Frederick I Barbarossa: Did you mean...?

Clint Smith teaches you about one of the most famous writers, orators, and advocates of the 19th century, Frederick Douglass. Douglass was born in slavery, escaped to the North, and became one of the most influential people of his time. Douglass...

In a July Fourth special broadcast, we share the words of Frederick Douglass as read by actor James Earl Jones. Born into slavery around 1818, Douglass became a key leader of the abolitionist movement. On July 5, 1852, in Rochester, New York...

The siege of Leningrad (Saint Petersburg) began during Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the USSR launched by the leader of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), during the Second World War (1939-45). The siege or blockade lasted from...

The Battle of Smolensk in 1941 ended in victory for Nazi Germany and its Axis allies against the USSR's Red Army during Operation Barbarossa in the Second World War (1939-45). Smolensk on the Dnieper (Dnepr/Dnipro) river was the traditional...

The siege of Sevastopol (Oct 41 to Jul 42) was an attack by Axis forces on the base of the USSR's Black Sea Fleet during Operation Barbarossa of the Second World War (1939-45). Sevastopol (aka Sebastopol) had one of the world's strongest...

The German-Soviet War, known in the USSR and today's Russia as the Great Patriotic War or, in Western Europe, as the Eastern Front of the Second World War (1939-45), began in June 1941 with Operation Barbarossa and ended in Germany's total...

The Battle of Valmy was a stunning French victory over a Prussian-led coalition army on 20 September 1792, during the French Revolutionary Wars (1792-1802). Although the battle was little more than a skirmish, it halted the coalition's invasion...

The Diet of Worms (January-May 1521) was the assembly convened by Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor to address, among other issues, the works of the reformer Martin Luther (l. 1483-1546) who openly criticized the Church. Luther was told to recant...

George II of Great Britain (r. 1727-1760) was the second of the Hanoverian monarchs, and like his father George I of Great Britain (r. 1714-1727), he faced a Jacobite rebellion to restore the Stuart line. Wars in Europe and beyond drained...

Manuel I Komnenos was emperor of the Byzantine Empire from 1143 to 1180 CE. Manuel continued the ambitious campaigns of his grandfather Alexios I and father John II to aggressively expand the boundaries of his empire. Manuel turned out to...