World History

See where the 100 million barrels of crude oil the world consumes daily end up.

OPEC's 1973 embargo sparked the first global energy shock.

OPEC (the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) has grown from five to 12 members since 1960.

The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan fell after a brutal 75-day siege.

The Aztecs worshipped a vast pantheon of more than 200 gods.

The Continental Army invaded Canada in an attempt to seize Montreal and Quebec City in 1775.

Experience 14 billion years of important moments in world history with this scrollable interactive timeline.

Tarring and feathering was a violent form of vigilante justice in Colonial America.

Experts believe Peggy Shippen played a larger role than originally thought in her husband Benedict Arnold's treasonous plot.

See a timeline of colonial settlement in North America.

European leaders pursued appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s, hoping to avoid war.

The treaty that ended the First World War laid the groundwork for the Second.

King George III was Britain's longest-reigning male monarch.

King George III assembled a 65,000-volume personal library.

Ukraine once had the third-largest nuclear arsenal—and gave them all up by 1996.

Read the New York Times 2016 obituary of Fidel Castro, the defining figure of the Cuban Revolution.

Pre-revolution Cuba was prosperous—and deeply unequal.

The Cuban Revolution, from 1953 to 1959, overthrew the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista and established the first socialist state in the Western Hemisphere.

Every Swiss resident is entitled to a spot in a nuclear fallout shelter.

Check out information on the over 1,000 protests across the globe since 2017.

Global population growth peaked six decades ago, at 2.3%.

More than 500,000 people worked to contain Chernobyl's fallout, many with very little protection from radiation.

See what became of Pripyat, the Soviet town built to house Chernobyl's plant workers, a year after the nuclear disaster forced its evacuation.

The Chernobyl disaster released more radioactive material than the Hiroshima bomb.

The United States ranks 32nd globally in religious diversity, though it ranks first among the ten most populous nations.

Explore the state of religious freedom worldwide with an interactive data visualization.

It's likely a myth that Ellis Island inspectors changed immigrants' names, and historians say the errors actually happened overseas.

Explore the full list of over 1,000 UNESCO World Heritage sites, broken down by country.

Cartoonist Thomas Nast helped bring down Boss Tweed, one of America's most corrupt political bosses.

John D. Rockefeller—the world's first billionaire—was born to a well-known con artist father.

With the help of one photographer who took photos of children at work, child labor in the US was eventually restricted by law in the mid-1900s.

Near the end of the 1700s, the United States was forced to pay Barbary pirates an annual tribute equal to 16% of its entire budget.

In 1822, French scholar Jean-François Champollion deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs using the Rosetta Stone.

Explore the major archaeological sites of Egypt's 3,000-year history.

During the Cold War, a mid-air fire led to a nuclear bomber crash in Greenland that left a piece of a hydrogen bomb missing to this day.

The Lewis and Clark Expedition unexpectedly ran into Sacagawea's long-lost family in the Rocky Mountains.

The Lewis and Clark expedition purchased more than 260 separate items to supply their journey, including 120 gallons of whiskey.

Sacagawea's son, Jean Baptiste, who was born during the Lewis and Clark expedition, traveled to Europe as a duke's companion before returning to the American West.

Lewis and Clark identified 122 animal species new to science.

William Clark negotiated one-tenth of all ratified treaties between Native Americans and the US.

Explore Lewis and Clark's 8,000-mile journey in Google Earth.

The prophetic Oracle of Delphi was believed to have a direct line to the Greek god Apollo.

The prophetic Oracle of Delphi held real power in ancient Greece.

Visit the Acropolis of Athens, the fortifie high city that hosts the iconic Parthenon temple, with travel writer Rick Steves.

The Greek city of Alexandria in Egypt helped form the template for modern cities by considering function, commerce, culture, and politics.

Watch the many different civilizations around the Mediterranean shift power from the year 2500 BCE to 0 BCE in this animated map.

See artifacts from the ancient Olympics at the Met.

Socrates, who never wrote down his ideas, is considered by many the father of Western philosophy.

Meet the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project.

Worried that Nazi Germany could weaponize nuclear fission first, Albert Einstein wrote a 1939 letter warning President Roosevelt about the possibility of atomic bombs—a decision he later regretted.