The Viking Age is the period from 793 AD to 1066 AD in European history, especially Northern European and Scandinavian history, following the Germanic Iron Age. It is the period of history when Scandinavian Norsemen explored Europe by its s...

Ivan IV Vasilyevich, commonly known as Ivan the Terrible, was the Grand Prince of Moscow from 1533 to 1547 and Tsar of All the Russias from 1547 until his death. His long reign saw the conquest of the Khanates of Kazan, Astrakhan, and Siber...

The War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48) – also known as King George's War in North America, and incorporating the War of Jenkins' Ear with Spain and two of the three Silesian wars – involved nearly all the powers of Europe, except for...

Napoleon Bonaparte was a French military and political leader who rose to prominence during the latter stages of the French Revolution and its associated wars in Europe. As Napoleon I, he was Emperor of the French from 1804 to 1814 and a...

The Battle of Austerlitz, also known as the Battle of the Three Emperors, was Napoleon's greatest victory, where the French Empire effectively crushed the Third Coalition. On 2 December 1805 (20 November Old Style, 11 Frimaire, XIV, in the...

The Battle of Borodino, fought on September 7, 1812, was the largest and bloodiest single-day action of the French invasion of Russia and all Napoleonic Wars, involving more than 250,000 troops and resulting in at least 70,000 casualties. T...

The Battle of Leipzig or Battle of the Nations was fought by the coalition armies of Russia, Prussia, Austria, and Sweden led by the Russian Czar Alexander I against the French army of Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, at Leipzig, Saxony....

Dimitri Mendeleev, was a Russian chemist. He is credited as being the primary creator of the first version of the periodic table of elements. Unlike other contributors to the table, Mendeleev predicted the properties of elements yet to be d...

The Alaska Purchase was the United States' acquisition of Alaska from the Russian Empire. Alaska was formally transferred to the United States on October 18, 1867, through a treaty ratified by the United States Senate. Russia had establi...

The Revolution of 1905 was a wave of mass political and social unrest that spread through vast areas of the Russian Empire. Some of it was directed against the government, while some was undirected. It included worker strikes, peasant unres...

The Tunguska event, or Tunguska explosion, was a powerful explosion that occurred not far from the Podkamennaya (Lower Stony) Tunguska River in what is now Krasnoyarsk Krai in Russia, at 00:13:35 Greenwich Mean Time (around 07:14 local time...

The Russian Revolution was a pair of revolutions in Russia in 1917 which dismantled the Tsarist autocracy and led to the rise of the Soviet Union. The Russian Empire collapsed with the abdication of Emperor Nicholas II and the old regime wa...

The Katyn massacre, also known as the Katyn Forest massacre was a mass murder of thousands of Polish prisoners of war (primarily military officers), intellectuals, policemen, and other public servants by the Soviet NKVD, based on a proposal...

Sputnik 1 or Elementary Satellite-1 was the first artificial Earth satellite. It was a 58 cm (23 in) diameter polished metal sphere, with four external radio antennas to broadcast radio pulses. The Soviet Union launched it into an elliptica...

The disaster that occured at a nuclear power plant in Chernobyl in the former USSR (now Ukraine) plant on April 25th 1986 is an example of the devastation that can occur when a nuclear reaction goes wrong. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant...