Showing results by author "Kelly Mass" in All Categories

This is a bundle of biographies of scientists and inventors that have paved the way for the technology and society we enjoy today. Their genius ideas and out-of-the-box thinking have been inspiring and courageous, to say the least.

Perhaps you have heard about Gilgamesh, or perhaps you know what he was but would like to know more about him. Gilgamesh was an age-old Mesopotamian hero and the lead character of the Impressive of Gilgamesh, a legendary poem written in Akkadian throughout the late 2nd millennium BC. He could have been a posthumously deified historic emperor of the Sumerian city-state of Uruk. Gilgamesh's famous deeds are stated in five Sumerian poems that have endured.

Even before World War II, there was a genocide. We are talking about the Armenian deportations that killed between one and two million innocent civilians, an atrocity the Turkish government still doesn’t fully acknowledge. At the time of World War I, the Armenian genocide led to the organized death of around one million ethnic Armenians. The Ottoman Empire was collapsing, and in a cruel act of desperation and vengeance, they decided to take out their empirical frustrations on the Armenians. It became one of the ugliest faces of the First World War in history.

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 an extensive guide to the world of Egyptian mythology. Both cultural background and historical events will help you understand the way the ancient Egyptians lived and the things they believed.

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 Hittites were mentioned in the Bible. They were an Anatolian people that contributed to creating a kingdom in Kussara before 1750 BC, the Kanesh or Nesha kingdom between 1750 and 1650 BC, and finally an empire based upon Hattusa in north-central Anatolia around 1650 BC. Under uppiluliuma I, the empire reached its peak in the mid-14th century BC, when it ruled over much of Anatolia and areas of the northern Levant and Upper Mesopotamia.

The Sumerians were the people from Sumer, the first recognized society in the historic area of southern Mesopotamia (now southern Iraq), developed throughout the 6th and 5th centuries BC throughout the Chalcolithic and early Bronze Ages. In addition to age-old Egypt, the Caral-Supe culture, the Indus Valley civilization, the Minoan civilization, and age-old China, it is also one of the world's early civilizations. Sumerian farmers who lived along the Tigris and Euphrates valleys grew a great deal of grain and other items.

From 768 to 800, Charlemagne, also referred to as Charles the Great, was king of the Franks, king of the Lombards, and emperor of the Romans. Charlemagne combined many Western and main Europe at the time of the Early Middle Ages. Since the fall of the Western Roman Empire three centuries before, he was the first acknowledged emperor to rule from Western Europe. The Carolingian Empire is the name given to Charlemagne's broadening Frankish world. Antipope Paschal the Third later canonized him.

Oliver Cromwell was an English army and statesman who led Parliamentary armies against King Charles I throughout the English Civil War. Why was he so hated by so many? And is this image of him historically correct? The reason why people thought he was so evil is because of his brutality against the Irish at that time. Several Irish and English scholars agree that Cromwell was too cruel in Ireland. Other academics accuse him of "ethnic cleansing", or the systematic expulsion of a certain ethnic population from a territory. Is this true? And why did he do this?

Mother Mary Teresa Bojaxhiu, typically referred to as Saint Teresa of Calcutta in the Catholic Church, was an Albanian-Indian Roman Catholic nun and missionary. She was born in Skopje (today the capital of North Macedonia), which was then part of the Ottoman Empire's Kosovo Vilayet. After 18 years in Skopje, she went to Ireland and ultimately to India, where she spent the remainder of her life. Teresa formed the Missionaries of Charity in the year 1950, a Roman Catholic spiritual order with about 4,500 nuns active in about 133 nations in the year 2012.

Emiliano Zapata Salazar was a revolutionary in Mexico. He was a key figure in the Mexican Revolt of the years 1910 until 1920, and also the primary leader of the people's revolution in the Mexican state of Morelos and the creator of the Zapatismo agrarian movement.

Catherine of Siena (who lived from March 25, in 1347 to April 29, in the year 1380), a Dominican laywoman, was a mystic, activist, and writer who impacted Italian literature and the Catholic Church significantly. She was canonized in 1461 and is a medical professional of the Church.

There is no doubt that Michelangelo is one of the most influential artists of all time, together with some other Renaissance geniuses, such as Leonardo and Rafael. Michelangelo had a vision, a dream, and the talent to carry out those imaginations. His life, in our perspective, is a compilation of great works of art, architecture, sculptures, paintings, and intricate movements, contrast, colors, and anatomy of the human body. Religious and thematic symbolism are intertwined in his frescos and structures. Let us learn more about this great artist.

Conquistadores (or Conquistadors) were the Spanish and Portuguese conquerors who invaded parts of the world that hadn’t been discovered by the Europeans before the 16th century. Some were incentivized by greed, lust, and dominance, which caused them to pillage, steal, and enslave the indigenous people they encountered. In this audiobook, you will learn more about one infamous sadist in particular: Francisco Pizarro, who abused and attacked the Peruvian peoples, acted as an inquisitor for the Catholic Church, and inflicted physical and psychological wounds on his subjects.

Initially diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and after a separation of his parents, Edmund Kemper already showed his twisted mind at 15 years old, when he murdered both his grandparents, who were taking care of him. Whether through nature or nurture, this man didn’t show a promising future from the get-go. But perhaps nobody could have suspected the horrors he would inflict on his many victims later in his life.

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.

This is a combo book with various topics represented. The Native American tribes are the center of this book’s focus. The tribes are: Apache, Cherokee, Comanche, Eskimo, Pawnee, and Sioux. You will learn about various historical happenings that shaped the future of the these tribes and their destination.

This audiobook consists of six topics, all selected to describe some of the worst atrocities of mankind: Genocides, mass rapes, abuse, mutilation, and murder.

During the Spanish inquisition, being called a heretic, a witch, or a sinner meant business. It could mean the end of your life. And so, it is with a tragic view on the past that we see countless innocent victims being accused of something they never did, with no bad intentions or rebellious behavior, and nonetheless being executed in brutal manners. One of the proponents of this system, and an active executioner, was Thomas de Torquemada, a completely insane, cruel man who had become notorious for his methods of hunting down and taking out supposed anti-church offenders.