Résultats de "Charles River Editors" dans Toutes les catégories

What made 1939 the watershed year was the release of several critically acclaimed movies, including The Wizard of Oz and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. But the most famous of the bunch, and perhaps the most famous movie of all, is Gone With the Wind, and one of the most remarkable aspects of the film is that the quintessential Southern belle was played by Vivien Leigh, a British actress still relatively unknown in Hollywood.

North America is full of natural wonders, but few inspire as much awe as Niagara Falls, the continent's most famous waterfalls. Comprised of three separate waterfalls (Horseshoe Falls, American Falls, and Bridal Veil Falls), Niagara's falls can boast the fastest flow rate in the world, dropping six million cubic feet of water every minute from as high as 185 feet. Situated on the border between the United States and Canada, Niagara Falls is not just a prime tourist spot but a source of hydroelectric power.

Thanks to Dan Brown's best-selling novel turned blockbuster mega-hit, The Da Vinci Code, in which audiences were introduced to Silas, the villainous, self-whipping monk, corporal mortification is now a term most often associated with Opus Dei. A creepy, deranged, and blood-thirsty albino monk, Silas is most remembered for viciously whipping himself with a nail-embedded cilice. For added suspense, various falsehoods of the real-life order have been propagated by the literary masterpiece; in fact, the character of Silas contains one of the foremost bloopers, as there were never any monks in the order.

The vast expanses of southern Russia and the Ukraine provided the Eastern Front arena where the armies of Third Reich dictator Adolf Hitler and Soviet dictator Josef Stalin wrestled lethally for supremacy in 1943. Endless rolling plains - ideal "tank country" - vast forests, sprawling cities, and enormous tracts of agricultural land formed the environment over which millions of men and thousands of the era's most formidable military vehicles fought for their respective overlords and ideologies.

Every great nation or empire has had at least one horrific military loss or disaster in their history, and the Roman Empire, perhaps the greatest empire that ever existed in the Western world, was no exception to this rule. While Rome certainly suffered defeats and outright massacres over the course of its long and storied history, none of them were as disturbing for the Empire as the battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 CE.

Pergamon reached the height of its power during the Hellenistic period, becoming the capital of the Attalid kings, which ruled during the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE. During the Roman period, the city was the first capital of the Asian province, but it ultimately lost this status to its local rival, Ephesus. Thanks to its royalty-decreed monopoly on parchment fabrication (“pergamon” in the Ancient Greek language) and tissues and its transnational commercial activity, the city became an important multicultural center for the entire empire.

Mary Magdalene is one of the most talked about figures in modern Christianity, a woman who mainstream media and modern sensibilities can hold with more conviction. The media, press, movie industry, and airport literature have been obsessed with this redhead for more than 100 years, a fascination that reached its climax in the first decade of this century and does not seem likely to end anytime soon. Mary Magdalene is frequently depicted as young and attractive, liberated and intelligent, a symbol of a freer spirituality, and not controlled by a male-dominated church. In the minds of many, she embodies opposition to a system dominated by old men in white cassocks, the "sacred feminine."

In a world fascinated by men like Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan is one of history’s greatest and most famous conquerors. No man, before or since, has ever started with so little and gone on to achieve so much.

In Britain, state broadcasting began at 18:00 on November 22, 1922 when Arthur Burrows, the Director of Programmes at the newly formed British Broadcasting Company, announced, “This is 2LO, Marconi House, London calling”. “London calling” became a key phrase used in broadcasts by the BBC. When the service began, most listeners were hobbyists who had their own radio receivers. In 1922, around 30,000 people in the UK had radio receiver licenses.

Fidel Castro is one of the most influential and controversial men of the last 50 years, equally revered and reviled by people across the globe. To the West, Castro has long been one of the prominent faces of Communism, and the main reason Cuba has been ostracized by many liberal democracies, particularly the United States. On the other hand, Castro has been admired by those who despised capitalism, and despite the fact the political platform Castro advocated has been almost universally repudiated and only maintains a weak hold even in Cuba.

