Third Estate: Did you mean...?

Hadrian’s Villa near Tivoli, Italy, is an opulent, sprawling garden-villa covering some 120 hectares (296 acres). It was built by Emperor Hadrian (76-138 CE) between 125-134 CE for use as his country estate, although the land may have originally...

Montesquieu (1689-1757) was a French philosopher whose ideas in works like The Spirit of the Laws helped launch the Enlightenment movement in Europe. His ideas on the separation of powers, that is, between the executive, legislative, and...

The Muromachi Period (Muromachi Jidai, 1333-1573 CE) refers to the period of Japanese medieval history when the Ashikaga shogun capital was located in the Muromachi area of Heiankyo (Kyoto). Replacing the Kamakura Shogunate (1192-1333 CE...

The Revolt of the Parlements of 1787-1788, was the climax of a power struggle between the royal authority of King Louis XVI of France (r. 1774-1792) and the Parlement of Paris, the most powerful of France's thirteen parlements, or high judicial...

Thomas Morton (l. c. 1579-1647 CE) was an English lawyer, poet, writer, and an early colonist of North America who established the utopian community of Merrymount, sparking conflict with his separatist neighbors at Plymouth Colony and the...

The RMS Empress of Ireland was a transatlantic passenger ship that sank early in the morning of 29 May 1914 on the St. Lawrence River killing 1,012 of the 1,477 people on board. It is considered Canada’s worst maritime disaster and one of...

The Battle of Passchendaele (October-November 1917), the final stage of the Third Battle of Ypres, took place in Flanders, Belgium, during the First World War (1914-18). The aim of the Allied commander in this part of the Western Front, Field...

Bodo was a early 9th-century Frankish farmer. He and his family hailed from a manor owned by the monastery of St.-Germain-des-Prés near Paris and worked as its tenants. He ploughed the farmlands while his wife, Ermentrude, took care of their...

In the cultures of the ancient world, there was no need for designations such as LGBTQ+ because there was no difference noted between what is now defined as "homosexual" and "heterosexual" relationships. There was no "us" and "them" dichotomy...

Defending Clerical Marriage (1524) is an open letter by reformer and theologian Katharina Zell (nee Schütz, l. 1497-1562), written to justify the marriage of Christian clergy. The Catholic Church prohibited clerical marriage, but Katharina...