| By Gale Staff | Although history is reliant on facts, many misconceptions exist about well-known historical figures. Did George Washington have wooden teeth? Did Einstein fail math? As historians look at the past with a critical eye, they’ve found proof to debunk common myths that evolved over time and are now widely accepted. Myths … Read more
|By J. Robert Parks| December 27 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Louis Pasteur. Pasteur’s contributions, especially in the fields of chemistry and microbiology, are foundational to modern science, and his developments in the areas of vaccines and immunology are particularly relevant today. Gale In Context: World History has a rich collection of … Read more
| By J. Robert Parks | The Kyoto Protocol was adopted 25 years ago this week, on December 11, 1997, as part of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It was a system of regulations and requirements that 154 countries agreed to follow in order to reduce the global emissions of greenhouse gases … Read more
| By J. Robert Parks | Although many people date the rise of Fascism to 1933, when the National Socialist (Nazi) Party took control of Germany, the Fascist Party came to power in Italy more than a decade earlier, when Benito Mussolini and thousands of his followers marched on Rome. The march took place on … Read more
| By J. Robert Parks | On October 18, 1922, the British Broadcasting Company was founded. Known throughout the world as the BBC, it was originally a private company that was granted a monopoly on wireless communication. Of course, in those days, wireless communication had nothing to do with cell phones or texting. Instead, it … Read more
Two hundred years ago this week, on September 11, 1822, the Catholic Church formally removed Galileo Galilei’s writings from its Index of Prohibited Books. Despite the fact that Galileo was a devoted Catholic, the conflict between him and the Catholic Church over the view of the sun, and not the earth, as the center of … Read more
| By Gale Staff | Seventy-five years ago this week, two of the world’s most populous countries, India and Pakistan, gained their independence. The entire Indian subcontinent had been under the colonial rule of Great Britain since the mid-nineteenth century, and Britain finally acceded to India’s and Pakistan’s independence on August 15, 1947 (although Pakistan … Read more
| By J. Robert Parks | Twenty years ago this week, on May 20, 2002, East Timor, also known as Timor-Leste, became the first newly independent nation of the twenty-first century. Gale In Context: World History includes coverage of this milestone and independence movements around the world. Roughly the size of the state of Connecticut, … Read more
| By Gale Staff | From Kyiv to Kharkiv to the seaport town of Odessa, the people of Ukraine are living on a battlefield. Millions of people, their homes, their businesses, their way of life destroyed or abandoned after Putin’s invasion in February 2022. The war in Ukraine began Europe’s first major war in decades, … Read more