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In 25 c.e., Liu Xiu, who received the posthumous title Guang Wudi (shining martial emperor), ascended the throne as the first ruler of the restored Han Dynasty, known as the Eastern, or Later, Han (25-220 c.e.), after the brief interregnum of Wang Mang and his Xin Dynasty (Hsin; 9-23 c.e.). Chinese civilization extended back to the third millennium b.c.e. but was first unified by Shi Huangdi (Shih Huang-ti; 259-210 b.c.e.), who established the Qin Dynasty in 221 b.c.e. It quickly disintegrated after Qin’s death, to be followed by the Han Dynasty under Liu Bang (Liu P’ang; posthumous title Gaodi, r. 206-195 b.c.e.). The era of the Western, or Former, Han, was a glorious period in China’s history, with the Han Empire encompassing much of modern China and extending far into Central Asia. However, internal dynastic quarrels and a series of weak and irresponsible rulers enabled Wang Mang to proclaim himself emperor of the Xin Dynasty.

The Lodī Dynasty was the last of the Delhi sultanates, which were originally established in 1192-1193 with the victory of military leader Muhammad of Ghor (d. 1206) over the Hindu Rājputs at the Battle of Tarain. Muhammad of Ghor was from Ghazni in modern Afghanistan, and most of the subsequent Delhi sultanate dynasties, including the Lodīs, were of Afghan origin. The sultans, or rulers, of the several sultanates were all Muslims, and conflicts were frequent between Muslim invaders and India’s majority Hindu population.

In 1861, William Morris and six partners established what would become the most famous decorating and design company in late nineteenth century England. Originally known as Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, & Co., and later as Morris & Co., the firm had an influence that spread to both the European continent and North America. The partners, who described themselves as “Fine Art Workmen in Painting, Carving, Furniture, and the Metals,” promised to provide for the needs of those interested in the well-designed and crafted decorative arts.

English poet. Often described as a “Georgian” poet and admired for his loving descriptions of the rural English landscape, Edmund Blunden was also a noted poet of World War I, the contemporary of Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, and Isaac Rosenberg. His Undertones of War is one of the great literary memoirs of the Great War. Blunden was also a scholar, particularly of the Romantic poets, Charles Lamb, and Thomas Hardy, a teacher and tutor of English literature in Oxford, Japan, and Hong Kong and a long-serving journalist, reviewer, and editor.

American journalist and historian. Claude Gernade Bowers (BOW-urz) was a journalist, political commentator, historian, and diplomat. His formal education ended when he graduated from public high school, and after a brief flirtation with the law he began his journalism career as an editorial writer for the Indianapolis Sentinel. Bowers, an avowed and partisan Democrat, twice ran for the Congress but was defeated on both occasions. After serving as a secretary to an Indiana senator during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, he returned to Indiana and journalism in 1917 as the editor of the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette. Beginning in 1923, Bowers wrote editorials for the New York Evening World for several years before becoming a political columnist for the New York Journal from 1931 to 1933.

"Dragons" begins with Pierre Chaigne, a widowed carpenter in a small French village, constructing a four-sided lantern, including three wooden pieces to be inserted into the lantern to block out the light except for a single direction. Narrated in the third person, the story is presented through the thoughts and actions of Pierre.

French politician. Léon Gambetta (gahm-BEHT-ah) was born in southern France, where his Italian grandfather had settled his family in 1818. There the Gambettas became shopkeepers. In 1837, Gambetta’s father, Joseph, married Marie Magdeleine Massabie, the daughter of a local chemist; Gambetta’s family, on both sides, might best be described as lower middle class. Gambetta’s father wished him to follow in the family business, but in 1857 Gambetta went to Paris to study law. He had long been an opponent of the Second Empire of Napoleon III, and during the 1860’s he began to write and speak against the regime. He made his mark during that decade in his defense of various individuals accused of political crimes against the empire. In 1869, he was elected to the French Legislative Assembly, representing the southern city of Marseilles though he had also been victorious in the working-class Parisian district of Belleville. Though young, he was already a recognized leader of the opposition.

