Nicaragua: Did you mean...?

Alexander Selkirk (or Selcraig, 1676-1721) was a Scotsman famously marooned for four years and four months on a desert island in the Pacific Ocean until his rescue by a passing British ship in February...

Franklin Pierce (1804-1869) was an American lawyer and politician who served as the fourteenth president of the United States. An unremarkable politician prior to his election, his presidency was marred by...

The first plantations in the Americas of sugar cane, cocoa, tobacco, and cotton were maintained and harvested by African slaves controlled by European masters. When African slavery was largely abolished in the mid-1800s...

The sea dogs, as they were disparagingly called by the Spanish authorities, were privateers who, with the consent and sometimes financial support of Elizabeth I of England (r. 1558-1603 CE), attacked and...

Jade was a highly-esteemed material in many Mesoamerican cultures, making it a valued regional trade good and first choice for objects of religious and artistic value such as masks, ceremonial axeheads, figurines, and jewellery...

The Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto (c. 1500-1542) landed on the west coast of Florida on 30 May 1539, hoping to find wealthy kingdoms to conquer and plunder. His crew journeyed for over four...

The English mariner, privateer, and explorer Francis Drake (c. 1540-1596 CE) made his circumnavigation of the world between 1577 and 1580 CE. Only the second to achieve this feat after the expedition of...

To climatologists, the period of seven to twelve centuries ago was known as a "Climate Anomaly" or a "Warm Period" (800-1300 CE). To archaeologists, it was a time of great change, a period when cultural patterns...

An 18th-century portrait of the Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto (c. 1500-42) who fought in Panama, Nicaragua, and Peru to expand the Spanish Empire before turning to North America and exploring as far as the Mississippi...

The Pull of the Monroe Magnet, illustration by Udo J. Keppler, 1913. In this cartoon depiction of the Monroe Doctrine, a colossal Uncle Sam, a national personification of the United States, forcibly draws toward himself...