Christmas is both a sacred religious holiday and a worldwide cultural and commercial phenomenon. For two millennia, people around the world have been observing it with traditions and practices that are both religious and secular in nature.

The roots of World War II sprouted in the treaty that ended World War I. The Treaty of Versailles put a heavy load on the people of Germany. They couldn’t have a military. They couldn’t keep the lands they thought of as German. They had to pay a lot of money to France.

German Backstory<br><br>The Battle of the Somme resulted in the loss of over 500,000 German lives, even with their entrenched position. Somme was a lot like Verdun, and was built to withstand frontal assaults. With a lot of the German forces already deployed in Verdun, Somme was fortified enough to where it would take days to overthrow.

The French Revolution was a period of time in France when the people overthrew the monarchy and took control of the government. The Storming of the Bastille Signals the Beginning of the French Revolution 

Ancient Mesopotamia is called the cradle of civilization. The first cities and empires formed here. As you will see from the timeline, power changed hands many times throughout the ancient history of this area. It went from the Sumer to the Akkadians to the Babylonians to the Assyrians back to the Babylonians back to the Assyrians and finally to the Persians.

In the late fourth century, the Western Roman Empire crumbled after a nearly 500-year run as the world’s greatest superpower. Historians have blamed the collapse on hundreds of different factors ranging from military failures and crippling taxation to natural disasters and even climate change.

People were quite aware of certain new techniques in metallurgy. They used these techniques to produce lead, copper, tin, and bronze. These metal products were popular items for export to oversea civilizations.

They were the world’s first dentists

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Architecture is the art of designing and creating buildings. Greek architecture is a very specific and influential type of design, which was based on the post-and-lintel system.

During most of the Stone Age, people in Egypt, like people everywhere else in the world, lived by hunting and gathering their food. They traveled around from place to place in the Nile Valley, harvesting wild grasses, digging up roots, picking berries, and finding bird eggs

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Badgers are found living in the forests of Europe and western Asia, scavenging for roots and berries as well as worms and insects.

The fruit fly which is known as "Drosophila" is one of the most useful insects known to science because it is used in the study of heredity, which means the passing on of characteristics from parents to offspring.

African Bush Elephants are the largest land animals in the world. Males can grow up to 13 feet tall at the shoulders, measure up to 30 feet from trunk to tail, and weigh up to 14,000 pounds. Perhaps that explains why Elephants are the ONLY mammals that cannot jump!

The flea lives on dogs and cats by sucking their blood. Fleas also infest rats, rabbits, squirrels, birds, and nearly all other warm-blooded animals.

A whale is a mammal. That is the baby whale is fed on its mother's milk like other mammals. While a fish is hatched from the egg, a baby whale is born alive and for sometime, it stays close to the mother who takes very good care of it.

There is a species of the cicada that lives for 17 years. There are more than 800 species or kinds of cicadas and 100 of these are found in North America. But the 17-year-old cicada is found only in the USA. Most species of cicadas live only for two years.

If your dog always comes inside right before it rains, you may think that animals can predict the weather. It's probably more accurate to say that animals react to certain environmental signals that accompany weather changes, not to the weather itself.

With an ample amount of sunlight, you can actually create vitamin D -- which has helped decrease the risk of vitamin D-deficiency diseases such as rickets and osteomalacia in areas with frequent sunny days.

Eating good foods is especially important for kids because they are still growing. Kids' bodies need nutrition to grow strong healthy bones and muscles.

While we've been conditioned to believe milk is the epitome of healthy drinking, it's really a gamble. It can be highly beneficial or highly detrimental.

The action of yeast in moist, warm dough is called leavening. The yeast cells convert the starch of the dough into sugar, which they then digest. As they do this they give off carbon dioxide as a waste product.

Origami is the Japanese word for paper folding. ORI means to fold and KAMI means paper. Together, they form the word, "origami." It is an art form that has been handed down from parent to child through many generations.

"Movies" is short for "motion pictures," and the development of pictures that seem to move has taken place over many years, thanks to the work of many people.

Riddles have been asked since very ancient times. Today, we consider rid­dles as a form of amusement, but long-ago people took riddles very seriously.

Today, practically all newspapers and magazines print some sort of cartoons in their pages. Some make us laugh, some make us think about the events of the day.

The earliest artists to do drawings and paintings were the caveman. Colored drawings of animals, dating from about 30,000 to 10,000 b.c., have been found on the walls of caves in southern France and Spain.

Advertising is a way of informing people of something. This can range from telling them of a product for sale, or a service, or urging them to do something, or even to bring one's name before the public.

The comic strip is usually found in daily newspapers. It is made up of three or four picture panels telling a story with one or more characters. Comic books are extensions of comic strips into magazines.

Hardly a child grows up without learning by heart "Hey Diddle, Diddle," "Pat-a-cake, Pat-a-cake," or "Jack and Jill." We call them nursery rhymes, and sometimes Mother Goose rhymes.

The crossword puzzle was both a new thing and a not-so-new thing. Since ancient times there had been what is called a word square. In a word square, the letters spelled the same words horizontally and vertically.

The violin is known as the queen of instruments. Of the more than one hundred musicians in a great orchestra, over thirty are violinists. The violin's high rank is due to the beauty of its tone and its wide range of expression.

For a very long time, music was not written down. It was sung or played from memory. As it was passed on from person to person, many changes crept into the tunes.

The lungi is a long, sarong-like garment worn by men throughout south India.<br><br>This garment is tightly fitted and usually reaches mid-calf or longer.

What decided whether men would let their beards grow or shave them off? All through history, it was chiefly a matter of religious custom or just fashion.

Kathak is a form of classical Indian dance arising out of north India.<br><br>The name kathak comes from the Sanskrit word “katha,” which means story, and this expressive dance form more than lives up to its name.

Wherever you go on the East African safari circuit of southern Kenya and northern Tanzania, the Maasai are a near-constant presence. The number of Maasai in Kenya is estimated to be approximately 800,000, with about the same number living in Tanzania.

The idea that the number 13 is unlucky is a superstition. There are many different kinds of superstitions, based on things in nature, charms, spirits, ob­jects, colors, accidents, and so on.

There have been barbers since very ancient times—so long ago, in fact, that we can't possibly know who the first barbers were. The first records of barbers in history go back to ancient Egypt.

Men and women have dressed and done things to their hair as far back as there are any records of human beings. An interesting thing is that dressing the hair was not a mark of "civilization."

The words of the English language originated in many different ways from many different sources, but Greek and Latin supplied most of the words used in English today.

Nobody knows when man first discovered gems, but he has been fascinated by them since the earliest times. For many thousands of years gems were worn as charms, or amulets, to protect people from demons and diseases. Even today there are people who believe gems have this power.

The first tombstones were used by Bushmen and other primitive tribes in Africa. They believed that there were evil spirits living in the bodies of dead people. By placing heavy stones on the graves they hoped to prevent these spirits from rising.

The Christmas tree is the symbol of the spirit of the Yuletide in many homes. The use of the Christmas tree is a custom and tradition, not a religious observance.

Nobody knows exactly where and when writing originated. But we do have an idea of how it developed from earliest times.