Charles River Editors

On November 29, 1943, as the Allies’ primary leaders met in Tehran, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt described to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin his idea for the organization that would become the United Nations.

Worship of the Feathered Serpent can be traced back 2,000 years, and the Serpent’s cults appear all across Mesoamerica. The Olmec, the Aztec, and both the Yucatec and K’iche Mayans all had different names for this deity, including Kukulkan, Q’uq’umatz, and Tohil....

Otherwise known as the “Roma” or by their popular misnomer “the gypsies”, the members of this highly undervalued and grossly misrepresented community have long been considered outcasts....

The Pleistocene Era: The History of the Ice Age and the Dawn of Modern Humans looks at the development of the era, what life on Earth was like, and the origins of archaic humans....

Theologian and reformer John Wycliffe never had the opportunity to take his doctrines outside of his native England, but he could never have imagined that his teachings would one day travel as far as 920 miles east to Bohemia....

After the siege of Boston forced the British to evacuate that city in March 1776, Continental Army commander George Washington suspected that the British would move by sea to New York City....

Few consider the question of whether the Old Testament is "complete" and whether in antiquity there were other books besides "Genesis", the "Exodus" or "Judges", with different histories and unknown characters, that were excluded from the canon and got lost in the sands of time....

The long agony of the “sick man of Europe”, an expression used by the tsar of Russia to depict the falling Ottoman Empire, could almost blind people to its incredible power and history....

The Boy Scouts: The History and Legacy of the World's Most Popular Youth Organization chronicles the history of the organization, and how it came to be so famous....

Cosa Nostra: The Notorious History and Legacy of the Sicilian Mafia examines how the world’s most famous mob formed, its inner workings, and the events that made it feared around the world....

To say Edith Stein lived a remarkable life would be a dramatic understatement. Born in Breslau (then part of Germany) at the end of the 19th century, Edith was raised as an observant jew, only to turn her back on religion right around the time World War I devastated the continent....

Since the early days of human warfare, which may date back to the Stone Age, combatants have sought to gain an advantage through the acquisition of secret information. With the growth of technology, a parallel advantage was sought through the application of numerous types of torture....

While actors like Humphrey Bogart and Cary Grant remain household names, and actresses like Greta Garbo are still widely remembered, few had careers that enjoyed the success of William Powell....

El estudio de los evangelios apócrifos - relatos de la vida o dichos de Jesús que no entraron al Nuevo Testamento - es una disciplina popular entre los académicos que llena ya varios estantes de cualquier biblioteca respetable....

Although the city had been destroyed, the legacy of the Persians survived, even as they mostly remain an enigma to the West and are not nearly as well understood as the Greeks, Romans, or Egyptians....

For nearly a thousand years following its foundation, there was only one Christian church. Centered in the city of Rome, the church expanded and grew until it became the dominant religion in Europe and beyond....

Native American Tribes: The History and Culture of the Blackfeet and Blackfoot Confederacy comprehensively covers the history and legacy of one of the Great Plains’ most famous Native American groups....

"The golden age of piracy" generally refers to the era when history's most famous pirates roamed the seas of the West Indies from 1670-1720....

Ancient Greece and its mythology has fascinated people for thousands of years, and few elements have intrigued people quite like the Eleusinian Mysteries....

The OSS and CIA: The History of America’s Intelligence Community during World War II and the Establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency looks at the agencies’ organizational characteristics, historical inception, early Cold War growth, and recent influence....