Mayor of the palace: Did you mean...?

The Demonstration of 20 June 1792 was a final attempt by the sans-culottes of Paris to reconcile King Louis XVI of France (r. 1774-1792) with the French Revolution (1789-99). Prompted by the king's veto of popular decrees, the people invaded...

Electra is a play written by the 5th-century BCE Greek tragedian Sophocles. Similar to Aeschylus' Libation Bearers, Electra focuses on the return of Electra's brother Orestes from exile and the plot to murder their mother. Years earlier...

The Palace of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia at Livadia, Yalta, Crimea, May 1918. The palace famously hosted the Yalta Conference of February 1945 where Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin discussed how to best end the...

Herod the Great was the king of Judea from 37-4 BCE. As a client king of Rome, Herod's moniker as "Great" was due more to his grand building program throughout the eastern Mediterranean world. Herod's building program generally ran from 35...

Ahuitzotl (Auitzotl) was an Aztec ruler who reigned between 1486 and 1502 CE. He was one of the greatest generals of the ancient Americas and he left to his nephew, Montezuma, an enlarged and consolidated empire which had been ruthlessly...

The Sapieha family - power-brokers of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth - built Ruzhany Palace in the late 1700s over the site of their earlier castle. In its heyday, Ruzhany’s famed theatre employed 100 performers. The palace also possessed...

Coyolxauhqui (pron. Koy-ol-shauw-kee) was the Aztec goddess of the Moon or Milky Way who was famously butchered by her brother Huitzilopochtli, the god of war, in Aztec mythology. This story was commemorated in a celebrated large relief stone...

A scale model of the Topkapi Palace, Istanbul. The palace was the residence of sultans of the Ottoman Empire in the 15th and 16th centuries CE. (Topkapi Palace Museum, Istanbul)

Despite the composition of a very significant English legal document within its halls, this 12th-century palace is nearly forgotten. The ‘Constitutions of Clarendon’ were Henry II’s attempt to gain legal authority over church clerks, but...

Revolutionary general Henry Christophe declared himself king over northern Haiti in 1811. According to one perspective, "Henry I" was a tin-pot dictator who forced his fellow Haitians back into virtual slavery and plunged the nation into...