General Franco & the Spanish Civil War

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The Ebro is a major river in Spain. It flows from the mountains to the lowlands and empties into the Mediterranean Sea, passing quiet farms and vineyards on the way.

Vietnam and the Cold War

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The Vietnam war has been the subject of literally hundreds of movies, documentaries, TV series and books; but, why were Americans fighting on the other side of the world? To make sense of the war, we need to go back in time and understand a little of the global politics after the Second World War and more about Vietnam's long history.

European Anti- Semitism: The Dreyfus Affair

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Since Jews first started coming to the continent about fifteen hundred years ago, the relationship with Christian Europe has never been an easy one. The conflict between the European wish to see everyone assimilate and the Jewish need to maintain a separate identity could only lead to trouble and everywhere they went the Jews found themselves, sooner or later, unwelcome. Though the Jews had entered Europe from both East and West, the vast majority of Europe’s Jews lived in the East, in countries like Poland, Ukraine or Lithuania, either in separate inner city areas called ‘ghettos’ or in Jewish-only villages often called ‘stetls’.

The Earth – Inside and Out

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It was Isaac Newton who, in 1700, calculated the average density of the Earth, using his Theory of Gravity. He was surprised to find that it was more than double the density of rocks on the surface of our planet. It followed naturally that the inside had to be much denser than the outside and, possibly, that the Earth became progressively denser as one got nearer the centre. Newton hypothesised that the centre was made of very heavy metals which sank to the centre of the Earth through the force of gravity

The Earth Moves – Tectonic Plates & Continental Drift

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In 1908, an amateur American geologist named Frank Bursley Taylor thought – rightly – that continents moved and their crashing together could have pushed up the world’s mountains. He noticed that some continents were shaped very similarly to others so that, for example, South America might have been fitted to Africa like a jigsaw puzzle, and so on. He did not produce much evidence though and the theory was considered too crazy for serious attention.

Ageing the Earth

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At the very end of the 18th century – in 1797, to be precise – in Edinburgh, capital of Scotland, James Hutton was dying. This was bad news for Hutton, of course, but good news for geology as it cleared the way for a man named John Playfair to re-write Hutton’s classic work without embarrassing the great scientist who had done so much to advance human understanding of Earth sciences.

English – A Language Created by Borrowing from Others

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The history of the English language is also the history of the British Isles, as different invaders arrived for a thousand years between the decades before the birth of Christ and the last conquest of England in 1066. In the eleven hundred years between, the Romans brought Latin, tribes called the Angles, Jutes and Saxons carried with them their Germanic language, the Vikings used Old Norse from Scandinavia, and another Viking whose family had long settled in France, William the Conqueror, beat the last of the Saxon kings on the south coast of England in 1066 and introduced French as the language of the court, government and the law.

Ancient Greece – Birthplace of Western Civilisation

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Greece is in the south-eastern corner of Europe, almost split in two between its northern and southern halves. It is a country of very different landscapes: mountains, snow-covered in winter, and sun-baked beaches, as well as hundreds – literally hundreds – of islands to its east, west and south. For all these geographical reasons, Greece was not an easy country for a single king to rule in 800 BC, around the time that the story of the Greeks begins. In fact, it was made up of many city-states, often with very different political systems, ways of living and cultures. Of course, this also meant that there was a much greater probability of war between them, until Alexander became king in 337 BC and united the country behind him – by force.

Rome: Kingdom, Republic and Empire

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Rome was built, according to legend, by twins Romulus (whose name became the city’s) and Remus in 753 BC. They were the grandsons of a deposed king. His replacement, thinking they would take revenge when they were old enough, ordered the twins to be drowned. Luckily, they were saved by a she-wolf which raised them with her own cubs. In adulthood, they gave their grandfather back his crown and murdered the new king, before moving away to establish their own city. However, the twins could not agree on the best place to build it and Romulus fought his brother, Remus, and killed him.