President (1848–1852) and emperor (r. 1852–1870) of France. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte was born in Paris in 1808. His father, also Louis Napoleon, was a younger brother of the French emperor Napoleon I . His mother, Hortense, was the daughter of the emperor’s first wife, Joséphine, from an earlier marriage. The marriage of Louis Napoleon and Hortense was not a success, and rumors persisted regarding their child’s paternity. After Napoleon I’s final defeat at Waterloo and exile to St. Helena, all the Bonapartes were forced out of France. Hortense, having separated from her husband, settled in Switzerland, where Louis Napoleon was educated to the dual heritage of the French Revolution and the imperialism of Napoleon I. Both traditions formed his character.

Pole Vaulter. The son of Dutch immigrants, Cornelius Anthony Warmerdam was born in Long Beach, California, on June 22, 1915. While still a young child, Cornelius, with his family, moved to a farm near Hanford in California’s San Joaquin Valley. As a senior at Hanford High School, Cornelius pole-vaulted 12 feet 3 inches, placing third in the state. In 1933, a traveling salesman observed him vaulting 13 feet in a spinach field and recommended him to the track coach at nearby Fresno State College, later known as the California State University, Fresno. The coach there convinced Cornelius to enroll at Fresno State, where, after he graduated in 1938, he became a teacher.

Pope (1049-1054). Leo IX was born Bruno of Egisheim, son of Hugo, count of Egisheim. The family was related to Conrad II, the Holy Roman Emperor. His parents were very religious, and Bruno was destined from an early age to enter the Church. The higher offices in the Church were generally reserved for members of aristocratic families, and Bruno was educated at a school for upper-class boys in Toul, an establishment noted for its atmosphere of piety and its reforming sympathies. After his schooling, he served as a deputy to Herman, the bishop of Toul, and led the military vassals of the bishop into battle alongside the emperor (a common action by members of the clergy in that strife-torn era). Herman died in 1026, and Bruno was chosen as the new bishop of Toul, although he was only in his mid-twenties and might instead have had a successful secular career serving the emperor. Toul was a poor diocese and not an obvious choice for an ambitious cleric. Bruno was consecrated bishop in 1027.

In 1881, Otto von Bismarck, chancellor of Imperial Germany since its formation in 1871, introduced into the German Reichstag, or parliament, the Accident Insurance Bill, which aimed to provide pensions for laborers who were injured while working in the nation’s most dangerous industries. During the next several years, Bismarck’s leadership led to the passage of several such insurance laws, together constituting the first comprehensive social welfare measures to be adopted in the industrial world.

Between November 15, 1884, and February, 1885, representatives of all the European imperial powers met in Berlin in what was the first major colonial conference of the modern era. The conference seemingly resolved various contentious issues among several European nations that arose from their competing imperial ambitions and relationships in Africa. Fourteen nations were represented, including the United States. However, the major participants were France , Germany, Great Britain, and Portugal, as well as the International Association of the Congo, a private entry created by the Belgian king, Leopold II . Leopold himself did not attend the conference, but he would prove to be its primary beneficiary. However, the conference itself was something of an anticlimax because many crucial decisions had been made before it even opened. In any case, many of the decisions that the conference did make were soon superseded by subsequent events.

The development of the semiarid Southwest was aided by the construction of numerous large dams, such as Arizona’s Roosevelt Dam, completed in 1911. In 1922, two California congressmen, Senator Hiram Warren Johnson and Representative Philip D. Swing, introduced legislation for the construction of a dam in Boulder Canyon on the Arizona-Nevada border. It received the support of Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover but failed to pass into law. It finally passed in 1928 and was signed on December 28, by President Calvin Coolidge.