The fighting in North Africa during World War II is commonly overlooked, aside from the famous battle at El Alamein that pitted the British under General Bernard Montgomery against the legendary "Desert Fox", Erwin Rommel. But while the Second Battle of El Alamein would be the pivotal action in North Africa, the conflict in North Africa began all the way back in the summer of 1940, when Italian dictator Benito Mussolini declared Italy’s entrance into the war, seeing an opportunity for Italy to enlarge its colonial holdings in Africa by seizing portions of the British Empire.

Moses Ben Maimon, frequently called Maimonides, was a medieval philosopher who revolutionized thinking about ethics, reason, and the Jewish Torah through his emphasis on reason and evidence. His works were broadly accepted by the Sephardi Jewish community and spread across the medieval world. St. Thomas Aquinas is known as one of the most important medieval philosophers and in many respects a harbinger of the Renaissance that began to flourish across Europe in the centuries that followed his life.

The Birth of the Republic of Ireland: The History of Ireland’s Split from the British Empire in the Early 20th Century analyzes the tumultuous events that marked Irish history during the early 20th century. You will learn about Ireland in the early 20th century like never before.

Uranium is best known for the destructive power of the atom bombs, which ushered in the nuclear era at the end of World War II, but given the effectiveness of nuclear power, nuclear power plants were constructed around the developed world during the second half of the 20th century. While nuclear power plants were previously not an option and thus opened the door to new, more efficient, and more affordable forms of energy for domestic consumption, the use of nuclear energy understandably unnerved people living during the Cold War and amid ongoing nuclear detonations.

While people still romanticize the Wild West, many Americans are still all too familiar with the fate of the Donner Party, a group of 87-90 people that met with disaster in the Sierra Nevada mountain range during the winter of 1846-1847. The party knew the journey would take months, but early snowfalls in the mountains left dozens of people trapped in snow drifts that measured several feet, stranding them in a manner that made it virtually impossible for them to go any further for several weeks.

The Japanese had to deal with large numbers of Filipino and American soldiers who had surrendered after a lengthy defense in the Bataan peninsula, but they were not prepared for so many prisoners of war because their own military philosophy emphasized rigid discipline and fighting until the end. They could not imagine a situation in which Japanese soldiers would willingly surrender, so they assumed that no other combatants would do so either.

Many important figures in Israeli history played a part in the establishment of the new state, and among the most iconic is the nation’s first female premier, Golda Meir. Known as the “uncrowned queen of Israel” and “Mother Courage”, Meir was an activist for many years, lobbying for a Jewish state in the Mandate of Palestine. She served in numerous capacities before her appointment as prime minister and remains one of the most revered Israeli leaders from the pre-state years through the long-sought dream of a Jewish nation.

The United Nations is one of the most famous bodies in the world, and its predecessor, the League of Nations, might be equally notorious. In fact, President Woodrow Wilson's pet project was controversial from nearly the minute it was conceived. At the end of World War I, Wilson's pleas at the Paris Peace Conference relied on his 14 Points, which included the establishment of a League of Nations.

Gunsmiths in early 19th-century America were helped along by noted artisans from Germany, Switzerland, and other European powers, but despite advances made in the European and American musket, the requirement of an exterior spark and percussion to ignite powder for a single-shot discharge remained the paradigm. Similarly, the era was unable to move past the cumbersome weapon that required at least half a minute to reload. The military compensation for such an ungainly and vulnerable process was the alternation of troop lines, in which one fired while the other reloaded from behind.

While Moby Dick remains a staple among students, Melville was actually inspired by a true story: the shipwreck of the whaleship Essex in 1820. While it was always dangerous to work on a whaleship, the Essex was the first known American ship to be badly damaged by a massive sperm whale's attack, and though whales would sink other ships in the ensuing decades, the entire ordeal encountered by the crew made headlines when the survivors were rescued.