For generations, both Asians and Europeans have thought of the Silk Road has been thought of as a highway connecting east to west. But what if both Asians and Europeans have gotten the whole point of the Silk Road wrong.

Ὦ ξεῖν', ἀγγέλλειν Λακεδαιμονίοις ὅτι τῇδε κείμεθα, τοῖς κείνων ῥήμασι πειθόμενοι. - Stranger, tell the Lacedaemonians that we lie here, obedient to their words So read, Herodotus tells us, an engraving on a memorial commemorating the Spartans who ...

In 1321 Dante Alighieri died in the city of Ravenna, near the shores of the Adriatic. In the years since his perpetual exile from his native Florence, he had lived in a variety of places in Italy. Now he was at rest.

When Alexander of Macedonia took the throne of his father Philip, he inherited an expansive and wealthy kingdom; a hardened and meticulously constructed army; and a cadre of aristocrats and nobles who were used to victory, and wanted more of it.

Each year tens of thousands of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints visit sites across the United States, like the recreated town of Nauvoo on the Mississippi River, or to "This is the Place" Heritage Park,

In Xanadu, Kublai Khan had a leopard. Well, it wasn’t a leopard really, it was a cheetah. And upon that fact, and upon many other anecdotes and material objects, Timothy Brook builds a bridge that connects the history of China to the history of the wor...

In 415 BC, Athens sent a fleet of over 100 ships and 5,000 hoplites to attack the city of Syracuse, in Sicily, an expedition that would result in catastrophe. The philosopher Plato writing decades later described a drinks party,

“Medieval Mediterranean slavery”  is a phrase that might seem a bit puzzling to some listeners—surely there wasn’t slavery in the medieval Mediterrean? Was there? - Indeed there was. For hundreds of years a slave trade existed throughout the Medieval ...

In the history of ancient Greece, three cities dominated its politics, society, and culture. Of these, Athens and Sparta are now best known. But set in the plains of central Greece was the third apex of this “fateful triangle”, the city of Thebes.

In 1763, James Boswell was accompanied by his new friend Samuel Johnson to Harwich, from which the young Scot then travelled to Utrecht in the Netherlands. There he was supposed to study law, which he did with great energy.