On May 24, 1915, Nicholas Murray Butler, the president of New York’s Columbia University, met with the advisory board of Columbia’s school of journalism. The purposes of the meeting were to verify that the terms set down in the will of newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer had been faithfully followed and to approve plans for awarding prizes in journalism and letters that were to be awarded in Pulitzer’s name and through his financial bequest. Butler’s relations with Pulitzer, who had died in 1911, had often been difficult, and the Columbia president had been required to follow Pulitzer’s expressed intentions carefully.

During the first half of the seventh century, Harṣa united North India under his rule, a reign that lasted for forty-one years. He ascended the throne of Thānesar, north of the present city of Delhi, in 606 at about sixteen years of age. The half century preceding his accession had been an era of anarchy, the result of the decline and fall of the Gupta Empire (c. 312-c. 550). The Gupta era had been a golden age in India, in both politics and the arts, but the invasion of the nomadic White Huns (Hūṇas or Hephalites) toward the end of the later fifth century led to the demise of the Gupta Dynasty a century later. Early Indian history is the story of the rise and fall of empires, notably the Mauryan (c. 321-185 b.c.e.) and the Gupta, followed by periods of political fragmentation, during which, as the Indian proverb states, the “big fish eat the little fish.” Under Harṣa, political unity was restored, although only temporarily.

The rebellion of An Lushan was one of the seminal events in China’s long history, an event that not only led to the ultimate fall of the Tang Dynasty (T’ang; 618-907) but also generated a story filled with romance, betrayal, and tragedy.

The non-Chinese Jurchen did not emerge as a separate entity in written historical records until the mid-tenth century. They originated to the north of China in present-day eastern Manchuria. Originally, the Jurchen were hunters in the forested areas of Manchuria. They became expert horsemen, a skill shared by members of other northern conquest dynasties such as the Khitan Liao (907-1125) and the later Mongolian-Yuan (1279-1368) and Manchu-Qing (Ch’ing; 1644-1911) Dynasties. The Jurchen could best be described as seminomadic, and although hunting and horsemanship were central to their culture, they also practiced agriculture, some living in small, walled towns.

In 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt noted that the United States was one of the few industrialized countries that had not established a “national policy for the development of our land and water resources.” This lack was in the process of rectification when, in March, 1933, shortly after his inauguration, Roosevelt proposed the establishment of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). The legislation provided for the voluntary mobilization of unemployed young men to work on various conservation projects throughout the nation.

“Easter 1916” is a poem of four stanzas, with sixteen lines in the first and third, and twenty-four lines in the second and fourth. One of William Butler Yeats’s best-known political poems, it was written shortly after the Irish Republican uprising against the British government in April of 1916, although it was not published until 1920. “Easter 1916” is one of several poems that Yeats composed during the Irish national struggle against the English, which lasted until an independent Irish state was created in 1922.

Swedish economist and politician. Myrdal, who received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, is among the most important intellectual figures of the twentieth century. He was one of the primary forces responsible for the development of the welfare state in his native Sweden, and his study of American racial relations contributed to the dismantling of legal segregation in the United States. His analyses of the poverty and problems of the developing world have been equally influential.

Wendi (wehn-dee; his posthumous reign title) was descended from an aristocratic family that had long served the northern rulers during the period of division after the fall of the Han Dynasty in 220 c.e. His daughter married the heir of the Northern Zhou, and in 581 c.e., as Yangjian, the regent, he usurped the throne. He unified China for the first time in three centuries by defeating the southern state of Chen. Private armies were disbanded and the Great Wall was rebuilt. Chinese authority in Vietnam was increased, and the northern frontier tribes of the Tujue were neutralized, thereby creating an empire as great as that of the Han.

The unnamed narrator is an Israeli soldier who fought in the Six-Day War and hoped his days of war were over. This morning, however, his unit has been called up and is watching from a ridge as tanks maneuver in a small valley, waiting until nightfall when they will be ordered into a battle. Although their comrades below are outnumbered, the Israeli command has decided that the unit should not enter into the valley until dark, because they have only two old half-tracks that could accomplish little against the Syrian tanks in the light of day.

