Blog Archives

Vikings in North America: The Norse Discovery of the New World

Vikings in North America Although they often do not receive their due accolades, the Vikings were actually the first Europeans to cross the Atlantic Ocean and discover and explore North America – almost 500 years before Christopher Columbus. The Viking sagas have long told of their journeys westwards across from their Greenland colonies around 1000 CE […]

Discover West Africa: Ghana, Togo, Benin, and more

The Story of West Africa West Africa consists of the modern nations of Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Côte d’Ivoire, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo. Across the region is a story of resilience, complexity, and extraordinary cultural richness. Long before European ships arrived on its […]

Bhutan the Hidden Kingdom: The Definitive Guide for Travellers

Bhutan: a journey into the Hidden Kingdom Bhutan, a tiny and remote nation nestled within the Himalayas, has been described as a real-life Shangri-La. It is famed for its Buddhist spirituality, pristine mountain landscape, and for measuring national growth in terms of happiness. Isolated from the outside world until the 1960s, Bhutan is gradually opening […]

Discovering Croatia’s History

Croatia’s long history and natural beauty lure tourists from all over the world. Croatia has a very long history. Human presence in the country dating back to the middle-Palaeolithic (50,000 BC) has been recorded in the 19th century with the discovery of “Krapina Man”. Around 1200 BC, Indo-European tribes, collectively called the Illyrians after the […]

Fez, Morocco

Fez is the oldest city in Morocco, located in the northern part of the country on the banks of the Wadi Fez. The old town was originally composed of two fortified quarters divided by the river.

Istanbul, Imperial City: The Definitive Guide

Istanbul, Imperial City | Small Group History Tours Turkey For more than a thousand years, Constantinople stood as the capital of the Byzantine Empire, surviving numerous attacks and internal rebellions, until the cannons of the Ottoman Empire breached its walls. Constantinople, the bastion of Christianity, was renamed Istanbul, “the city of Islam”. It became the starting […]

From Cairo to the NAC: Egypt Builds a New Capital City

From Cairo to the NAC: Egypt Builds a New Capital City On July 11, 2018 Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi laid the first stone of what was to become Egypt’s new capital. The city is so new it still does not have a name. Currently called the New Administrative Capital or NAC, the area covers […]

The Jerash Ruins (Gerasa), Jordan

Jerash in northern Jordan is noted for its well-preserved Roman ruins, one of the largest in the world.

The Roman Ruins of Volubilis: Morocco’s Lost Imperial City

The Roman Ruins of Volubilis: Morocco’s Lost Imperial City Hidden in the fertile foothills of Morocco’s Zerhoun mountains lie the Roman ruins of Volubilis, one of the best-preserved ancient cities in Africa. Once a thriving frontier outpost of the Roman Empire, its excavated streets, mosaics, and triumphal arch reveal a fusion of Berber, Punic, Greek […]

Medieval British Village Life: The Definitive Guide for Seniors

Life in the Medieval British Village In a previous article, we looked at the icons of the British village–the pub and the cottage–and looked at their history and evolution from Roman and Norman times. In this article we will look at daily life in the British village during the medieval period–or the period spanning the […]

Assisi, Italy

Lying amid Umbria’s rolling plains is the city of Assisi, best known as the birthplace of Saint Francis, Italy’s patron saint and founder of the Franciscan order.

Atlantic Triangular Slave Trade

Atlantic Triangular Slave Trade Somewhere between ten million and twelve million enslaved Africans were transported across the Atlantic to the Americas between the middle of fifteenth century and the end of the nineteenth. The largest long-distance forced movement of people in recorded history, it occurred within a broader system of trade between Europe, Africa, and […]

Zakopane, Poland

Zakopane Zakopane is a beautiful resort town on the edge of the Tatra Mountains in Southern Poland famed for skiing during the winter months and mountain climbing and hiking in summer. Visitors are treated to a stretching Alpine-like landscape, a rich wildlife, a vivid cultural heritage of Polish mountaineers, unique architecture and delicious Zakopane style […]

Poznan, Poland

The History and Attractions of Poznan Poznan city lies on the Warta River in west-central Poland, in the Greater Poland region, halfway between Warsaw and Berlin. The birthplace of the Polish state in the 10th century, the city has long since been a place of political, economic, cultural and academic importance keeping its status for […]

From Anatolia to the Ottoman Empire: A History of Turkey

From Anatolia to the Ottoman Empire: A History of Turkey For six centuries, the Ottoman Empire ruled from the gates of Vienna to the deserts of Arabia, absorbing the older civilisations of Anatolia — the Hittites, Greeks, Persians, Romans, Byzantines and Seljuks — into one of history’s most enduring superpowers. Its palaces, mosques and battlefields […]

Krakow, Poland

The History of Krakow Krakow, traditionally known as Cracow, is the second largest and one of the oldest cities in Poland. Lying on both sides of the upper Vistula River in Southern Poland, the city has a long history dating back to the 8th century as a centre of Polish academic, economic, and cultural life. […]

British Neoclassical Architecture & Decorative Arts

Neoclassicism Neoclassicism was a Western cultural movement in the 18th-19th centuries inspired by the art and culture of classical antiquity (Greece in the 8th to 4th Centuries BCE and Rome in the 5th to 1st Centuries BCE). The movement was most prominent in architecture and the visual arts, but also expressed itself in literature, theatre, […]

Althing, the world’s longest running parliament is in Iceland

The Althing In the Thingvellir valley, in the southwest of Iceland, the world’s longest running national parliament first assembled over 1000 years ago. Known as the Althing (Icelandic: Alþingi), the parliament was founded as an outdoor assembly in 930, uniting the various Viking chieftaincies of Iceland and establishing justice, order, and a rule of law. […]

The Dazzling Aten, Egypt

Discovered in late 2020 underneath the sands of the west bank of the Nile is the remains of a lost ancient Egyptian city, known as The Dazzling Aten, or Aten for short. Uncovered near the modern-day city of Luxor, home of the Valley of the Kings, the large city is close by to several other monuments. To the north is King Amenhotep III’s 14th-centurye BCE mortuary temple and the Colossi of Memnon, and to the south is Medinet Habu, a mortuary temple built almost two centuries later for King Ramses III.

18th Century London

London in the 18th Century The 18th century was a period of unimaginable change in England. The century witnessed not only the early stirrings of the Industrial Revolution, after the industrious revolution, but also a consumer revolution in which a new form of society emerged based on the mass consumption of a variety of goods […]

A History of Ukraine Since World War Two

the Soviets prioritized heavy industry, particularly in preparation for conflict with the capitalist West, which the Kremlin believed was imminent. By 1950, Soviet Ukraine had surpassed pre-war levels of industry and production, becoming the centre of Soviet arms industry and high-tech research. Over the course of the cold war, the republic would serve as a Soviet military, its territory crowded by military bases packed with the most up-to-date weapons systems.

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