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Frigg is a fertility goddess in Norse mythology. She is the wife of Odin, king of the gods, and is the greatest goddess of the Norse pantheon. She is thought to have developed, along with the goddess Freyja, from an earlier fertility deity...

The War in the Vendée was a counter-revolutionary uprising that took place in the Vendée department of France from 1793 to 1796, during the French Revolution (1789-99). In response to the French Republic's attempts to impose conscription...

Mary of Nazareth, the mother of Jesus Christ, is one of the most venerated women from the ancient world. Her most common epithet is "the virgin Mary." She is celebrated by Eastern Orthodox Churches, Catholicism, and various Protestant denominations...

Electra is a Greek tragedy written by the playwright Euripides c. 420 BCE. It retells the classic myth concerning the plotting of Electra and her brother Orestes to kill their mother and her lover. This version of the story should not be...

The popular view of life in ancient Egypt is often that it was a death-obsessed culture in which powerful pharaohs forced the people to labor at constructing pyramids and temples and, at an unspecified time, enslaved the Hebrews for this...

The central cultural value of ancient Egypt was ma'at – harmony and balance – which maintained the order of the universe and the lives of the people. Keeping balance in one's life encouraged the same in one's family and, by extension outward...

Christmas was one of the highlights of the medieval calendar, not only for the rich but also for the peasantry. For the longest holiday of the year, typically the full twelve days of Christmas, people stopped work, homes were decorated and...

Located in what is the present-day German province of Schleswig-Holstein, the Dithmarschen Republic (1227-1559) was a republic by commoners who developed quasi-democratic institutions, including their own written constitution. Fiercely independent...

The state created by Diocletian and Constantine used to be described as despotic and oppressive, extracting higher taxes and threatening its subjects with punishments for non-compliance. Recent research, however, paints a different picture...

The Qin Dynasty (221-206 BCE) was the first dynasty of Imperial China (defined as the era of centralized, dynastic government in China between 221 BCE and 1912 CE) which united the separate states following the Warring States Period (c. 481-221...