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The man known to most of the world as Emperor Hirohito ruled during some of the most tumultuous years in Japanese history. When he came to the throne in 1926, he inherited control of a country which had only recently emerged as a major industrial and world power. Through the aggressive expansion and wars of the 1930s, Hirohito was at the head of one of the world’s foremost powers. Throughout the maelstrom of World War II, he remained in power, a distant and, to most outsiders, inscrutable factor in the rise of the Japanese Empire.

In 1977, two spacecraft were launched from Earth to explore the outer Solar System, and incredibly, the now-ancient technology from the 1970s is still working, sending daily reports back to the planet that sent the two robotic envoys on their way, over 40 years ago. Voyager 1 and 2 have done far more than accomplish their original missions. In fact, they are now exploring interstellar space, far beyond the outer planets, in the cold wasteland between the stars.

Over 450 years after his reign, Henry VIII is still the most famous and recognizable King of England, but it’s for all the wrong reasons. Though well regarded by contemporaries as a learned king and "one of the most charismatic rulers to sit on the English throne", he is best remembered today for his gluttony and multiple marriages. History for Kids: An Illustrated Biography of King Henry VIII chronicles Henry VIII’s life and reign.

The importance of Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus (or as he was known from birth, Gaius Octavius “Octavian” Thurinus) to the course of Western history is hard to overstate. His life, his rise to power, his political, social, and military achievements, all laid the foundations for the creation of an empire which would endure for almost five centuries, and whose traditions, laws, architecture, and art continue to influence much of Europe and the world today.

History for Kids: The Illustrated Life of Queen Elizabeth I chronicles the life and reign of England’s most famous queen, but it also humanizes the woman who ruled one of the world’s most powerful kingdoms in an age dominated by men. Elizabeth inherited her grandfather’s political acumen and her father’s magnificence, thus creating not just one of the most colorful courts in Europe but also one of the most effective governments in English history.

The American occupation of Japan holds a singular and problematic place in the histories both of Japan and of American foreign policy. For the Japanese, the occupation marked the transition from war to peace, from authoritarianism to democracy, and from privation to plenty, making it a passage from one of the darkest chapters in Japanese history to one of the brightest.

One of the most turbulent and romanticized eras in ancient Chinese history is that of the three kingdoms period. During the third century AD in China, warlords battled for supremacy. This turbulent and bloody era is known as the three kingdoms period. It's also one of the most romanticized eras in Chinese history; heroes and villains like Cao Cao, Liu Bei, and Zhuge Liang have served has inspiration for poetry, novels, opera, and song in China.

“Pancho Villa,” people whispered at the beginning of the 20th century, "can march 100 miles without stopping, live 100 days without food, go 100 nights without sleep, and kill 100 men without remorse." The legend of Francisco Villa is full of heroism, tragedy and romance, a story about how a poor farmer boy became a bandit after avenging an injustice on his family and transformed into a military genius who fled from an oppressive government to lead the largest revolutionary army in his country's history.

There is a farm outside La Porte, Indiana, that no longer exists. The buildings burned to the ground on the morning of April 28, 1908, but what the fire left behind was a cellar full of horrors that the people of La Porte and the country at large spent the better part of that spring trying to comprehend. Investigators found the remains of several bodies that had been dismembered, wrapped, and buried with the kind of efficiency that suggested someone had done the work many times before.

Often called the “Father of Geometry,” Euclid’s influence is so pervasive that his book, The Elements, was the primary math manual for over 2,000 years. It was not a “textbook” in the modern sense, as it did not have problem sets, word problems, or diagrams for practice, but it was a foundational reference and logical guide that students had to read, memorize, and demonstrate. In the Western and Islamic worlds, Euclid’s Elements was the standard geometry text for almost every educated person until the 19th century.

At the conclusion of World War I, a once promised unified Arab state, which was to include the modern Hejaz, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine/Israel, Jordan and Iraq, did not materialize. Instead, the territories were divided between the French and British, but the British did reward the Hashemites by putting local leaders on the thrones of Iraq and Jordan....

Despite the enmity towards Carthage held by the Greeks and Romans, they nevertheless spent centuries romanticizing and mythologizing its legendary founder, Queen Dido. It’s an established fact that the Phoenicians established a maritime empire with Tyre at the forefront in the early 1st millennium BCE, and from that, the ancients believed that a Phoenician princess named Elisa fled Tyre to North Africa after her brother killed her husband, where she managed to negotiate with local leaders for land and secure the site of Carthage, becoming Queen Dido in the process.

Herman Webster Mudgett was born in 1861 in a small New Hampshire hill town, and he was dead before he turned 35. In the years between, operating under a name he had constructed to replace his own, he built a hotel in Chicago designed to kill its guests, committed a number of murders whose exact count remains in dispute, and earned the distinction of being among the first Americans to whom the word “serial killer”—a term that did not yet exist in his lifetime—could reasonably be applied.

Amid the upheaval in the Islamic world following Muhammad’s death, the Umayyad Caliphate lasted for less than a century, but it spent that time becoming one of the most influential of the major caliphates. Its official existence was from 661-750, and the rulers were the male members of the Umayyad dynasty, roughly translated from Arabic as the “Sons of Umayyah.” Its primary base of power was in Syria following the creation of a dynastic, hereditary rule headed by one of Syria’s long-lasting governors, Muawiya ibn Abi Sufyan.

Ionia was one of the most important Greek settlements in Anatolia, and it was the home of one of the most influential figures of antiquity, Pythagoras of Samos. Pythagoras studied cosmology, geometry, and astronomy under Thales and his successor Anaximander, and by building on the legacies of their brilliant minds, Pythagoras refined and expanded upon their foundational concepts. However, he also went in a different direction, focusing on mysticism and numbers more than material principles.

At the start of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, the Soviets were so caught by surprise at the start of the attack that the Germans were able to push several hundred miles into Russia across a front that stretched dozens of miles long, reaching the major cities of Leningrad and Sevastopol in just three months. The first major Russian city in their path was Minsk, which fell in only six days. In order to make clear his determination to win at all costs, Stalin had the three men in charge of the troops defending Minsk executed for their failure to hold their position.

The Protestant Reformation is often associated most closely with Martin Luther, and it’s often considered to have started when Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517. However, the Reformation cannot be reduced to a single, abrupt, and exceptional event, but must be traced to a much longer process of spiritual, social, and intellectual transformation that unfolded over the late medieval period.

Though extremely different men in most ways, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Third Reich Fuhrer Adolf Hitler shared a passion for science, technology, and (sometimes impractical) "wonder weapons." In some cases, this fixation paid off handsomely, as in the case of British centrimetric radar, a compact, powerful radar type that enabled fitment to individual aircraft and contributed to the defeat of German U-boats.

Although the Counter-Reformation is sometimes also called the Catholic Reformation, the latter term properly refers to the set of measures of spiritual, theological and liturgical renewal with which the Catholic Church had attempted to reform its institutions even before the Council of Trent. During the Council of Constance, for example, the council fathers had already called for a reform "in the head and in the members", but it was only after the Protestant Reformation that this need became urgent, resulting in the application of the Tridentine conciliar provisions.

The United States has no shortage of famous military units, from the Civil War’s Iron Brigade to the 101st Airborne, but one would be hard pressed to find one that had to go through as many hardships off the field as the Tuskegee Airmen, a group of African American pilots who overcame Jim Crow at home and official segregation in the military to serve their country in the final years of World War II.