Vampire by Edvard Munch (1893). • WIKIMEDIA COMMONS During the 18th and 19th century, an epidemic of vampirism spreads in Europe. As Rousseau stated in 1762:“If there is any attested history in the world, it is that of vampires; nothing is missing; minutes, certificates from notables, surgeons,
Mercury thermometers (an invention of Daniel Fahrenheit in 1714) • WIKIMEDIA COMMONS At the beginning of the XVIIth century, Santorio Santorio was one of the great names in Italian medicine. During his youth, he began by settling in Croatia, then in Venice to practice medicine, which he then tau
The Wolverine by Georg Emanuel Opiz (1804) • WIKIMEDIA COMMONS An image of opulence and sensuality In the Middle Ages, when the specter of hunger hung over the overwhelming majority of the population, a plump body conveyed an image of opulence and sensuality, while a emaciated body denoted dise
Paper money first appeared in China in the 7th century. This post is from the Ming dynasty • WIKIMEDIA COMMONS Like so many other inventions, paper money finds its origin in China, where it has been used since the IXe century. Europeans discovered its existence three centuries later, thanks to t
Anonymous portrait of Fernand de Magellan, 16th or 17th century, Mariners Museum, Newport News (Virginia) • WIKIMEDIA COMMONS In the spring of 1518, Fernand de Magellan, Portuguese hidalgo, concluded an agreement with the young king of Spain Charles Ist to lead a commercial expedition to the oth
Las Meninas, painted around 1656 by Diego Velazquez • WIKIMEDIA COMMONS In 1656, Diego Vélasquez completed the gigantic canvas, 3.18 m high and 2.76 m wide, which we now know under the title Las Meninas . The painter probably began it in the fall of 1655, the correlation of shadows and light ent
In the eyes of many, Nicolas Machiavelli is the author of Prince . Nothing more. The universal echo of this political essay has earned him a detestable reputation. According to the Robert dictionary , a Machiavellian person uses trickery, bad faith, does not keep his promises, to achieve his ends.
It is not known how Vlad III died. He fell at the end of 1476 during a fight against the Turks, perhaps betrayed by one of his trusted men, a Turk bought by Mehmed II, who would have beheaded him with a sword stroke. Her embalmed head was sent to the sultan. According to tradition, Vlad is buried in
In 1842 a Russian manuscript titled Povest’o Drakule was found in Saint Petersburg. , work of Fyodor Kuritsyn, who was the ambassador of Ivan III the Great, Grand Prince of Moscow, to Mathias Corvin from 1482 to 1485. Twenty-two manuscript copies of this text were made up to the XVIIIe century. Whil
This portrait of Vlad Tepes, Prince of Wallachia, is a copy of an original painted during his lifetime. Ambras Castle, Austria • WIKIMEDIA COMMONS Dracula, Prince of Darkness, Lord of the Undead! This mythical character was born in 1897 from the fertile imagination of Bram Stoker. But behind the
The best known of the Founding Fathers are George Washington, Commander-in-Chief of the United States Army during the Revolutionary War and first President of the United States (1789-1797); Benjamin Franklin, negotiator of the 1778 treaty of alliance with France and member of the committee in charge
In France, the American Revolutionary War is known as the “American War”. If the American colonists fought against Great Britain from April 1775, France did not officially enter the conflict until February 1778, with the signing of a treaty of alliance, and did not send troops only in the summer of
In the 17th -XVIIIe centuries, much of America was French. French colonial history in North America begins in 1603, when Samuel de Champlain stayed at the confluence of the Saguenay and the St. Lawrence and established a Franco-Amerindian alliance, which made possible a lasting settlement of the Fre
The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers in America. By Antonio Gisbert Perez. 1886. Senate of Spain, Madrid • WIKIMEDIA COMMONS “A ship, the Mayflower; a date, 1620; a holiday, Thanksgiving; […] a utopia, the “city on the hill”; heroes, the Pilgrim Fathers . Here are the ingredients of the mythical b
Son of a candle merchant, Benjamin Franklin was born in 1706 in Boston, Massachusetts; he is the youngest of a family of 17 children. In 1723, he settled as a printer in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 1727, he created a reading and discussion club, the Junto, and in 1731 founded the first library in
The threat comes first from the continent. If they have adopted the culture of the Chinese world, the Koreans have never accepted its political control. With each attempt at occupation, they rose up, as in the summer of 612, when north of Pyongyang General Eulji Mundeok crushed the immense army disp
In the middle of the Korean War, a young girl carrying her little brother on her back flees on a road where an American tank is driving. Photograph taken June 9, 1951 by Major R.V. Spencer • WIKIMEDIA COMONS According to a Korean proverb, “when the whales snort, the shrimp have their backs broke
After the capture of the Nasrid capital on January 2, 1492, Boabdil, the deposed sultan, came to hand over the keys of Granada to the Catholic Kings, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile. The episode, which marks the end of the Reconquista, is represented here by Francisco Pradilla. 1882. Pal
Turgot the liberal From 1761 to her coming to power in 1774, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot worked, as intendant of Limousin, to modernize one of the most deprived regions of the kingdom. In August 1774, the appointment of this encyclopaedist, precursor of liberalism, to the post of Comptroller General
In France under the Ancien Régime, the Estates General of the kingdom was an assembly that brought together the three orders of society (also called the three estates), that is to say the clergy, the nobility and the third estate (or third state). The States General are therefore the emanation of th
The Chauvet Cave houses the oldest known human artistic productions, dating from the Paleolithic and with complex painting techniques. By Me. Tales PintoThere are 425 animal figures, mainly 65 rhinos, 74 lions and 66 mammoths, engraved on the walls and stalactites of the walls of the Chauvet Cave.
Barely a month after the start of World War II the British embassy in Oslo received a mysterious unsigned letter offering information detailed information on the state-of-the-art weapons that Germany was developing. That sowed confusion in the secret services because it did not come from any known
This fabulous animal knew in the North a fortune comparable to that which was his in the East, without it being possible to explain exactly why. In any case, this monster appears almost everywhere, not only in the myths, but also in the representations apparently unrelated to it:thus, a good number
One of the first movies that Penelope Cruz made in Hollywood was Captain Corellis Mandolin , a loose adaptation of the novel by the British writer Louis de Bernieres. In it she played (although she was nominated for the Razzie Award for Worst Actress) the role of a young Greek woman from Kefalonia