Page 8 - Citing Primary News Today

This view of Podil (also known as Podol) is from Souvenir of Kiev, an early 20th-century album showing the main sites of Kiev, the capital of Ukraine and at that time one of the most important cities of the Russian Empire. The name Podil derives from an old Slavic word meaning "lowlands." Established before the city expanded into the surrounding hills, Podil stretches along the Dnieper River. It was where Kiev's trade, commerce, and industry originated and where craftsmen, merchant...

This speech to the people of Senegal by Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906-2001) was delivered the day after his election as the first president of the newly independent republic. Senghor was born in what was then French West Africa. He was sent at a young age to a Catholic mission school, where he embraced French and European culture, but also felt the loss of his mother tongue and the pain of being torn from his African roots. He won a scholarship to pursue literary studies in France, beginning i...

This satirical watercolor by the Italian artist Raffaello Jonni is part of a series of 79 original drawings by Jonni preserved at the Alessandrina Library in Rome. It portrays a hand trying to grab a safe labeled "Trieste" that is carried by Franz Joseph I (1830--1916), the aged emperor of Austria-Hungary. The hand represents a powerful Italy that is seeking to acquire Trieste, historically part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and, during World War I, its main point of access to the sea...

Historia general de las cosas de nueva España (General history of the things of New Spain) is an encyclopedic work about the people and culture of central Mexico compiled by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún (1499--1590), a Franciscan missionary who arrived in Mexico in 1529, eight years after completion of the Spanish conquest by Hernan Cortés. Commonly referred to as the Florentine Codex, the manuscript consists of 12 books devoted to different topics. Book XI, the longest in the codex, is a tr...

Alexis Sidney Krausse (1859-1904) was a British journalist and author who wrote for many British periodicals and produced books about a wide range of subjects, including poverty in the city of London, China and the Far East, and the Russian Empire. Russia in Asia: A Record and a Study, 1558-1899 is a history of Russia's expansion in Asia, beginning in 1558, the year Grigorii Stroganov received a charter from Ivan the Terrible to colonize lands on the Kama River on the western edge of the Ura...

The Northwest Boundary Survey of 1857-61 was a joint U.S.-British project to survey the border between the United States and Canada from the crest of the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. Carried out jointly by American and British experts, it involved four years of strenuous work in rugged and heavily forested terrain. James Madison Alden (1834-1922) was a Massachusetts artist who, in 1854, enlisted in the U.S. Navy and worked as a cartographer on a project to chart the California coast. In...

Historia general de las cosas de nueva España (General history of the things of New Spain) is an encyclopedic work about the people and culture of central Mexico compiled by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún (1499--1590), a Franciscan missionary who arrived in Mexico in 1529, eight years after completion of the Spanish conquest by Hernan Cortés. Commonly referred to as the Florentine Codex, the manuscript consists of 12 books devoted to different topics. Book XII recounts the Spanish conquest of ...

Abu Bakr Muhammad Ibn Zakariya al-Razi (also known by Latinized versions of his name, Rhazes or Rasis, 865--925 AD) was a Persian polymath, physician, and philosopher. He was born in Rayy, south of present-day Tehran, Iran. After studying philosophy, at around the age of 30 he began studying medicine under the supervision of Abu Al-Hassan al-Tabari. He became the head of a Rayy hospital and later headed a hospital in Baghdad. Al-Razi was known in the fields of medicine and chemistry, which he co...

With this document dated April 30, 1721, and signed in Montreal, Philippe de Rigaud Vaudreuil (1643--1725), governor of New France, permitted Jacques Hertel de Cournoyer (1667--1748) to go to the Pays d'en Haut (a vast territory to the west of Montreal) with two canoes and eight men. Cournoyer was to serve Father Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix (1682--1761), a priest who was traveling to the region ostensibly to visit missions, but who had been ordered by Philippe, duc d'Orléans...

On the night of September 18, 1931, anti-Japanese activists set off explosions on the Japanese-owned South Manchurian Railroad in Manchuria, northeastern China. The Japanese army used the incident as a pretext to invade Manchuria, and quickly occupied its key cities. China appealed to the world's powers for help. The Council of the League of Nations, supported by the United States, sought to negotiate a peaceful solution to the conflict. In early 1932, the Council dispatched an inquiry commi...