Maurice Duplessis is described as everything from a lovable rogue to a political beast. He served as Premier of Quebec for longer than any other politician in the 20th century;his time in office is known as "The Great Darkness."

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Abelard was a poet, philosopher and theologian; Heloise was one of his students. This is a tragic love story, complete with lovers forced apart, a secret marriage, a castration and repeated exhumations. Happy Valentine's Day!

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Casanova led a life so full of sex and adventure that today we call any particularly charismatic and successful lover by his name. But he was also. smart and witty, traveled and wrote extensively, and had a hand in all kinds of aristocratic intrigue.

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Rosa's arrest for breaking bus segregation laws catalyzed the Montgomery Bus Boycott, one of the keystones in the American Civil Rights Movement. It was widely covered in the national media, which brought more attention to the struggle for equal rights.

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Anyone who has ever heard about the Civil Rights Movement in the United States is sure to know that Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a segregated bus. But that's but a tiny sliver of her life story.

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Crown Prince Sado of Korea -- sometimes called Korea's "Coffin King" -- has been described as insane, depraved and sadistic, but when you examine his short life, it's more complicated than a list of acts of savagery (though there are plenty of those).

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History is written by the victors. But one big exception to that conventional wisdom is the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, in which Native Americans rose up against Spanish colonists and missionaries at the turn of the 17th century.

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You may never have heard of him, but Avicenna was one of the first, and probably the most influential, Islamic philosopher-scientists. He's listed among the great philosophers in Dante's Inferno and is mentioned in the prologue to the Canterbury Tales.

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So how did Ancient Egyptians actually embalm their dead? Thanks in large part to Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus, we have some great descriptions of what happened to the deceased.

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When the S.S. Arctic joined the Collins line fleet in the 1850s, it was by all accounts a glorious ship. But in 1854, the steamer collided with another ship in a fog, and the resulting panic led to the deaths of most of the passengers.

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