be known as the "Cambrian explosion."
Although new species in the Cambrian explosion developed almost entirely in the...
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The Netherlands has had a complex and turbulent history involving the interplay of multiple political entities, ethnicities, and languages. The term "Netherlands" (Nederland in Dutch, Pay-Bas in French) refers to the low-lying topography of the region and today is used specifically to describe the country bordering Germany and Belgium, but historically it referred to the entire region occupied by Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. In English, the...
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By the mid-17th century, the existence of a land in the south referred to as Terra Australis was generally known and understood by the Europeans, and incrementally, its shores were observed and mapped. Van Diemen's Land, an island off the south coast of Australia now called Tasmania, was identified in 1642 by Dutch mariner Abel Tasman, and a few months later, the intrepid Dutchman would add New Zealand to the map of the known world. Taking into account...
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The Mongols were pushed out of the region by the Poles and Lithuanians, who then occupied state territories in the 14th century. Poland seized areas in the west, known as Galicia, while Lithuania occupied a northern area called Volynia. The Mongol-Tatars, however, retained control of the Crimean Peninsula, using it as a base for trade, including that of slaves, with the Ottoman Empire. The Tatars would actually strengthen their grip on the Crimea...
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Movie stars are revered for their ability to captivate audiences, and Hollywood began to flourish before the onset of television, allowing movies to enjoy relatively uncontested supremacy over American entertainment. The popularity of various actors would thus extend well beyond the success of any of their individual films, reflecting their much broader cultural significance as monuments of Hollywood during its Golden Age. In the 1920s, the burgeoning...
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Overall, Tulsa in 1921 was considered a modern, vibrant city. What had fueled this remarkable growth was oil, specifically the discovery of the Glenn Pool oil field in 1905. Within five years, Tulsa had grown from a rural crossroads town in the former Indian Territory into a boomtown with more than 10,000 citizens, and as word spread of the fortunes that could be made in Tulsa, people of all races poured into the city.
By 1920, the greater Tulsa...
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At the start of the 1840s, the Oregon Country had no political boundaries or effective government. The only administrative organization in the territory was the Hudson's Bay Company, which applied only to British subjects, and aside from natives, the region was populated by a handful of independent traders, hunters, and prospectors, as well as those employed in the various company depots.
The first to begin showing up in large numbers were missionaries....
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For the most part, the Uighurs are based in East Turkestan, more commonly referred to as the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China. This prodigious plot of land boasts a total land area of over 1. 665 million km², or 640,000 mi², and is, as China puts it, the largest administrative division in the country. The pro-independence inhabitants of East Turkestan, on the other hand, have been fighting for decades to regain...
15) Ancient and Medieval Conspiracy Theories: The History of the World's Most Persistent Conspiracy Theo
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Perhaps it should also not be surprising that the themes found in contemporary conspiracy theories are often echoed in ancient conspiracy theories. While some people still insist that Lyndon B. Johnson was in on John F. Kennedy's assassination, it was speculated across the ancient world that the young Macedonian king, Alexander the Great, conspired to have his own father, Philip II of Macedon, assassinated. Likewise, the New Age beliefs that Mesoamerican...
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Perhaps not surprisingly given how advanced they were in comparison to contemporaries, the Egyptians invented one of the first writing systems ever, and for centuries, people thought these ancient texts held some sort of secret, be it aliens, advanced technology lost to the world, or mystical cures for all of the world's ills. Even the ancient Egyptians saw their writing systems as full of mystery and hidden knowledge - according to Egyptian mythology,...
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As archaeologists quickly learned, there are numerous temples dedicated to Quetzalcoatl all across Mesoamerica. From the Aztec to the Maya, Quetzalcoatl - the Feathered Serpent - rears his beautiful head from magnificent relief carvings in temples no less grandiose than the largest pyramid in the region, that of Cholula in Mexico. Furthermore, thousands of people still gather in the great Mayan city of Chichén Itzá during the spring and autumn equinoxes...
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On paper, the extraordinarily unorthodox ideology spouted by Heaven's Gate ranks near the top of the list of most outlandish end-of-the-world prophecies, and it was built on a blend of Christian, Gnostic, supernatural, New Age, and extraterrestrial lore. Although the cult did not speak in Christian terms, it was clearly apocalyptic, and its belief system was a strange mix between science fiction and the basic message of Revelation. The cult's leader,...
19) Great Northern War: The History of the Conflict that Made Russia the Dominant Empire in the Baltic
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The Great Northern War, fought from 1700-1721, gets its name from the fact the war focused on the Baltic, but the battlefields extended into Germany and deep into Poland and Ukraine. Sweden was a military power with a small empire in the Baltic, while Russia was still a landlocked place, backward when compared to the rest of Europe, not very powerful, and highly xenophobic. The Poland-Lithuanian Commonwealth was still powerful, and the Cossacks were...
20) Rocky Mountain Harry Yount: The Life and Legacy of the Famous American Explorer and Mountain Man
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During the mid-19th century, the mountain man persona transformed into that of a more multifaceted individual. Frontiersmen who were once alone in the West were hired on as guides and scouts for the military, or for settlement caravans crossing the new trails to the Pacific Northwest and California. A third generation of mountain men followed the Civil War as veterans headed west to test their survival skills learned in the military.
In the case...
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