Pacific Ocean: Did you mean...?

The hei tiki is a small personal adornment, fashioned by hand from tough pounamu (New Zealand greenstone or nephrite jade), and is worn around the neck. Hei means something looped around the neck, and tiki is a generic word used throughout...

Europe is a continent forming the westernmost part of the land mass of Eurasia and comprised of 49 sovereign states. Its name may come from the Greek myth of Europa, but human habitation of the region predates that tale, going back over 150,000...

Suleiman the Magnificent (aka Süleyman I or Suleiman I, r. 1520-1566) was the tenth and longest-reigning sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Hailed as a skilled military commander, a just ruler, and a divinely anointed monarch during his lifetime...

The U-boat, short for Unterseeboot (undersea boat), was the name for submarines used by the German Navy during the First World War (1914-18) and Second World War (1939-45). In the two Battles of the Atlantic, U-boats sank thousands of ships...

The Description of Africa is the first comprehensive book about Africa, written by Leo Africanus, an African scholar trained in the Islamic intellectual tradition, in 1526, during the Italian Renaissance. A skillful mixture of anthropology...

Midgard is the realm of human beings in Norse mythology. The Old Norse word garðr literally means an enclosure (yard), and miðr (middle) refers to its position as a circle with both an interior ocean, and an outer ocean beyond which there...

Christopher Jones (l. c. 1570-1622 CE) was the English captain and quarter-owner of the Mayflower, the cargo ship that brought the religious separatists (now known as pilgrims) to the New World in 1620 CE. Little is known of Jones' life prior...

Hernán Cortés (1485-1547) was a Spanish conquistador who led the conquest of the Aztec Empire in Mexico from 1519. Taking the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan in 1521, Cortés plundered Mesoamerica as he became the first ruler of the new colony...

George III of Great Britain (r. 1760-1820) was the third of the Hanoverian monarchs, and he remains the longest-reigning king in British history. His six decades on the throne saw the creation of the United Kingdom, the loss of the 13 American...

Francisco Pizarro (c. 1478-1541) was a conquistador who led the Spanish conquest of the Inca civilization from 1532. With only a small group of men, Pizarro took advantage of his superior weapons and the fact that the Incas were weakened...