Category

History

Stories in this category

• Ludwig II of Bavaria: the fairy-tale King

  Ludwig II of Bavaria, crowned at eighteen, was a king out of his time: he loved art, Wagner’s music, and fairytale castles, despi…

• Pompeii, the eruption that stopped time

  In 79 AD, Vesuvius buried Pompeii under a rain of pumice and ash, erasing in a few hours one of the most prosperous cities of the…

• The man whom death sought twice

  Tsutomu Yamaguchi, a Japanese engineer, was in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, on a business trip, less than three kilometres from t…

• A whisper in the sand: the "curse" of Tutankhamun

  In 1922, in the Valley of the Kings, a group of archaeologists discovers the intact tomb of a young pharaoh: Tutankhamun. The fin…

• The lies that built the Middle Ages

  The Middle Ages have long been portrayed as an era of obscurantism, populated by millenarian terrors, lords claiming the ius prim…

• The book that defeats death: a journey into the Egyptian afterlife

  The Book of the Dead was not a book about death, but a book for living beyond death. The ancient Egyptians called it the "Book fo…

• The enigma of the Chevalier d'Éon: the spy who lived two lives

  Charles d’Éon de Beaumont, an 18th-century French nobleman and spy, lived 49 years as a man, soldier, diplomat, fencing master an…

• The Führer's food tasters

  During World War II, fifteen young women were forced by the SS to become Hitler's food tasters, to protect him from poisoning. Am…

• The causes of the French Revolution: from absolute monarchy to the guillotine

  The French Revolution did not break out suddenly. It was the endpoint of a decline lasting decades, in which the absolute monarch…

• Rasputin, the monk who destroyed an empire

  Grigori Rasputin, an illiterate Siberian peasant, became the most influential advisor to Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna thanks to h…