Torture: Did you mean...?

History is recorded by individual human beings with their own beliefs and interests guiding what they choose to record, and, as such, many events and details may be omitted from the account of a certain event or the story of a great person’s...

A group of German generals attempted to assassinate the leader of Nazi Germany Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) using a bomb on 20 July 1944 but failed. The conspirators were against Hitler's conduct of the Second World War (1939-45) and Nazism in...

Herodotus' section of his Histories on burial in ancient Egypt (Book II.85-90) is an accurate description of Egyptian mummification, but he purposefully omits the spiritual significance of embalming in keeping with his commitment to refrain...

The sculpture group of Laocoön and His Sons, on display in the Vatican since its rediscovery in 1506, depicts the suffering of the Trojan prince and priest Laocoön (brother of Anchises) and his young sons Antiphantes and Thymbraeus and is...

The Ludlul-Bel-Nemeqi (c. 1700 BCE) is a Sumerian and later Babylonian poem on the theme of unjust suffering, which is thought to have influenced the biblical Book of Job. Also known as The Poem of the Righteous Sufferer, the title translates...

Pliny the Younger's (61-112 CE) letter (Epistulae X.96) to Roman Emperor Trajan (r. 98-117 CE) is one of our earliest sources on Christianity from an outsider's point of view. It highlights the Christian movement's impact on the old Roman...

The Ulunsuti tales of the Cherokee deal with the mystical jewel, the Ulunsuti ("transparent"), a diamond on the forehead of the great horned serpent Uktena. The Ulunsuti appears in several Cherokee legends, but the story is developed through...

The Batavia was a Dutch East India Company ship that foundered on the coral reefs of the Houtman Albrolhos Islands, 60 kilometres (37 mi) off the coast of Western Australia, just before dawn on 4 June 1629. It was the flagship of a fleet...

The only sources for the life of Jesus of Nazareth are in the canonical gospels (or the gospels that were included in the authorised version of the New Testament). We have no contemporary, eyewitness testimony from the time that he lived...

Although both the Byzantines and the Armenians were Christian, the types of Christianity they professed had important differences that led to a lack of recognition and tensions between the two groups and a considerable part of their relationship...