Page 3 - Citing Primary News Today

In 1604, a decade after the death of Gerhard Mercator (1512-94), one of the great cartographers of all time, the globe maker, engraver, and publisher Jodocus Hondius (1563-1612) bought the plates to Mercator's atlas from his grandsons. Hondius then worked with his brother-in-law, the engraver Pieter van der Keere, to add about 40 new maps to Mercator's atlas to create what became known as the "Mercator-Hondius Atlas," published in Amsterdam in 1606. Later operated by his sons a...

In 1874-75, the Russian government sent a research and trading mission to China to seek out new overland routes to the Chinese market, report on prospects for increased commerce and locations for consulates and factories, and gather information about the Dungan Revolt then raging in parts of western China. Led by Lieutenant Colonel Iulian A. Sosnovskii of the army General Staff, the nine-man mission included a topographer, Captain Matusovskii; a scientific officer, Dr. Pavel Iakovlevich Piasetsk...

This manuscript, tinged with blood and found between the sash and shirt of Agustín de Iturbide after his execution by firing squad on July 19, 1824, is an emotional defense of Iturbide's public career. A former Royalist officer who joined the Mexican struggle for independence, Itrubide was crowned emperor of Mexico on May 21, 1822, under the name Agustín I. However, he was unable to achieve peace and abdicated on March 19, 1823, and went into exile. Without knowing that he had been decla...

Kazakhstan had a strong oral tradition in literature until the mid-19th century. Abai (Ibrahim) Kunanbayev (1845--1904) was a Kazakh poet and teacher, and the key figure in developing a new Kazakh national written literature. His father, Kunanbai Uskenbayev, was a landowner, and the family was prominent in eastern Kazakhstan. Abai studied at the madrassa led by Mullah Akhmet Riza in Semipalatinsk and also attended a Russian school. He spoke Arabic, Persian, and other Eastern languages. Abai Kuna...

This photograph from 1921 shows a group of children orphaned as a result of World War I, newly arrived in New York harbor and about to begin a new life, posing with American flags. The war brought devastation to communities across Europe, leaving behind needy populations, including hundreds of thousands of orphans. In Central and Eastern Europe, the collapse of empires and onset of revolution prolonged the disorder, famine, and disease that began during the war. For Jews, there was the added dan...

This orphanage in Kiev, Ukraine, took in children, mostly from small towns, who had survived the pogroms (anti-Jewish riots) of May 1920. In the years immediately following the Russian Revolution and continuing until the end of the Russian Civil War, disputed territories of the former Russian Empire suffered repeated invasions from Ukrainian, Bolshevik, and Polish forces. During this period of political upheaval, there were many pogroms, and disease and starvation were also rampant. In Ukraine, ...

These children in Grodno, Poland (present-day Hrodna, Belarus) were among tens of thousands of Jewish war orphans who between 1914 and 1920 had lost one or both parents on the battlefield, in military hospitals, or from epidemics, starvation, and other war-related causes. The Joint Distribution Committee of American Funds for the Relief of Jewish War Sufferers (later the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, both names abbreviated as JDC) was formed in 1914 to send aid, including food, c...

In the aftermath of World War I, poverty caused by wartime destruction and dislocation bred disease in Europe. The children in this photograph, taken in Vilna, Poland (present-day Vilnius, Lithuania) in 1921, have their heads wrapped; they are being treated for favus, a fungal skin disease that affects the scalp. The physician (standing, rear right) treating the children has been identified as Mahmud Kajabi. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), a humanitarian organization crea...

This short work consists of two letters relating to a planned slave uprising in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti) in 1758. The context and importance of the letter are explained in an introductory paragraph by an anonymous editor: "Two letters were delivered to us. One is from Cap-Français, Island of Saint-Domingue, and one from the person to whom this letter was addressed. As this person knows perfectly well per se the current state of this island, we will give his ...

The Minas and Rio Railway, also known as the Rio Verde Railway, was opened for traffic on July 14th, 1884, in the presence of Emperor Pedro II (1825--91), his daughter Princess Isabel, and her husband, Prince Gastão de Orléans, conde d'Eu. The British-owned and constructed line ran from Cruzeiro in the interior of the state of São Paulo, across the Mantiqueira Mountains, and through cities and towns in the southern part of the state of Minas Gerais as far as Três Corações do Rio ...