Roman statesman and military leader. Little is known of the early years of Pompey the Great, or Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus. His family rose to prominence in Rome only during the second century b.c.e. and thus was not among the ancient patrician nobility. Pompey’s father, Pompeius Strabo, was an ambitious and successful general during the Social War (91-87 b.c.e.). As a result of his military success, Strabo extended his political influence, gaining many supporters, or clientela, whom he then used in advancing his own career.

Vardhamāna’s original name was Nataputta Vardhamānam, and he was also known as Māhavīra, which means “great man” or “great hero.” Vardhamāna is generally recognized as the founder of Jainism, one of several important religions, including Hinduism and Buddhism, which developed in the Indian subcontinent before the common era.

American novelist and short-story writer. Raymond Thornton Chandler was one of the most significant writers of detective fiction in the United States. Like Dashiell Hammett, Chandler took the murder story out of the English drawing room and put it back on the mean streets, where violence and mayhem generally took place. He was the son of Maurice Benjamin Chandler, an engineer from Philadelphia, and Florence Thornton, from Waterford, Ireland. His father, who was an alcoholic, worked for various railroads, and the family lived a peripatetic existence. After his parents divorced, Chandler and his mother moved to London, living with her family. In 1900, he entered Dulwich College, one of the better English public schools. After leaving Dulwich, he sought a literary career and composed poetry and wrote reviews, but he met with only marginal success. In 1913, shortly before World War I, he returned to the United States and settled in Los Angeles.

English statesman and historian. Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, a prime minister of Great Britain as well as a statesman, historian, biographer, soldier, and painter, holds a secure place in the history of nations and the history of literature. As a personality, he was the nineteenth-century hero in a twentieth-century world, bringing to the crises of a totalitarian and atomic age the urbanity, moral sense, and stubborn courage of an earlier era.

Athlete. Francina Elaje Koen, or “Fanny,” was born in Baarn, the Netherlands, on April 26, 1918. Her father had not inherited any land and was a tenant farmer. When Fanny was five, her father moved the family to Hoofddorp, where he established a transportation business. Fanny had two older and two younger brothers. She joined a gymnastics group at the age of six; also, she swam, skated, and ran better than most of the boys in town. She joined the Amsterdam Dames’ Athletic Club at sixteen. At 5 feet 9 inches and approximately 135 pounds as an adult, she had the size to succeed as an athlete. However, in the 1930’s, few women made sports a career; home and family were the accepted goals.

During the eighteenth century, China was the supreme power in East Asia. Westerners first arrived in China during the early sixteenth century, with the Portuguese followed by the Dutch, the British, and others eager to benefit from the riches to be gained from trade for exotic goods such as tea and silks. China was traditionally wary of outsiders, or “barbarians,” as exemplified in 1793, when the Qing emperor Qianlong dismissed George Macartney’s request to open trade with Great Britain, observing that there was nothing that China needed from the West.

The duration of British influence in Ireland can be measured in centuries. Anglo-Norman aristocrats settled in Ireland among the native Celts in the twelfth century, and Protestants from England and Scotland were given lands there by British monarchs in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was not until 1800, however, that Ireland was fully integrated into the political system of the United Kingdom. Prior to that date, Ireland had its own parliament, although that body was often subject to the influence and control of the British authorities. The Act of Union in 1800 abolished the Irish parliament, leaving a single Parliament for the entire United Kingdom.

Stephen T. Mather and Robert Sterling Yard founded the National Parks Association with the aim of creating a nonprofit public-service organization to support the numerous national parks in the United States through the backing and activities of private citizens. The national parks had a long history—Yellowstone, the first national park, had been created in 1872—but until well into the second decade of the twentieth century, there was no central direction or control of the country’s parks and national monuments. The need to coordinate the various national parks was widely recognized: Even the generally conservative U.S. president William Howard Taft had, in 1912, urged the creation of a national parks bureau, but Congress had failed to act on his suggestion.

A factory dedicated to the production of war materials is located in an idyllic rural landscape on the edge of the Pacific Ocean in California, north of Los Angeles. It is World War II and most of the factory's assembly-line workers are women, many married to soldiers who are far across the Pacific waging war against the Japanese.

