The Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan is often credited as being the first person to have circumnavigated the globe, but the reality of his journey is a bit more complicated. More

Depending on how you calculate things, several different states can lay claim to producing the most commanders in chief. Going by birthplace, Virginia is the winner, with eight of its native sons More

Theodore Roosevelt was the first commander in chief to travel outside the U.S. on official business, when he sailed to Panama in November 1906. Roosevelt made the trip in order to inspect the More

From the Middle Ages to the late 17th-century, the so-called “philosopher’s stone” was the most sought-after goal in the world of alchemy, the medieval ancestor of chemistry. According to More

October 8, 1871 is best known as the start date of the Great Chicago Fire, which leveled three square miles of property and claimed 300 lives. Yet the very same night the Windy City went up in More

As with the wheel, cities and law codes, the earliest examples of written literature appear to have originated in ancient Mesopotamia. The Sumerian civilization first developed writing around 3400 More

The Allies’ war aims changed over the course of the conflict in response to military and diplomatic developments and to pressure from the United States to make them clear as a basis for negotiating More

The fate of Musa bin Nusair and Muhammed bin Qasim is a lesson of historical importance. With the ascension of Muawiya, legitimacy of rule was no longer by consent of the masses; it was by force. More

The conquest of Sindh brought Islamic civilization face to face with the ancient Vedic civilization of the Indo-Gangetic Plains. In later centuries, there was much that Muslim scholarship would learn More

Hajjaj bin Yusuf Saqafi was the Omayyad governor of Iraq. When reports reached him of this incident, he wrote to Raja Dahir demanding that the captives be released and the responsible pirates More

The conquest of Sindh, located in today’s Pakistan, happened in stages. During the Caliphate of Omar ibn al Khattab (r), Muslim armies approached the coast of Makran, but Omar (r) withdrew the More

At the time of the American Revolutionary War, ‘Canada’ was not a single country but regions, two of the most powerful of which were Nova Scotia and former French colony of Quebec. More

On 16 September 1620, a merchant ship, the Mayflower, sailed from England and made its way to the New World. More

The Forbidden City, the Great Wall, fabulous ceramics: the Ming is how we see historic China. The Ming came out of the shock of Mongol occupation and the civil wars of the 1350s. More

Michael Wood has spent much of the last two years in China filming a BBC series on the nation’s tumultuous history. Here he explores the country’s six great eras to reveal what has made its More

By 1917, the British had made three different agreements with three different groups promising three different political futures for the Arab world. The Arabs insisted they still get their Arab More

Before the Arab Revolt could even begin and before Sharif Hussein could create his Arab kingdom, the British and French had other plans. In the winter of 1915-1916, two diplomats, Sir Mark Sykes of More

100 years ago, most Arabs were part of the Ottoman Empire/Caliphate, a large multi-ethnic state based in Istanbul. Today, a political map of the Arab world looks like a very complex jigsaw puzzle. More

Atatürk knew these secular reforms would be futile if the Turkish people could manage to rally together to oppose them. The biggest danger to this new order was the history of the Turks, which since More

At first, the new Turkish government seemed to inherit the role of the Ottoman government as the upholder of Islam. A new constitution drawn up by the GNA declared that Islam was the official state More

The evolution of Turkey in the early 1900s is one of the most baffling cultural and social changes in Islamic history. In a few short years, the Ottoman Empire was brought down from within, stripped More

In the 1500s, when King Henry VIII became fascinated by his Arthurian heritage, such ancient ideas began to spring up again. This has ensured that the legend of King Arthur lies at the heart of the More

Britain probably obtained its first turkeys from the Spanish, who had brought the birds back to Europe after encountering them in the Aztec empire. However it’s possible that they were introduced More

The notoriety of this prince travelled far and wide until a well known shaikh in far away Shiraz in ancient Persia heard . “I must reform this prince before he squanders all his wealth on pomp and More