History

History

Today is Monday, Jan. 26, the 26th day of 2026. There are 339 days left in the year. Today in history: On Jan. 26, 1905, the Cullinan Diamond, at 3,106 carats (621.2 grams) the largest diamond ever found, was discovered in South Africa. Also on this date: In 1887, groundbreaking began for the construction of the Eiffel Tower; the tower would be completed just over two years later. In 1915, President Woodrow Wilson signed the act establishing Rocky Mountain National Park.

1 Lydia of Thyatira is claimed to be the first person in Europe to do what? 2 In what country do mountain lions eat penguins? 3 Single pot still is a style of what drink? 4 Violet, you're turning violet is a line in what book? 5 Whose Easter Sonata was originally attributed to her brother? 6 Which two small UK cities share a name? 7 Who spoke the pitmatic dialect? 8 Which football team won five NASL titles? What links:

Max Weber famously argued that one of the hallmarks of a modern state was a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a defined territory. Within the compass of the law of war, Weber's insights have been associated with the legal tradition of ius ad bellum. This is the concept that governments retained the exclusive authority to declare legitimate war.

The team identified multiple buildings aligned roughly west-east, in several sizes, ranging from about 8 × 7 metres to 14 × 8 metres. Within these structures are rectangular halls-some interpreted as spaces for worship-alongside smaller rooms that may have served devotional or practical functions for the monks. Excavators also noted evidence of plastered wall surfaces and tiled floors, as well as architectural features such as entrances and surviving supports, including beams.

One of the most southerly sites, at the very edge of the alluvial river plain and close to the marshes: the transitional zone between sea and land, with its shifting watercourses, islands and deep reed thickets.

As a writer of political fiction for many years, including four seasons of my TV series Borgen, I find myself in the strangest of landscapes watching Donald Trump desperately wanting Greenland like a spoilt child who has never heard the word no. We dedicated an episode to Greenland in the first season in 2010 and then it became the main setting for the fourth season in 2022.

It should be noted, however, that the advances of Mesopotamia's Early Dynastic period differed from Egypt's in significant ways, notably in that Mesopotamia - even under the rule of Sargon or later empires - was never the cohesive ethnic or political entity Egypt was, and the kinds of cultural development cited for this era were not as uniform as they were in Egypt.

Early migration and Erik the Red The first humans settled in Greenland around 4,500 years ago. They came from the North American continent. In the 12th century, they were gradually displaced by Asian immigrants, the Thule people, who arrived on the island from Siberia via the Bering Strait. Their descendants are the Inuit, from whom most of the 56,000 Greenlanders today are descended.

It was a love letter written by one of the more important British spies of the cold war that made Tom Brass realise he had never fully known his mother. The spy in question was John Cairncross, the alleged fifth man in the Cambridge spy ring, whose spycraft also helped the Soviets win the Battle of Kursk and turn the tide of the second world war.

The only building known to have been designed by Vitruvius himself was found under Piazza Andrea Costa in a preventative archaeology excavation before redevelopment. Unlike the ancient public building found in 2023 which was speculated to be the long-sought basilica, the newly-discovered structure matches the detailed description in Vitruvius' De Architectura. The accuracy with which the remains found coincided with Vitruvian descriptions left experts astonished.

The Last Kingdom (2015-2022) is a historical fiction TV series based on Bernard Cornwell's The Saxon Stories novels and adapted for television by English screenwriter Stephen Butchard. With five seasons, the show began as a BBC production and was later acquired by Netflix. Filmed in Hungary and Wales, it is based on English history during the 9th and 10th centuries, as the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms fought against the invading Vikings.

In the dire months since Donald Trump's return to power, you've no doubt read a version of the famous mea culpa "First They Came"-perhaps woven into the lines of an essay or op-ed, perhaps thumbed out on social media. Part warning, part exhortation, the short text (it's often mistaken for a poem) comes to us as tragically earned wisdom from the rise of the Nazis, alas grimly relevant to the America of today.

Though it's eas­i­ly for­got­ten in our age of air trav­el and instan­ta­neous glob­al com­mu­ni­ca­tion, many a great city is locat­ed where it is because of a riv­er. That holds true every­where from Lon­don to Buenos Aires to Tokyo to New York - and even to Los Ange­les, despite its own once-uncon­trol­lable riv­er hav­ing long since been turned into a much-ridiculed con­crete drainage chan­nel.

