An accomplished Latin poet, no less distinguished in “council and prudent matters of state,” an expert cartographer and an enterprising ship-builder, William Petty was a many-sided man, typical of the scientific spirit of the later seventeenth century. By K. Theodore Hoppen.
Four centuries ago the title of Dalai Lama was conferred on a Tibetan abbot by a Mongol sovereign, writes George Woodcock. Fourteen incarnations of the Compassionate Bodhisattva have since ruled Tibet as priest-kings.
Maurice Ashley describes how, divided by a vast gulf from the prospering gentry, seventeenth-century cottagers and labourers lived a poor and harsh life. After 1660, their standard of welfare seems to have declined.
According to the ancient religions of the Near East, every man possessed a double nature, compounded of physical and psychical elements, each an essential adjunct of his life.
In the year that saw the birth of Shakespeare, Galileo Galilei, the revolutionary Italian astronomer and mathematician, was born in Pisa.
Henry I. Kurtz describes how, in 1763, the Conspiracy of Pontiac led to an Indian rebellion aimed at ousting the British from their newly won North American territories.
Robert Gavin outlines how, just as it was about to become the “Sick Man of Europe”, the Turkish Empire showed surprising vigour in re-imposing its grasp upon Arabia to the dismay of Egypt.
By the year 129 B.C., writes D.R. Dudley, the Stoic philosophy was firmly established among the ruling classes of Rome in a form cut to suit the Roman virtues.
Count Zeppelin and his successors in Germany and Britain backed an invention that failed; but David Sawers describes how, during its lifetime, the airship attracted the enthusiasm of many aeronautical engineers.
Robert H. Schwoebel explains how, in the fifteenth century, the growing power of the Turks prompted a number of European princes to despatch emissaries to the Levant as intelligence officers on the Eastern Question.
