Stories
All topics from the Ancient Mediterranean — from gender to magic, literature, and philosophy, this page has stories that look at how ancient people lived, what they thought, and what we know about them.
In this section, stories dealing with the people who lived in Eurasia and Africa from the Early Medieval through the Late Middle Ages are featured. From plagues to art, sex to war, you’ll find Crusaders and raiders.
For over a thousand years, the capital city of Ancient Rome moved to the city of Constantinople. We call this civilization Byzantine but to those who lived through it, they were the Romans.
With the Columbian exchange, the advent of the printing press, and the onset of the Protestant Reformation, lives changed irrevocably, and not just in Europe. It was a world with witches and coffee, pirates and Puritans, and all manner of other strange stories.
It’s a lot to discuss, Africa, Asia and South Asia, but the stories in this section deal with topics as disparate as Buddhist art and Hindu Goddesses, philosophical treatises on war and mathematic discoveries.
This section is so much fun — it’s all of history up until writing was developed. This of course means pre-human history, but also human evolution and early societies that pre-dated writing. Here you’ll find much about biological and even planetary evolution as well.
The subjects in this section are obvious, but I’ve focused on individuals versus trends in women’s history. Most of these women could have belonged in another category, but if you’re looking for stories that focus on the lives of particular women, this section is for you.
Expand your idea of what science here means — it’s not only the stuff we now accept as “correct and proven by the scientific method”. Instead, this section features stories about humans who have endeavored to find natural or material explanations about how the world works. So alchemy doesn’t work, but it’s here along with the folks who developed vaccines.
If it happened from the French Revolution up to today, it’s here. Unless it’s about science or individual women, because then it’s not. Often people think more recent times are less macabre than past ones. This section aims to show that assumption false.
North, South, and Central America before Columbus — from Incan mummies to Aztec atheists, American Indian mounds to recent genetic studies of America’s first emigrants, this section has a lot of variety, just like the earliest peoples.
Yours truly loves to travel, and so this section features items I’ve seen on my journeys, whether in museums, historical sites, or on my many hikes. Much of these stories might belong in other sections as well, but they are here because I’ve taken the photos from these places.
