“Imagine the Crimea is yours,” wrote the Russian statesman Grigory Potemkin to his imperial mistress Catherine II late in the…
Deep within the recesses of Krakow’s Czartoryski Museum, amidst priceless antiquities and artworks, resides a cabinet of historical curiosities unlike…
DRAWN IN PALE BROWN INK on two skins of soft vellum, the Gough Map, kept in Oxford’s Bodleian Library, presents…
In the spring of 1991, as the reborn Croatian state emerged from the rubble of the collapsed edifice of post-Tito…
It is tempting to think of Russia in terms of historical continuity, with a red thread of autocracy, coterminous with…
Some time during the fourth century before Christ, according to the historian Sallust, the ancient Mediterranean city-states of Carthage and…
By dint of its roughhewn landscape, kaleidoscopic diversity, and considerable strategic value, the Caucasus is forever destined to exist in…
In the spring of 1890, the West African kingdom of Dahomey and the French Third Republic were on the brink…
On the morning of July 17, 2010, the residents of the French commune of Saint-Aignan awoke to the sound of…
The Italian island of Lampedusa, situated between Malta and the Maghreban shore, resembles a seagirt stone finger pointing west towards…