American novelist. Robert Ludlum was one of the twentieth century’s most successful practitioners of the conspiracy thriller, wherein an individual is faced with a series of overwhelming events created by powerful evil forces which threaten not only his life but often the peace and security of the entire world.{$S[A]Ryder, Jonathan;Ludlum, Robert}{$S[A]Shepherd, Michael;Ludlum, Robert}

Italian statesman. Lorenzo de’ Medici (loh-REHNT-soh day MEHD-ee-chee) was born in Florence. His father, Piero, died at age fifty-three in 1469. Lorenzo’s grandfather, Cosimo, building on the accomplishments of his father, Giovanni, had established himself as the most powerful individual in the Florentine republic. Medici influence resulted in the wealth accumulated through banking activities. Financial abilities were joined to political talents and ambitions, which made them the most formidable nonroyal family in fifteenth century Europe.

In The Worm Ouroboros, E. R. Eddison tells the tale of Lord Juss and his quests as well as of the battles between the lords of Demonland and King Gorice and his minions from Witchland. The novel begins somewhat awkwardly, in an idyllic English country home of a man named Lessingham. Within the house is the Lotus Room, a magical place that allows the sleeper access to faraway lands. One evening, Lessingham journeys to the planet Mercury and to Juss’s castle in Demonland.

The Wood Beyond the World is the story of a young man, Golden Walter. The son of a prominent merchant from the city of Langton, Walter is trapped in an unhappy marriage. With his father’s permission he leaves Langton, wishing to escape his wife but also desiring to see other lands and experience new adventures. By so doing he faces many dangers, but he gains his heart’s desire.

President Calvin Coolidge, who had taken office the year before following the death of President Warren G. Harding, was elected in 1924 over Democrat John Davis and Progressive Robert La Follette. Thus, in the absence of any major national crises, the 1924 election ratified the pro-business policies ascendant since the Republicans took control of both the White House and Congress at the start of the decade.

English novelist, poet, and artist. Mervyn Laurence Peake, painter, poet, and novelist, is one of the most interesting English artists—visual and literary—of the twentieth century. He was born in Kuling, China, in 1911. His father, Ernest Cromwell Peake, was a Congregational missionary doctor, and his mother, Amanda Elizabeth Powell, of Welsh background, had come to China as a missionary nurse. The Peakes returned to England just before the outbreak of World War I in 1914 but went again in 1916 to China, where they remained until 1923. Mervyn Peake never returned to China, but critics have suggested that his most famous work, The Gormenghast Trilogy, was influenced by his youthful experience of living in China as a foreigner, where he was affected by both its squalor and its exoticism. Back in England, he enrolled at Eltham College, where he remained until 1929. Although better as an athlete than as a scholar, he impressed his teachers with his artistic abilities. He enjoyed his public school days, and in the Gormenghast novels, the customs and protocols of school life were re-created.

A medievalist, Carolly Erickson has written several biographies of the major figures of Tudor England, including Henry VIII and his two daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, as well as Henry’s second wife and the mother of Elizabeth, Anne Boleyn. As a biographer, Erickson has been drawn to women, or in the case of Henry VIII, a figure whose power and influence directly determined the fates of six wives. Her focus in those biographies has been less on matters of state, of high diplomacy and international conflict, than upon the upbringing and the private lives of her subjects. Those issues are of greater significance to the author than the constitutional concerns so often the center of Tudor biographies. In Our Tempestuous Day: A History of Regency England, Erickson carries her interest in English history into the early nineteenth century. Instead of a royal biography, the author tells the tale of the ten-year period from 1810 to 1820.

