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In the 18th century, French Louisiana covered territory comprising some 20 present-day U.S. states. Explored and named by Robert Cavelier de La Salle in 1682, it was colonized beginning in 1699. In that year, King Louis XIV and his minister, Pontchartrain, ordered Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville, assisted by his brother, Jean Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, to form a permanent settlement at the mouth of the Mississippi in order to counter possible British encroachments. A fort was raised at Biloxi in 1699, then a post at Mobile in 1702. During the War of the Spanish Succession (1702--13), the ...

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 Piasetskii; Chinese and Russian interpreters; three non-commissioned Cossack soldiers; and the mission photo...

This document is the original roll of the students of the Navy Officer Training School in Nagasaki that was established in 1855 by the Edo bakufu (shogunate) for the purpose of introducing a European-style navy to Japan. It was staffed by Dutch naval instructors. The students studied mathematics, seamanship, ship construction, navigation, and weaponry. The school existed until 1859, when a naval training school opened at Tsukiji, close to Edo (present-day Tokyo), with Nagasaki graduates as instructors. The roll shown here contains a total of 41 names, including those of Matsumoto Ryôjun (183...

This map sheet displays three views of the central Arabian Peninsula. It was created by the legendary Harry Saint John Bridger Philby (1885-1960), a British adventurer, political counsellor, author, spy, and the most celebrated early modern traveler in Arabia, about which he published several books. The map focuses on the topographic features along the routes of Philby's travels. The central map shows the route across the Arabian Peninsula from Riyadh to Jeddah (Jiddah) taken in 1917 in connection with a diplomatic mission to Ibn Saʻud, the future king of Saudi Arabia. The larger of the t...

The manuscript presented here is a two-page fragment of a commentary on the Commedia by the great Florentine poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321). The text, written in Italian by an unknown scribe, was produced in Italy the second half of the 14th century, only a few decades after the poet's death. This was also about the time that the poet Giovanni Boccaccio (1313--75) first applied the epithet "divine" to Dante's poem, which Dante himself had simply called Comedia. This fragment was preserved in the historical library of the Franciscans in Skalica (present-day western Slovakia)...