Images

A photograph showing German troops on horseback passing a destroyed Soviet T-26 tank during Operation Barbarossa, the attack by Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) on the USSR from June to December 1941. Horses...

A photograph showing a burning Russian village during Operation Barbarossa, the attack by Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) on the USSR from June to December 1941. (Imperial War Museums)

A photograph of German Waffen SS motorcyclists during Operation Barbarossa, the attack by Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) on the USSR from June to December 1941. (Imperial War Museums)

The oldest known and documented medical degree in the world. It was awarded by the University of al-Qarawiyyin, Fez, Morocco, to Doctor Abdellah Ben Saleh Al Koutami in 1207.

This reconstruction of the 14th-century water clock from the Dar al-Muwaqqit of the al-Qarawiyyin Mosque (Fez, Morocco) is now on display at the Istanbul Museum of the History of Science and Technology in Islam...

Figure of Fatima Al-Fihri (c. 800-880) from the Jordan Museum, Amman, Jordan. Fatima Al-Fihri was a Muslim woman, scholar and philanthropist who is credited with founding the world’s oldest, continuously...

The fountain in the courtyard of Al-Qarawiyyin mosque complex, Fez, Morocco.

John Wesley Cromwell (l. 1846-1927), educator, historian, lawyer, and activist, from an 1887 sketch in Men of Mark: Eminent, Progressive and Rising by William J. Simmons and Henry McNeal Turner, G. M. Rewell & Company, 1887.

Nat Turner's Rebellion as depicted in Samuel Warner's Authentic and Impartial Narrative of the Tragical Scene Which Was Witnessed in Southampton County, 1831. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Throughout the study of the past, historians have relied on broad conceptual shortcuts to categorize time, societies, and developments. While these models help structure historical analysis and provide useful comparisons...