Group items tagged

When Homer was born, the Greeks had just recently learned how to use the alphabet from the Phoenicians. Homer used the alphabet to write down two long epic poems called the Iliad and the Odyssey. Probably Homer didn't make up these stories, or even the words, himself. Poets or bards had been going around Greece telling these stories for hundreds of years already. But Homer wrote them down, and gave them their final form.

This forest is the last and greatest of Earth's wildernesses. It stretches from the furthest tip of Russia's arctic regions as far south as Mongolia, and east from the Urals to the Pacific: five million square miles of nothingness, with a population, outside a handful of towns, that amounts to only a few thousand people.

iberia is the source of most of Russia's oil and mineral resources, and, over the years, even its most distant parts have been overflown by oil prospectors and surveyors on their way to backwoods camps where the work of extracting wealth is carried on.

summer of 1978

While medieval country marriages were often the result of love, marriage among the noble class was more a business transaction than the culmination of ardent feelings

Courtly love became the subject of some of the most famous medieval poems, and where we get today's word, "Courtesy."

Passion was considered sinful to 11th and 12th century moralists, but these ideals were slowly being worn away with the rituals of courtly love.

The earliest Greek civilizations thrived nearly 4,000 years ago. The Ancient Greeks lived in Greece and the countries that we now call Bulgaria and Turkey.

Between 1339 and 1351 AD, a pandemic of plague traveled from China to Europe, known in Western history as The Black Death

The Black Death was actually a combination of three different types of plague: bubonic, pneumonic, and septicaemic, with bubonic being the most common

The initial symptom is a blackish pustule forming over the point of the bite, followed by swollen lymph nodes near that bite.

The Latin word sacramentum means "a sign of the sacred." The seven sacraments are ceremonies that point to what is sacred, significant and important for Christians. They are special occasions for experiencing God's saving presence.

For Catholics, the Sacrament of Baptism is the first step in a lifelong journey of commitment and discipleship. Whether we are baptized as infants or adults, Baptism is the Church's way of celebrating and enacting the embrace of God

Catholics believe the Eucharist, or Communion, is both a sacrifice and a meal. We believe in the real presence of Jesus, who died for our sins. As we receive Christ's Body and Blood, we also are nourished spiritually and brought closer to God.

  Slavery, or involuntary subjection to another or others, existed in every ancient civilization, such as Sumer, Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, parts of the Roman Empire, and so on. People were enslaved for various reasons, including slave raiding, sale of insolvent debtors and capture in war; slaves commonly were recognized as property, assets that could be bought and sold. In the Chinese empire (c. 211 BCE - 1912 CE), slavery existed throughout all dynasties, although numerous aspects of slavery did not remain the same. The word "slave" itself changed many times, nubi () in the Han period, yinke () in Jin, booi aha () under Manchu rule, and so on. The function and position of slaves in Chinese economy shifted several times as well.             This paper will briefly describe the initiation of slavery before Imperial China, and proceed to analyze several aspects about slavery in each dynasty of the Chinese Empire; I will discuss the changing definition of a slave, how slaves became slaves, abolition of slavery and ways to gain freedom, and the degree of dependence or power slaves held in society. The paper is organized in chronological order, but details of slavery in several dynasties existing before Ming and Qing can be scarce due to the lack of attention slaves received prior to Manchu rule.

Cold War

fueled by the arms race and the growing threat of nuclear weapons, wide-ranging espionage and counter-espionage between the two countries, war in Korea and a clash of words and ideas carried out in the media.

Space exploration served as another dramatic arena for Cold War competition. On October 4, 1957, a Soviet R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile launched Sputnik

Did you know that 600 years ago people used to make copies of books by writing each page by hand? It would take months to make one book! Johannes Gutenberg changed that. He invented the printing press