Paper Money: Did you mean...?

The arrival in Europe of the printing press with moveable metal type in the 1450s CE was an event which had enormous and long-lasting consequences. The German printer Johannes Gutenberg (c. 1398-1468 CE) is widely credited with the innovation...

The Goryeo (Koryo) kingdom ruled ancient Korea from 918 CE to 1392 CE, and it oversaw a flourishing of the arts, literature, and architecture. One of these developments was the production of finely crafted illuminated Buddhist texts. Painted...

Twelfth Night, or What You Will is a romantic comedy by William Shakespeare (l. c. 1564-1616), written between 1600 and 1601 and first performed on 2 February 1602. As suggested by the title's allusion to Twelfth Night – the night before...

Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-1859) was a British engineer and a key figure of the British Industrial Revolution (1760-1840). Brunel masterminded the Great Western Railway from London to Bristol, designed and built innovative giant steamships...

Mary Prince (l. c. 1788 to c. 1833) was the first enslaved Black woman to publish an autobiography/slave narrative. Prince was illiterate but dictated her life story to the writer Susanna Strickland (l. 1803-1885), published in 1831 as The...

Society in the Kingdom of France in the period of the Ancien Regime was broken up into three separate estates, or social classes: the clergy, the nobility, and the commoners. These classes and their accompanying power dynamics, originating...

A 17th-century hand-coloured engraving by John Payne of The Sovereign of the Seas, a ship built in 1637 during the reign of Charles I of England (r. 1625-1649). The ship was built using money from the controversial Ship Money tax. (National...

Our CEO Jan van der Crabben writes about the organization's history for its 10th anniversary in 2019 (when it was still called Ancient History Encyclopedia). Ancient History Encyclopedia just turned ten! On 25 August 2009, we officially...

Money Matters: The Development of Money through the Ancient World. A four-part series that traces the development of economic systems in the ancient world and explore how money as a financial instrument has evolved over the millennia...

The electrical telegraph was invented in 1837 by William Fothergill Cook (1806-1879) and Charles Wheatstone (1802-1875) in England with parallel innovations being made by Samuel Morse (1791-1872) in the United States. The telegraph, once...