Showing results by author "Kelly Mass" in All Categories

Leon Trotsky was a Ukrainian-Russian Marxist revolutionary, political thinker, and political leader who lived from November 7, 1879 to August 21, 1940. He developed a variation of Marxism referred to as Trotskyism after being a communist ideologically. After the Tsarist monarchy was toppled in the February Revolution of 1917, Trotsky went back to Russia and signed up with the Bolshevik faction as a leader. He was a popular figure in the November 1917 October Revolution, which deposed the new Provisional Federal government, as head of the Petrograd Soviet.

The Dutch East India Company, officially the United East India Company (Dutch: Vereenigde Oost Indische Compagnie; VOC), was a megacorporation created in the early 17th century by a government-directed merger of many competing Dutch trade services. You might think that Amazon or Google is big, but the VOC is still thought to be the world's biggest corporation in documented history.

This is a great package of several titles in one book. The topics are all related to the history of the Netherlands. 

The war between the Protestant Netherlands, mostly led by William of Orange, and Catholic Spain was one of the marks in Dutch history. This war had determined the beliefs of many people who now lived along the three rivers that went through the country. Most of the people north of the rivers were Protestant, and most of the believers below them (even throughout Belgium as well) were Catholic. This was no coincidence. The war in the 1600s had become a symbol of Dutch resistance, independence, and the royal family (of Orange).

The Yugoslavian genocide is hard to explain. So many factors have contributed to the war—and eventually, the genocide in Bosnia—that many UN soldiers didn’t even know what to do about it. A lack of response, though, made the problem worse. A combination of historical aspects, such as the division of religion, the world wars, the Iron Curtain, and the fall of the Soviet Union, were part of what led to a conflict that lasted for years in this sensitive region in Europe.

The Crimean War was an army war between Russia and an alliance of France, the Ottoman Empire, the UK, and Sardinia that lasted from October 1853 to February 1856. The rights of the Christian minority in Palestine, which became part of the Ottoman Empire, were the immediate reason for the war. Longer-term elements included the Ottoman Empire's fall, the Russian Empire's development at the time of the preceding Russo-Turkish Wars, and the British and French desire to safeguard the Ottoman Empire to maintain the Concert of Europe's balance of power. 

Perhaps you have heard of the horrible stories of the Spanish, Portuguese, or French inquisition, the Catholic body of persecutors who would arrest the supposed “heathens” and accuse them of witchcraft, heresies, blasphemy, adultery, and a whole list of other sins or crimes. Torture, interrogations, executions, burnings, and other inhumane methods were used to then force, coerce, or kill the victims of this Catholic organization within the church at the time.

This may just be your lucky day, since you are looking at the bundle of six different books that comprise stories of mythology and historical facts about several fascinating ancient societies. These are the titles: African Mythology, Celtic Mythology, Egyptian Mythology, Greek Mythology, Indian Mythology, Viking Mythology.

There are doers and there are preachers. The people who were executing orders or abusing people in World War Two wouldn’t have been able to commit any atrocities if the country hadn’t warmed up to an inhumane narrative. That’s where propaganda came in. Propaganda has long been part of various countries and societies to make the population believe something, and to find culprits, create feelings of animosity, and glorify local leaders or military campaigns.

Mary I, typically called Mary Tudor and called "Bloody Mary" by her Protestant challengers, ruled as Queen of England and Ireland from July 1553 to November 17, 1558. She is well remembered for her attempts to reverse the English Reformation. During her five-year rule, Mary had more than 280 spiritual dissenters burnt at the stake in the Marian persecutions. You might justify it by saying she may not have been much worse than other dictators and royalty around that time, but the fact of the matter is still that she murdered hundreds of people for religious and political reasons.

The Netherlands had a great century in the 1600s, until it all ended about three-fourths of the way along. Trading was all around; business was good. Their vast empire that reached across the world made money from spices, raw materials, metals, and so much more, with an extensive network of ships and merchants, and an entire army fleet. The Dutch Golden Era was a time in Dutch history varying from about 1588 (the start of the Dutch Republic) to 1672 (the "Catastrophe Year"), throughout which Dutch trade, science, and art, and the Dutch armed force, were amongst the world's best.

You may have heard of Lourdes, a town in France where millions of people go every year, either as a tourist to take pictures or see what the hype is all about, or real believers who think that the town has a sanctity to it and can somehow cure them, help them, or inspire them through divine means. Whatever the reason for the many visitors is, it is undeniably an interesting historical heritage, something worth exploring. To be precise, Lourdes is a small market town nestled in the Pyrenees' foothills.

In this guide to Celtic Mythology, several stories are not only outlined, but narrated elaborately. Others are quickly mentioned, and some historical background about the Celts, Irish, and Scottish is provided to set the stage. Overall, a fantastic guide to both be entertained and informed. Get started now!

From 1845 to 1852, the Great Hunger, also referred to as the "Potato Famine", was a period of a lot of starvation and illness in Ireland. The period was known in Irish at the time as a "Drochshaol"—loosely translated as "the hard days", or actually "the bad life"—with the most badly affected districts in the west and south of Ireland, where the Irish language was popular. The year 1847, at times called "Black '47", was the absolute worst year of the period. Around one million people died, and over a million left the nation throughout the Great Famine.

Florence was a major center of middle ages European trade and banking, and also one of the most affluent cities in the world at the time. A lot of academics believe it was the beginning of the Renaissance, and it has been called "The Athens of the Middle Ages". Periods of supremacy by the strong Medici family, and also several spiritual and republican transformations, have marked the nation's unpredictable political history. The city was the capital of the Kingdom of Italy from 1865 to 1871 (developed in 1861).

Naples (or, in Italian, Napoli) is the local capital of Campania and Italy's third-largest city, after Rome and Milan, with a population of 967,069 people living within the city's administrative limits since 2017. With a population of 3,115,320 people, its province-level town is Italy's third-most inhabited urbane city, and its city periods for around twenty miles outside the city walls. Naples, established by Greeks in the first millennium BC, is just one of the world's oldest constantly occupied cities.

Many of us don’t know much about mythological stories from these regions, and it is my pleasure and privilege to educate you on the intricate details that lie within them. That’s why I have also provided some fascinating facts and historical background about each of these peoples. Creation myths, legacies, the sacrificing of children, the empires, and their wars are all mentioned and touched on in this book. 

Not too many people realize that the story of Dracula was based on a really sadistic ruler in Romania. Vlad the Impaler, or Vlad the Third, was a merciless despot who tried to make an example out of his opponents by impaling them and displaying them in public. He also enjoyed bathing in dead people’s blood and did some other gross, inhumane things. He was the terror of Eastern Europe for many years.

This is a combo of eight biographies contained in one book: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Hannibal Barca, Napoleon Bonaparte, Suleiman the Magnificent, Vlad the Impaler, and William the Conqueror. Get this great deal now.

St. Petersburg's structures lie over the skeletons of the press-ganged servant workers who worked to build it, giving it the label "the city built on bones". Historians approximate that 100,000 18th-century serfs are buried underneath the city's stunning Italianate estates and large Parisian-style streets. They were drawn from all around the Russian Empire at the time. They dedicated their lives for the magnificence of Imperial Russia, and the city they built, St. Petersburg, stands as a testament to the Russian state's single-mindedness.