On the morning of 30 July 1929, a man carrying a small axe entered the upper terrace of the Sri Maha Bodhi in Anuradhapura and struck one of its principal branches several
A great-grandson of Benito Mussolini has sparked controversy in Italy by defending the legacy of the fascist dictator in a new book, claiming that the regime was “not so bad” and that
MoreArchaeologists have uncovered compelling evidence that the first humans to inhabit the High Arctic were not merely surviving at the edge of the world, but actively transforming it. Newly discovered archaeological sites
MoreIn an age when corporate lifespans are often measured in quarters rather than centuries, Japan stands apart. Scattered across the archipelago are businesses that trace their origins back more than a thousand
MoreIn the final weeks before her death in August 1997, Diana, Princess of Wales, did something almost unheard of for a senior royal. She spoke openly, on the record, to a foreign
MoreFrom the moment a visitor stands at the foot of Sigiriya and looks up at its mist-veiled summit, a strange quiet seems to press down on the landscape. The sheer granite monolith,
MoreA Nigerian court has ordered the British government to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation to the descendants of unarmed civilians killed during a colonial-era massacre, in a ruling described
MoreFor decades, the Iran–Iraq War has been remembered as a brutal, ideologically charged conflict between two regional rivals that bled each other dry from 1980 to 1988. Nearly a million people were
MoreOne needs a huge audacity and imagination to write a political satire, as it can always be a double-edged sword. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and George Orwell’s famous Animal Farm are examples
Moreby Eric Tobias Straumann’s Out of Hitler’s Shadow is a book that sets out, with cool archival confidence and quiet provocation, to dismantle one of the most comfortable moral myths of postwar
Moreby Luxman Brooke N. Newman’s The Crown’s Silence is a book that does not merely revise British history; it indicts it. Written with the precision of an archival historian and the moral
MoreIn the midst of the Cold War’s early years, Soviet scientists quietly explored an engineering idea so vast it bordered on science fiction: sealing off the Bering Strait with a colossal dam
MoreFor generations, La Malinche occupied a singularly dark place in Mexico’s national imagination. Her name became shorthand for treason, her story a cautionary tale of Indigenous betrayal during the Spanish conquest. As
Moreby Eric “This is a violation of the given word and an act against the rights of man and international morality.”“No ruler, no matter how exalted, stood above the will of the
MoreIn the decades before the storming of the Bastille, France did not simply move toward revolution because of bad harvests, economic collapse, or the glaring inequality between Versailles and the starving streets
MoreWe descended into Chibichibi Cave in southern Okinawa with the heavy feeling that this was not a site of distant history, but a warning. The cave is low enough that you have
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