During World War I, shell shock was considered a psychiatric illness resulting from injury to the nerves during combat. The condition is now known as combat stress reaction, a military term used to categorize a range of behaviors resulting from the stresses of battle. Symptoms include fatigue, slowed reaction time, indecision, disconnection from one’s surroundings, and the inability to prioritize. Why did some argue during the Vietnam War that distressed soldiers should be sent back to combat? Discuss
Source: The Free Dictionary
The woodwose, or hairy wild man of the woods, was the Sasquatch figure of medieval Europe. Seen as a link between civilized humans and dangerous, elf-like woodland spirits, the woodwose is depicted in a wide range of images, including carvings in the Canterbury Cathedral and 16th-century European coats of arms. References to the creature are found in stories by J.R.R. Tolkien. What happened to France’s King Charles VI and five of his courtiers when they dressed as woodwoses for a masquerade? 
Five days after one of the biggest heists in British history, an anonymous tip led police to a farm where they found the robbers’ fingerprints, including some on a Monopoly game that had apparently been played after the robbery—with real money. Thirteen of the criminals involved in the 1963 event now known as “the Great Train Robbery” were eventually caught, but the bulk of the stolen £2.6 million—the equivalent of US $80 million today—was never recovered. How did the robbers stop the train? 
Once boasting a population of nearly 10,000 during a mining boom in the late 1800s, Bodie, California, is now an authentic Wild West ghost town. Visitors can walk the deserted streets to see the remnants of a town whose mines produced more than $34 million worth of gold. That success brought to Bodie the amenities of larger towns, including a railroad, banks, a brass band, and a jail. What type of business had 65 different locations along Bodie’s main street at the peak of the city’s popularity? 
In 1857, Indian troops in the service of the English East India Company ignited a massive rebellion. They refused to use rifle cartridges thought to be lubricated with grease containing a mixture of pigs’ and cows’ lard, considered religiously impure. Lakshmi Bai—queen of the Indian state of Jhansi—became an unlikely hero in the rebellion. When a British commander vowed to destroy Jhansi unless its people surrendered, Lakshmi Bai asserted that they would fight to the death. What happened to her? 
Known only from one incomplete copy discovered in 1890, the Story of Wenamun tells the tale of an Egyptian priest and his journey to Byblos in Phoenicia. Once widely believed to be an actual historical account, the story is now generally accepted by Egyptologists as a work of historical fiction. Still, the vivid narrative, written in the ancient Egyptian writing system of hieratic, is often treated by historians as a primary source on the late 20th Dynasty. In what year is the story set? .jpg)
Characterized by their corkscrew-like shaft, Solomonic columns draw their name from the Biblical description of the two columns that famously flanked the entrance to the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, built in the 10th c BCE. According to tradition, that temple was the source of a set of columns brought to Rome by Constantine the Great in the 4th c CE for the original St. Peter’s Basilica, where several of the pillars still remain. These columns are now believed to have originally stood where? 
The world’s most famous case of art theft—the removal of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911—was solved when museum employee Vincenzo Peruggia tried to sell the painting to a gallery in Italy. He had kept the masterpiece in his apartment for two years after having simply walked out of the museum with it hidden under his coat. What famous painter—some of whose own sketches would be stolen more than 50 years later—was questioned before Peruggia was caught? 
Zhou Tong was the archery teacher of famous Song Dynasty general Yue Fei. Zhou certainly led an impressive life, however, it was the publication of a fictional biography of Yue Fei during the Qing Dynasty that made Zhou into a local hao, or folk hero. Zhou’s fictional exploits have since been chronicled in films, comic books, and even his own modern fictional biography. What unorthodox ritual did Yue Fei engage in to mourn his former teacher after Zhou’s death in 1121? 
For the first three centuries CE, the people of Roman Egypt, especially those of the Faiyum region, used hot, pigmented wax to paint portraits of the dead on wooden or plaster-coated panels. Renowned for their naturalism, the detailed funerary masks, which were placed over the faces of Faiyum’s ancient mummies, make up the richest body of portraiture to have survived from antiquity. What do some scholars claim the age of the subjects in the portraits says about life expectancy at the time?