Military

In 261 BCE, an Indian emperor stood on a battlefield strewn with roughly 100,000 corpses — a kingdom he had just destroyed in order to possess it. He had won. …

On the morning of May 6, 1527, 189 men stood between 20,000 mutinous imperial soldiers and the leader of the Catholic world. Armed with halberds and swords, they held their …

At the height of his infamy, the pirate Blackbeard commanded four ships and roughly 300 men. In the same century, a former sex worker from Canton commanded 1,800 warships and …

A religion founded on ahimsa — the sacred principle of non-violence — produced some of history’s most feared armies. The Shaolin monks of Tang-Dynasty China and Japan’s sōhei warrior monks …

Around 1721, a Welsh pirate captain named Bartholomew Roberts composed a document aboard his ship that opened with a startling declaration: “Every man shall have an equal vote in the …

Imagine a word so charged with fear that enemies of a medieval sect invented it as a slur — and it stuck so well it became a permanent fixture of …

Imagine being purchased as a child, transported thousands of miles from your homeland, and handed a sword. Now imagine that this is not a sentence of misery — it is …