Wood: Did you mean...?

It was supposed to be just another masquerade. As daylight turned to dusk on 28 January 1393, servants rushed through the halls of the Hôtel Saint-Pol in Paris, making the final arrangements for what promised to be an evening of fun and revelry...

The Bolshevik Revolution occurred on 7 November 1917 (old calendar 25 October) and established a new republic: Soviet Russia. The Bolsheviks were radical socialists led by Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924), whose goal was a fairer society where...

Ancient China covered a vast and ever-changing geopolitical landscape, and the art it produced over three millennia is, unsurprisingly, just as varied. Still, despite continuous indigenous technical developments, changes in materials and...

Calligraphy established itself as the most important ancient Chinese art form alongside painting, first coming to the fore during the Han dynasty (206 BCE - 220 CE). All educated men and some court women were expected to be proficient at...

Papyrus is a plant (cyperus papyrus) which once grew in abundance, primarily in the wilds of the Egyptian Delta but also elsewhere in the Nile River Valley, but is now quite rare. Papyrus buds opened from a horizontal root growing in shallow...

The Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 saw British-led armies invade the Zulu Kingdom in Southern Africa as part of a wider plan to unify various territories into a single British-controlled state. Despite their spectacular success in the opening Battle...

The architecture of the 80,000 Shinto shrines in Japan varies depending on geographical location, the deity worshipped, and the date of foundation. The earlier Shinto shrines tend to be simpler and less decorative affairs than those which...

Phoenician architecture is typified by large temples with double-columned facades approached by a short staircase, enclosed sacred spaces containing cube-like and open-fronted shrines, and such large-scale engineering projects as dams and...

Red Cloud (Makhpiya-luta, l. 1822-1909) was an Oglala Lakota Sioux chief, statesman, and military strategist who became the only Native American leader of the Plains Indians to win a war against the United States. Red Cloud's War (1866-1868...

Aaron Burr (1756-1836) was an American politician and lawyer, who served as the third vice president of the United States (1801-1805). His reputation as a US Founding Father was marred by his killing of political rival Alexander Hamilton...