28 articles found
Denver's 16th Street Mall: The History Behind Colorado's Most Famous Boulevard
Walk the length of Denver's 16th Street Mall today and you'll pass chain restaurants, hotel lobbies, coffee shops, street performers, and the constant swoosh of free mall ride buses. It's pleasant and busy — Denver's version of a downtown promenade. ...
Why Is Puerto Rico Part of the USA? The Full Story
When you arrive at Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport in San Juan, you do not clear customs or immigration. The currency is the US dollar. Signs are in English and Spanish. Police drive Ford Explorers with lights and sirens identical to those in ...
Bryggen: Bergen's UNESCO World Heritage Hanseatic Waterfront
The row of pointed gables lining Bergen's eastern harbour — red, yellow, ochre, and weathered brown — is one of the most recognised skylines in Scandinavia. Bryggen (simply "the wharf" in Norwegian) was for four centuries the most important node in n...
Oslo's Viking Ship Museum: The World's Best-Preserved Viking Vessels
On the Bygdøy peninsula — Oslo's museum quarter — stands a cross-shaped building of modest exterior and extraordinary interior. The Viking Ship Museum (Vikingskipshuset) holds what is beyond reasonable argument the finest collection of original Vikin...
Viking Age Norway: History, Myths, and Where to Experience It Today
The Viking Age — broadly defined as the period from the first recorded Norse raid (Lindisfarne Monastery, 793 AD) to the Battle of Hastings (1066 AD) — transformed medieval Europe and established Norse seafarers as the most wide-ranging explorers of ...
Who Are the Greek People? Ancient Roots and the Question of Continuity
The question "Are modern Greeks the same people as the ancient Greeks?" has been asked — and answered differently — by Byzantine theologians, Ottoman administrators, 19th-century European Romantics, German philologists, Greek nationalists, and modern...
Why Is Greece Called Greece? The Story Behind the Name
If you ask a Greek person what they call their country, they will say Hellas (Ελλάς or Ελλάδα). They call themselves Hellenes (Έλληνες). The Greek language is Helleniki. Greece, in the eyes of the Greeks, has always been and remains Hellas. So where...
Gdańsk: Where World War II Started — and One of Poland's Greatest Cities
At 4:45am on 1 September 1939, the German warship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on the Polish military transit depot at Westerplatte, on the outskirts of Gdańsk. The 182 Polish defenders held for seven days against overwhelming German force. It was ...
Warsaw: The City That Refused to Die — History and What to See
No major European capital suffered more in the Second World War than Warsaw. By January 1945, when Soviet troops entered the city, it was a sea of rubble — 85% of its buildings destroyed, its entire pre-war population of 1.3 million expelled or kille...
Angel Falls and the Tepuis: Venezuela's Natural Wonders Explained
In the Gran Sabana region of southeastern Venezuela, flat-topped mountains called tepuis rise like islands above the surrounding forest — some reaching 3,000 metres, their cliff faces vertical and unbroken, their summits isolated for so long that evo...
Machu Picchu and the Inca Empire: History, Mysteries, and How to Visit
Nearly 600 years after its construction and 113 years after its re-introduction to the outside world by Hiram Bingham, Machu Picchu remains unexplained in ways that continue to fascinate. Not unexplained in the tabloid sense — the Inca built it, prob...
The Galápagos Islands: Darwin, Evolution, and One of the World's Great Wildlife Encounters
In September 1835, a 26-year-old naturalist named Charles Darwin stepped ashore on the Galápagos Islands and began making observations that would, over the following decades, reshape humanity's understanding of life on Earth. Nearly 200 years later, ...