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 little military post at Mobile, barely populated with 200 colonists and poorly provisioned, was on the verge of abandonment. Between 1712 and 1731 the king placed the colony under the control of private interests. From 1712 to 1717 the royal monopoly was granted to the financier Antoine Crozat, who hoped to find and exploit gold and silver mines near Mexico. During this period, Louisiana's zone
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 photographer, Adolf Erazmovich Boiarskii. The mission proceeded from Saint Petersburg to Shanghai via Ulan Bator (Mongolia), Beijing, and Tianjin, and then followed a route along the Yangtze River, along the Great Silk Road through the Hami oasis, to Lake Zaysan, back to Russia. Boiarskii took some 200 photographs, which constitute a unique resource for the study of China in this period. Most of the ph
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 (1832-1907), who studied medicine with the Dutch and served as private doctor to the 14th shogun; Tokugawa Iemochi (1846-66); and Akamatsu Noriyoshi (1841-1920), one of the first Japanese students sent to Europe at the end of the Edo period to study Western ways. During the Meiji era Akamatsu became a vice admiral in the Japanese navy. The roll is dated as of 1857.
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 two inserts shows the extension of this journey from the Persian Gulf to Riyadh, while the other shows the entire central peninsula but on a smaller scale. This smaller inset shows routes surveyed in 1917-18. Explanatory notes provide a glossary of Arabic topographic terms and an explanation of Philby's geodetic methods. Mentioned in the latter are Colonel Lewis Pelly (1825-92), a British East
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). The Franciscans settled in Skalica in the middle of the 15th century, where they built a church and monastery that operated continuously until 1950. Dante's great allegorical epic in three parts, Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, based on the geocentric world view of Dante's time, synthesized nearly all medieval knowledge in a structure of flawless art that is sustained through the work&