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Although the Sumerians continue to get second or even third billing compared to the Babylonians and Assyrians, perhaps because they never built an empire as great as the Assyrians or established a city as enduring and great as Babylon, they were the people who provided the template of civilization that all later Mesopotamians built upon. The Sumerians are credited with being the first people to invent writing, libraries, cities, and schools in, and many would argue that they were the first people to create and do those things anywhere in world.

The Protestant Reformation is often associated most closely with Martin Luther, and it’s often considered to have started when Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517. However, the Reformation cannot be reduced to a single, abrupt, and exceptional event, but must be traced to a much longer process of spiritual, social, and intellectual transformation that unfolded over the late medieval period.

Though extremely different men in most ways, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Third Reich Fuhrer Adolf Hitler shared a passion for science, technology, and (sometimes impractical) "wonder weapons." In some cases, this fixation paid off handsomely, as in the case of British centrimetric radar, a compact, powerful radar type that enabled fitment to individual aircraft and contributed to the defeat of German U-boats.

Although the Counter-Reformation is sometimes also called the Catholic Reformation, the latter term properly refers to the set of measures of spiritual, theological and liturgical renewal with which the Catholic Church had attempted to reform its institutions even before the Council of Trent. During the Council of Constance, for example, the council fathers had already called for a reform "in the head and in the members", but it was only after the Protestant Reformation that this need became urgent, resulting in the application of the Tridentine conciliar provisions.

The United States has no shortage of famous military units, from the Civil War’s Iron Brigade to the 101st Airborne, but one would be hard pressed to find one that had to go through as many hardships off the field as the Tuskegee Airmen, a group of African American pilots who overcame Jim Crow at home and official segregation in the military to serve their country in the final years of World War II.

In virtually all fields of human endeavor, Classical Athens was so much at the forefront of dynamism and innovation that the products of its most brilliant minds remain not only influential but still relevant to this day. To the ancient Greeks, the cosmos was ordered and harmonious. Consequently, reason and intellect were considered the architects of all art and craftsmanship. The absolute perfection of form was sought in everything and the Greek passion for simplicity, elegance, harmony, and beauty is to be found everywhere, particularly in architecture.

Japan's blissful isolation changed with the arrival of American Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853. In awe of the American weapons and ships, the Tokugawa shogunate quickly realized that they needed to evolve and modernize their military to survive, and a time of rapid change descended on Japan. Within a mere 30 years, the Tokugawa period’s great samurai caste was extinct. Military service was no longer the exclusive domain of the privileged warrior class who had combined the military with an intricate network of social status and vassalship to their feudal lords.

In southern Iraq, a crushing silence hangs over the dunes. For nearly 5,000 years, the sands of the Iraqi desert have held the remains of the oldest known civilization: the Sumerians. When American archaeologists discovered a collection of cuneiform tablets in Iraq in the late 19th century, they were confronted with a language and a people who were at the time only scarcely known to even the most knowledgeable scholars of ancient Mesopotamia.

Robert Smalls’ life illustrates what can happen when one is freed from the fetters of others’ estimations. Smalls’ metamorphosis from slave to ship pilot to U.S. Congressman displays the power of fiery determination and unrelenting ambition. News of Smalls’ incredible exploit made it all the way up to Lincoln, who eventually met him and asked why he would dare such a thing. Smalls replied with only one word: ‘Freedom.

The modern world has the ancient Romans to thank for the origins of many modern technologies, conveniences, and ideas, from running water, baths, and republican style government to roads. Similarly, by the 3rd century BCE, the Romans were prodigious monument builders, so much so that the memory of the great Roman Republic and the Roman Empire continues to exist within a cityscape of stone.

As one of the most influential and recognizable religious figures in history, Martin Luther continues to impact the world over 550 years after his death. Luther was a German priest and theologian whose writings and teachings sparked the Protestant Reformation in the early 16th century, creating one of the greatest schisms in the history of the Catholic Church and touching off religious turmoil and bloodshed that would engulf Europe for the next 2 centuries.

The ability to remain and travel underwater for an extended period of time has long been a dream for a good portion of mankind, perhaps second only to that of flying. The first “submersible” may have been a kind of glass container made for Alexander the Great so that he could observe undersea life firsthand. Despite this early attempt, fate decreed the idea of traveling beneath the surface of the water would lie fallow for nearly another 2,000 years after this experiment in about 332 B. C. Alexander’s death the next year effectively squashed any further developments.

In the wake of the Civil War, African Americans attained freedom from chattel slavery, but continued to suffer discrimination both legal in the form of Jim Crow laws and de facto in the continued perception among the vast majority of white Americans that African Americans were at the very least inferior and at the most a constant dangerous presence in their communities who must be carefully controlled.

Africa may have given rise to the first human beings, and Egypt probably gave rise to the first great civilizations, which continue to fascinate modern societies across the globe nearly 5,000 years later. From the Library and Lighthouse of Alexandria to the Great Pyramid at Giza, the ancient Egyptians produced several wonders of the world, revolutionized architecture and construction, created some of the world’s first systems of mathematics and medicine, and established language and art that spread across the known world.

An often overlooked, yet very important, environmental process in world history is known as the “Late Antique Little Ice Age,” which took place during the 6th century A.D. across most of the Northern Hemisphere and received its name because it was shorter and less well-known than the Little Ice Age, which took place from the 16th-19th centuries.

The Harlem Hellfighters, also known as the 369th Infantry Regiment of the U. S. Army, embody a significant intersection of America’s military history and racial history. Initially raised as the 15th New York (Colored) National Guard and later federalized for World War I, the regiment was "loaned" to the French Army, where it compiled an extraordinary combat record, with a remarkable 191 days on the line and suffering about 1,400 casualties while never yielding its sector (Morrow & Sammons, 2014, pp. 3–6; Harris, 2003, pp. 233–235).

For more than half a century, the names J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were synonymous with epic fantasy. Thanks to his classics, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Tolkien both revived interest in fantasy literature and set the standard for the genre, and today he is widely acknowledged as the “father” of modern fantasy.

In the 50 years following the First Crusade, the Latin states in the East were consolidated, but there were also growing tensions and new challenges. Against this backdrop, the fall of the County of Edessa in December 1144 at the hands of Zengi, the atabeg of Aleppo and Mosul, was a catastrophic event. Founded in 1098 by the future King Baldwin of Boulogne, Edessa was the first Crusader state, as well as the northernmost, weakest, and least populated.

Of the many campaigns during the Middle Ages, few are as remarkable or seemingly impossible to win at the start as the First Crusade (1095-99), and the true crowning achievement of that crusade, which resulted in two centuries of Western European Christian states in the Middle East and the permanent firing of the European imagination, was the conquest of Jerusalem on July 15, 1099 after three weeks of siege.

It was Constantine the Great who first decided that Rome, exposed and vulnerable near the gathering masses of barbarians moving into Germania and Gaul in the early 4th century, was a strategically unsafe base for the empire, and thus expanded the city of New Rome on the Dardanelles straits, creating what eventually became Constantinople.