English novelist. Long Fiction:

Prior to the sixteenth century, the islands of Japan were relatively isolated from world events. The exception to this trend was Japan’s long relationship with China and its sometime vassal state of Korea. Japanese writing was based on that of China, and seventh century Chinese Buddhist missionaries shaped Japanese religious history. Even with these influences, however, Japan’s relative geographical isolation resulted in a unique and largely self-contained Japanese culture. The culture’s native religion was Shintoism, or the “way of the gods,” and Japan’s emperor was claimed to be descended from the sun goddess, Amaterasu. Most Japanese in the sixteenth century practiced a combination of Shintoism and Buddhism.

Clancy’s first published novel, The Hunt for Red October, became a runaway best seller. Writing at a time of heightened Cold War tensions, Clancy touched a deep chord. Soviet submarine captain Mark Ramius is disillusioned by the communist system and the Soviet state. His wife, a former ballerina, died on an operating table at the hands of a drunken doctor who, because of his Communist Party connections, was not punished for his misdeed. The leading Soviet expert in submarine tactics, Ramius decides to defect to the United States.

In Debt of Honor (1994), in an event in which art anticipates eventual reality, a deranged Japanese terrorist crashes a 747 into the Capitol, killing the president, all of the members of the Supreme Court, as well as most members of Congress. In Executive Orders, Jack Ryan, who had been sworn in as vice president after the resignation of the elected vice president (who was accused of sexual battery), survives the destruction and assumes the presidency. This is an office that he did not desire, but as a patriot, he accepted the responsibility. Ryan guides the creation of a new national government, while facing numerous challenges, both domestic and international.

One of the strengths of Clancy’s novels is their timeliness. The Sum of All Fears, published in 1991, reflects the immediate post-Cold War world. The Berlin Wall has fallen; the Soviet Union is no more. Yet the world is not necessarily safer. New tensions and old rivalries have replaced superpower antagonisms. International terrorism is obviously not new—Clancy himself wrote about it in Patriot Games—but without the restraining influence of the Cold War, terrorism could well pose a greater threat than in the past.

Stephen Brice accepts the offer of Judge Whipple, his father’s friend, who promises Stephen an opportunity to enter his law firm. In 1858, he moves from Boston to St. Louis with his widowed mother. A personable young man, Stephen finds favor among the people of St. Louis, including Colonel Carvel, and the colonel’s daughter, Virginia. Stephen promptly falls in love with Virginia Carvel. He is not encouraged by the young woman at first because he is a New Englander.

On January 30, 1972, a protest rally organized by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, to demand an end to the internment without trial of suspected terrorists resulted in a clash with British troops. Thirteen of the protesters, all Catholics, died, and more were wounded. The event, which quickly became known as “Bloody Sunday,” led to claims that the British had fired without provocation, a charge rejected by the official British investigation called the Widgery Report, although it was confirmed by various eyewitnesses.

In 1976, Anthony Powell, author of the highly acclaimed twelve-volume series of novels, A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-1975), published Infants of the Spring, the first of the four volumes which make up his memoirs. The second, Messengers of Day, appeared in 1978, followed by Faces in My Time in 1980 and The Strangers All Are Gone in 1982. Together they make up To Keep the Ball Rolling, which in turn was published in an abridged one-volume edition in 1983.

DATE February 25, 1920

Ossie Davis's Purlie Victorious (1961) is a satirical play that relates the titular character's dream of becoming a preacher to the African American community in southern Georgia, set amid the changes and upheaval of the civil rights movement of the 1950s. Although the original production received mixed reviews, a 2023–24 Broadway revival earned great acclaim.

The Gupta Dynasty initiated Hinduism’s classical age by successfully unifying central India after the five centuries of political fragmentation that followed the decline of India’s first imperial age under the Mauryans. The Gupta family’s origins are obscure, but it has been suggested that they were wealthy landowners whose center of power was in the eastern end of the Ganges plain in the region of Magadha. Thanks to substantial iron resources and through military conquests and a marriage alliance with the Lichchhavis, the powerful rulers of Vaishali, Chandra Gupta I achieved control of the river Ganga, or Ganges, northern India’s vital arterial waterway. His coronation occurred in 320 and he took the Sanskrit title of maharajadhiraja, or “Great King of Kings.”