Mysteries In History World History

Challenge students to explore several important unexplained events that helped shape history. Students use primary source materials, posters, and simulations to find clues and to make informed decisions about these events. There are no right or wrong answers. These real-life mysteries encourage students to research, think, debate, and form conclusions.

The author explains why he believes that history has all the twists and turns, intellectual challenges, and surprise revelations of a great mystery story, and offers explanations for some of history's most intriguing mysteries.

This volume makes teaching and learning history a powerful and enjoyable experience for students in the classroom through the study of historical mysteries, a wide variety of active ideas, and how-to-do-it brainstorms.

In this landmark series of lectures, Rudolf Steiner challenges the notion that human consciousness has in essence remained the same throughout history. On the contrary, we can only see the past in its true light when we study the differences in human souls during the various historical eras. Consciousness, he says, evolves constantly and we can only comprehend the present by understanding its origin in the past.Delivered in the evenings during the course of the 'mystery act' of the Christmas Foundation Meeting – when Rudolf Steiner not only re-founded the Anthroposophical Society but for the first time took a formal role within it – these lectures study world history in parallel with the ancient mysteries of initiation, showing how they are intimately linked. Steiner describes consciousness in the ancient East and follows the initiation principle from Babylonia to Greece, up to its influences in present-day spiritual life. He also discusses Gilgamesh and Eabani, the mysteries of Ephesus and Hibernia, and the occult relationship between the destruction by fire of the Temple of Artemis and the burning of the first Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland.Published for the first time with colour plates of Steiner's blackboard drawings, the freshly-revised text is complemented with an introduction, notes and appendices by Professor Frederick Amrine and an index.

As Napoleon once observed, history is largely a set of lies agreed upon by the winners and, once a lie attains the dignity of age, it becomes the truth. As everyone knows, Cleopatra was an Egyptian of considerable beauty who died in a snaky embrace; Marco Polo travelled to China to become Kublai Khan's right-hand-man; Pope Joan was a medieval woman who fooled the Catholic Church; Joan of Arc was a French military leader; and The Great Fire of Rome was started by Nero to clear the way for his urban re-development of the city ... Well, no, actually. To take those in order: Cleo was a Greek with a face belying generations of inbreeding who poisoned herself; Marco Polo got no further than Turkey, where he sat picking the brains of those who had actually been to China; there was no female Pope; the so-called Joan of Arc - if she existed at all - never led any French army; and as Nero said all along, it was the Christians who torched the city. As this intriguing book reveals, the greatest mysteries of history centre on who invents such false accounts in the first place, how they gain traction so quickly and why others are so willing - anxious, even - to believe them.

Examines the evidence surrounding some of history's unsolved mysteries, from why the pyramids were built to whether or not there was a conspiracy to kill President John F. Kennedy.

For many intelligent people, the stuff of history does not consist of the kind of dry-as-dust investigations of diplomatic, economic, or political history that most university historians research and write about, but the famous topics of “history’s mysteries”- who was Jack the Ripper? Was there a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy? Did Richard III murder the Princes in the Tower? What are the mysteries of the ancient Pyramids? Not only have a great many books and articles been written on these and similar topics by so-called “amateur historians,” but they have generated societies, conferences, newsletters, and television programmes. Many people who are not academic historians take a keen interest in these topics, and have in some cases made themselves real experts on them, with interesting theories of their own. Despite all of this, however, these topics are virtually ignored by academic historians and can be treated with contempt. In Shadow Pasts, William D. Rubinstein a well-known and widely published history professor, examines seven of the most famous and interesting topics which have been discussed, debated, examined, and written about by “amateur historians. Each of these mysteries and the theories surrounding them are examined in detail, with Professor Rubinstein presenting his own original and sometimes surprising conclusions about what really happened.