Yaroslav the Wise: Did you mean...?

Alcohol played an integral part in Norse culture. People drank ale more than water because the brew had to be boiled as part of the process and so was safer to drink. The Norse of Scandinavia had four main types of fermented beverage: ale...

Religion and superstition went hand in hand in Colonial America, and one’s belief in the first confirmed the validity of the second. The colonists' worldview was completely informed by religion and so everything that happened - good or bad...

The Frog Princess is a Slavic folktale focusing on the importance of recognizing someone’s inner beauty, regardless of their outward appearance, as well as the possibility of redemption after failure. The tale has many variants and appears...

Herodotus’ narrative on Lydia takes up almost one half of Book I of his Histories and the section dealing with King Croesus is among the best-known and often anthologized. The last section, in which he discusses Lydian women as prostitutes...

The Coyote tales come from the Shasta people who originally inhabited the regions of modern-day northern California and southern Oregon. Coyote is a popular trickster figure among many Native peoples of North America, including the Shasta...

A Very Useful Epistle (Epistre tres utile, 1539) is an open letter by the female reformer Marie Dentière (l. c. 1495-1561) to Marguerite of Navarre (l. 1492-1549) advocating for a greater role for women in the work of the Protestant Reformation...

The Shield of Heracles (also known as The Shield of Herakles and, in the original, Aspis Herakleous) is a poem of 480 hexameter lines written by an unknown Greek poet in the style of Hesiod (lived 8th century BCE). It deals with the Greek...

The Hidatsa Sun Dance Ritual (also known as Hidatsa Sun Dance) is a Native American story of the Hidatsa nation illustrating the practice of an individual initiating the Sun Dance for personal reasons, in this case, to win the hand of the...

Zeno of Citium (c. 336 – 265 BCE) was the founder of the Stoic School of philosophy in Athens, which taught that the Logos (Universal Reason) was the greatest good in life and living in accordance with reason was the meaning of life. He was...

The Prophecy of Bear Man is a war story from the Cheyenne nation relating their response to a Pawnee horse-raiding party and how they defeated their enemy, regaining most of the horses taken. The story exemplifies Native American warfare...