A pair of 19th century lacquered bronze and wrought iron andirons designed by architect Edward William Godwin and manufactured by Hart, Son, Peard & Co. have been acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. This is the first time metalwork designed by Godwin has been bought by a museum. The dealer, Paul Shutler of Broadway, Worcestershire, UK, bought them from an antiques center in Connecticut last June. Before being placed on sale there they were in a private collection in the US.

Candidly, most people visiting the British Museum's Hawaii exhibition probably walk in with a lot of stereotypical preconceptions about the island nation. And will walk out with a totally different understanding of it. Understandably, we probably think of it as not much more than the Pacific island nation that's part of the USA, home to Pearl Harbour and the long-running TV show Hawaii 5.0.

The Bulldogs' squad was packed with talent -- seven of the 11 projected starters in an official "game souvenir" (something like a game program in the form of a bound flipbook) from the team's game against Harvard would earn All-American honors at some point in their careers -- but admittedly the sport they played was a far cry from what fans today might recognize.

In the weeks leading up to September 1891, mathematician Georg Cantor prepared an ambush. For years he had sparred - philosophically, mathematically and emotionally - with his formidable rival Leopold Kronecker, one of Germany's most influential mathematicians. Kronecker thought that mathematics should deal only with whole numbers and proofs built from them and therefore rejected Cantor's study of infinity. "God made the integers," Kronecker once said. "All else is the work of man."

This part of London sits just outside the historic City walls, so it attracted traders who wanted to avoid the strict rules binding City merchants. The land was later acquired by Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Cleveland, who developed it, hence the main road being named Wentworth Street. If you're wondering about Ann's Place, that was probably after his wife, Anne Hopton.

A previously unknown drawing by the German Renaissance artist Hans Baldung Grien has been rediscovered in a wooden box belonging to the family of the woman who sat for the portrait 500 years ago. Drawings by Baldung are extremely rare, with only a handful known in private collections. One with a direct-line provenance by descent from the original sitter is an unprecedented find.

Abū Nuwās's poetry is sheer joy: it never fails to delight, surprise, and excite. His diwan, his collected poems, encompasses the principal early Abbasid poetic genres: panegyrics ( madīḥ), renunciant poems ( zuhdiyyāt), lampoons ( hijāʾ), hunting poems ( ṭardiyyāt), wine poems ( khamriyyāt), love poems ( ghazaliyyāt) to males ( mudhakkarāt) and females ( muʾannathāt), and transgressive verse ( mujūn).

The excavation revealed 19 small and medium-sized pits containing bones of different animals, including: short-horned domesticated buffalo, deer, roe deer, wolves, leopards, foxes, serows, wild boars, porcupines, swans, cranes, geese, haws and eagles. What makes it clear that at least a portion of the animals were kept and likely raised in captivity rather than hunted for sacrifice is the discovery of bronze bells worn around several of the animals' necks. Twenty-nine bells were found in 13 of the 19 pits.

This is a book about a book: the small, cropped, somewhat ragged but brightly illustrated volume now known formally, and rather forbiddingly, as British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x/2. The fame and beauty of its four Middle English poems have given it sobriquets beyond the shelfmark, however, which are more familiar and intimate: it is also the Gawain-Manuscript or, as I will call it, the Pearl-Manuscript.

Explore the history of education in the Middle Ages through the development of schools, curriculums, the growth of universities, and the diverse individuals who were involved in teaching and learning during this 1000 years of history. Class begins on Saturday, January 24th. This six-week course includes live 90-minute sessions with Ryder Patzuk-Russell each week from 12:00 to 1:30 pm EST.

On March 10, 1778, Gotthold Frederick Enslin became the first soldier to be tried, convicted, and expelled from the Continental Army for "Infamous Crimes" with another serviceman. Commander in Chief George Washington personally approved the court-martial decision. Whether Washington signed the discharge order because Enslin had been found guilty of intimate relations with a private, or because Enslin had been discovered socializing with someone below his rank, which was equally forbidden and scandalous, or because Enslin had lied about the matter to a superior officer,