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The Battle of Gazala in Libya in May-June 1942 was a decisive victory for German and Italian forces led by General Erwin Rommel (1891-1944) against British, Commonwealth, and Free French forces during the...

The First Battle of El Alamein (1-27 July 1942) was a series of encounters during the Second World War (1939-1945) in Egypt between Allied and Axis forces. The battle, focussed around the El Alamein defensive line, ended...

The great cities of Mesopotamia ("the land between two rivers") developed prior to the late 4th millennium BCE along two rivers – the Tigris and Euphrates – and were...

Two major revolutions remade the world between 1750 and 1900. The first was a revolution of the mind: thinkers of the Enlightenment argued that authority was based upon reason and consent, rather than...

The island of Sri Lanka (formerly known as Ceylon) became a focus of European attention soon after the Portuguese entry into the Indian Ocean in the late 15th century. Large swaths of the island would come...

The British Industrial Revolution (1760-1840) witnessed a great number of technical innovations, such as steam-powered machines, which resulted in new working practices, which in turn brought many social...

Joseph Stalin's five-year plans (1928-50) were a series of state-led initiatives which aimed to grow the economy of the USSR, rapidly industrialise what was still a largely agricultural...

Joseph Stalin's gulag system was a network of labour camps across the USSR, which were, from 1930, used to detain criminals and anyone considered enemies of the state. A wide spectrum of Soviet society...

The Aztec civilization, which flourished in central Mexico between c. 1345 and 1521 CE, was able to provide an astonishingly wide range of agricultural produce thanks to a combination of climatic advantages, diverse artificial...

The rulers of China's Ming dynasty (1368-1644) acquired an insatiable desire for silver in the 16th century, largely to pay for huge prestige projects like building the Forbidden City in Beijing and repairing the...