While the English were falling apart a little, with their civil war and their restoration and their succession problems, the Dutch were getting their act together. They were throwing off the yoke of the Spanish Empire, uniting their...

Weather isn’t all sunshine and rainbows—sometimes it’s rain, and sometimes that rain looks like blood.

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Written language, the hallmark of human civilization, didn't just suddenly appear one day. Thousands of years before the first fully developed writing systems, our ancestors scrawled geometric signs across the walls of the caves they...

Juana Ramírez de Asbaje sat before a panel of prestigious theologians, jurists, and mathematicians. They had been invited to test Juana's knowledge with the most difficult questions they could muster. But she successfully answered every...

Today, our closest evolutionary relatives, the apes, live only in small pockets of Africa and Asia. But back in the Miocene epoch, apes occupied all of Europe. Why aren't there wild apes in Europe today?

This week on Crash Course Theater, Mike and Yorick take us to beautiful Spain, and look at its Golden Age. Spain was having kind of a moment in the 16th and 17th centuries. They had this big empire, the culture was really flowering, and...

One summer evening in 335 BCE, Alexander the Great was resting by the Danube River when a band of strangers approached his camp. Alexander had never seen anything like these tall, fierce-looking warriors with huge golden neck rings and...

We're still leading up to World War II, but first we gotta talk about the rise of the dictators. Today we talk about the rise of militaristic dictatorships in Germany, the Soviet Union, Japan, and Spain, and the economic depression that...

Around 750-1250 CE, the Islamic empire made incredible scientific advancements that still influence many fields of research today. What we know about some of the great minds of that time, as well as what we’ve learned from modern...

Paul Andersen describes mechanisms that increase the genetic variation within a population. He begins by discussing how horizontal transfer can move genetic material between bacteria. Transformation, transduction, and conjugation in...

Co-ops are a big part of the global economy: they employ 10% of the world's workforce and over two trillion dollars flow through their doors every year. At a co-op, there's no single person with overarching, top-down power over everyone...

The thing about European History is that it tends to leak out of Europe. Europeans haven't been great at staying put in Europe. As human beings do, the people of Europe were very busy traveling around to trade, to spread religion, and in...

European powers had a lot of wars in the 18th century, and they weren't confined to Europe. Conflict raged across the globe, in what might be called a World War...but we don't call it that, because we already have a couple of those...

Get to know Pablo Neruda, one of the most celebrated poets of the 20th century and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. -- A romantic and a revolutionary, Pablo Neruda was one of the most celebrated poets of the 20th century, but...

In which John Green talks about the many revolutions of Latin America in the 19th century. At the beginning of the 1800s, Latin America was firmly under the control of Spain and Portugal. The revolutionary zeal that had recently created...

In which John Green explores how Spain went from being a middling European power to one of the most powerful empires on Earth, thanks to their plunder of the New World in the 16th and 17th centuries. Learn how Spain managed to destroy...

In which John Green explores how Spain went from being a middling European power to one of the most powerful empires on Earth, thanks to their plunder of the New World in the 16th and 17th centuries. Learn how Spain managed to destroy...

Sagrada Familia reaches full height after 144 yearsCredit: Basílica de la Sagrada Família

Dogs rescued onto lifeboat as floods devastate popular tourist destinationCredit: Guardia Civil

"1984" by George Orwell explores the dangers of totalitarianism through the story of Winston Smith in a society controlled by Big Brother. Drawing on Orwell's own experiences in the Spanish Civil War, the novel delves into themes of...

Simon Calder: Entry-exit scheme explainerCredit: The Independent

The Dictator's Story: Francisco Franco's rise to power #documentary

An animated video infographic showing every terrorist attack with more than 20 deaths between 1/12/2000 and 11/13/2015.

The 10 highest scoring nations on the Global Connectivity Index.