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Colonial History
This 1524 map of the Aztec capital was a window into an exotic otherworld — and largely a fiction.
A century ago, an American colony named after Trump's favorite president was thriving on the Isle of Pines. Then came hurricanes and geopolitical reality.
Ernst Stromer discovered Spinosaurus in Egypt. His fossils were destroyed in WWII, yet still shape how we imagine this mysterious dinosaur today.
The plan — conquer China and push west to attack the Ottomans — was peak imperial hubris, as the Spanish themselves eventually realized.
The African Union argues that the Mercator projection distorts the continent, both in size and global attention.
In this excerpt from "Tales of Militant Chemistry," Alice Lovejoy exposes how the need for uranium during WWII led the Allied governments to turn a blind eye to colonial exploitation.
Big Think spoke with historian Marc-William Palen about the egalitarian aims of the free-trade movement in past centuries.
Was the terror of Biscayne Bay a man who escaped slavery, an African chieftain, or a marketing ploy that went viral?
Australian soldiers fighting the Japanese recruited native New Guineans to their campaign.
The global extent of the Revolutionary War surprises many Americans today — but it was crucial to independence.
Does humanity have a moral imperative to seed life on lifeless worlds? And should we avoid colonizing a planet if life already exists there?
Glimpse into the ancient Maya empire through the writing of its own inhabitants.
Queen Calafia seems like she could have sprung from the pages of a modern fantasy novel.
From Aristotle's lazy cosmology to Immanuel Kant's "scientific" racism, great minds are not immune to very bad ideas.
Japan just opened to tourists for the first time since the coronavirus pandemic began, echoing the island country’s isolationist policies during the feudal era.
Time will tell what the reign of Charles III will look like, but one thing is for sure: the “new Elizabethan age” is long gone.
Horses pranced around the western hemisphere until they went extinct in the late Holocene. They were reintroduced by European colonists — though where, when, and how has remained unclear.
This representation of the Bamum kingdom is a rare example of early 20th-century indigenous African cartography.
One hundred years ago, a Ukrainian flag flew over Vladivostok and other parts of the “Russian” Far East.
Since Ukraine originally meant “borderland,” the territory was already a target for several kingdoms.
The early colonists thought they were being pulled by God into a void left by plague.
The decades-long conflict is best understood not through secondhand accounts of historians, but the primary accounts of people who actually experienced it.