Modern Era
Battle of Antietam (1862): America's Bloodiest Single Day
Tactically inconclusive but a strategic Union success: Lee withdrew to Virginia, and Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation five days later.
All Articles
Every Chronicle article on world history, newest first: battles, empires, disasters, discoveries and revolutions.
Modern Era
Telephone Invented (1876): Alexander Graham Bell's First Call
Bell's patent and first successful call launched the telephone industry; within a few decades telephone networks linked cities across North America and Europe.
Modern Era
Battle of Navarino (1827): Last Great Battle of Sailing Ships
Decisive allied victory; most of the Ottoman-Egyptian fleet was destroyed, ensuring the survival of an independent Greece.
Middle Ages
Great Drought of 1276: The Ancestral Puebloan Exodus
By about 1300 the northern Southwest was emptied of farmers, who resettled in the Rio Grande valley, Zuni, Acoma and the Hopi mesas.
Middle Ages
Kingdom of Kongo: Founding of a Central African State (c. 1390)
A centralised kingdom emerged south of the lower Congo River and became one of the largest states of Central Africa.
Middle Ages
Founding of the Vijayanagara Empire (1336) and Hampi
Harihara and Bukka established an independent kingdom that grew into the Vijayanagara Empire, dominating South India until 1565.
Middle Ages
Song Dynasty (960-1279): Commerce, Science and Culture in China
The Song reunified China proper by 979 and presided over an economic and cultural flowering before losing the north to the Jurchens in 1127 and the south to the Mongols in 1279.
Middle Ages
Madinat al-Zahra: The Lost Palace City of the Cordoba Caliph
The caliph's palace city flourished for about seventy years, was sacked during the civil war of 1009-1031 and lay buried until excavations began in 1911.
Middle Ages
Dominican Order (1216): Saint Dominic and the Order of Preachers
The Order of Preachers became a leading religious order of educated mendicant friars, prominent in universities, missions and the medieval Inquisition.
Middle Ages
Massacre of Verden (782) and Charlemagne's Saxon Wars
According to the Royal Frankish Annals, 4,500 Saxons were beheaded in a single day; Saxon resistance continued until about 804, when Saxony was absorbed into the Frankish empire.
Middle Ages
Great Schism of 1054: The Split Between East and West Churches
Mutual excommunications between Rome's legates and the Patriarch of Constantinople became the symbolic date of the division between Catholic and Orthodox Christianity.
Early Modern
Jacobite Rising of 1715: The Fifteen and the Old Pretender
The rising collapsed after the drawn Battle of Sheriffmuir and the Jacobite surrender at Preston; James left Scotland in February 1716 and leading rebels were executed or exiled.