Tides of History

Much of what we take for granted about the European Middle Ages was a product of the Carolingian dynasty, particularly its most notable member, Charlemagne. But before long, the empire Charlemagne bui...

By the 280s BC, only a few of the men who had ridden the length and breadth of Asia with Alexander were still alive, and the world they had spent decades fighting to make was ready to be born: the Hel...

What was it like to be a soldier during the Thirty Years War? I spoke with Dr. Lucian Staiano-Daniels, author of the upcoming book The War People: A Social History of Common Soldiers during the Era of...

Antigonus the One-Eyed came closer than almost any other figure in the post-Alexander world to recreating the dead king's empire, but his success aroused the ire of the other Successors, and his doom ...

Ancient DNA has transformed our understanding of the more distant reaches of the human past, but what can it tell us about more recent ages of history? Dr. Hannah Moots has extensively investigated th...

As the dust began to settle after Alexander's death, the possibility of one of his relatives truly ruling the dead king's empire grew smaller and smaller. The power lay with the generals, and as they ...

With mountains of treasure, huge armies, and ambitions that no amount of conquest could ever slake, Alexander's Successors spent the next 40 years after the king's death fighting over his inheritance....

The last years of Alexander the Great's reign were a troubled time. The king wanted to keep fighting, but his soldiers were spent after years of campaigning. Then, quite suddenly, the king died, and i...

Professor Fred Naiden wrote one of my favorite books on Alexander the Great - Soldier, Priest, and God - and it provides a much different view of Alexander than the warrior king we so often see in mod...

When we think of the ancient world, we tend to think of just a few societies: Egypt, Mesopotamia, and so on. But the more distant reaches of the past contained multitudes, and Raven Todd DaSilva has w...