Carl Seaver - History Defined

Who were the Moirai, the Three Fates of Greek Mythology?

In Ancient Greece, religious life, mythology, and literature were almost indistinguishable. Some of the earliest Greek writers, such as Homer, the quasi-fabled author of the Illiad and the Odyssey, and Hesiod, a Greek poet of the eighth century BC who composed the Theogony and Works and Days, discuss the Greek gods like Zeus, Athena and Poseidon side by side with heroes […]

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The Horrific History of the Oubliette

When one thinks of the Middle Ages, they are often confronted by a dour landscape of peasant drudgery punctuated by the occasional castle or small town. In many instances, knights or lords inhabited these castles and acted in an autocratic manner outside the boundaries of what we would view as traditional law and order today.

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Who were the Blue Fugates of Kentucky?

There are dozens of well-known fictional characters with blue skin, from Watchmen’s Dr. Manhattan to X-men’s Beast to Neytiri in Avatar. Real people, though? They don’t tend to come in blue. Or do they? In reality, the Fugates family of Eastern Kentucky, particularly those alive in the early to mid-20th century, were born with blue

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How Sargon of Akkad Created the World’s First Empire

In the late 24th century BCE, Ancient Mesopotamia was embroiled in a constant war over who would unify the region. Out of the ashes came Sargon of Akkad, who united many city-states in Mesopotamia and is credited with founding the first empire in recorded history. In tribute to his life and legacy, future generations referred

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The Fascinating History of Europe’s Hellfire Clubs

Eighteenth-century Europe was a period in which clubs and societies abounded. In an age before that most modern types of entertainment, the moving screen of cinema and television, many people spent their leisure time in taverns or pubs. But for the upper class of British society, there was an increasingly snobbish desire to establish societal

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The Amazing Truth Behind the 300 Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae

In 480 BC, a force of Spartans, along with many other Greeks, held off the Persian army at the Battle of Thermopylae. Thermopylae is a famous battle in ancient history and endures in movies and books to this day. But what happened at Thermopylae? Why did the Spartans choose to make their stand there? Let’s

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The Strange Origin Of The Term ‘Pyrrhic Victory’

Many phrases exist today that we normalize as just being run-of-the-mill, as it were. ‘Run of the mill’ is one of them. But it only came into usage in the early twentieth century to say something is ‘average,’ ‘typical,’ or ‘common.’ Before this, it was used in industrial factories packing flour in Britain. So it

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Who Were the Green Children of Woolpit?

The medieval world was full of tales of supernatural and magical occurrences. Many of these stories were later collected by antiquarians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, individuals like the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, each of which collected and recorded these centuries-old folklore tales before their memory was forgotten entirely. England has its

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What Was a Day in the Life of an Average Roman Like?

Ancient empires lasted longer, generally speaking than modern states. For example, the Pharaohs ruled Egypt for a staggering period of 3,000 years. That’s twelve times longer than the United States has been around. Yet, even though these ancient societies constitute the bulk of human history, we often know little about how the average person lived

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The History Behind the Cruel Roman Practice of Decimation

Of all of the world’s empires, few have risen from such inauspicious beginnings to such heights as did that of the Romans. For several hundred years following its mythical foundation in 753 BCE, Rome was just one of many towns in Central Italy. It controlled little more than some farmland in the surrounding countryside. In

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