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So Haiti's been making the news again recently, for being even more of a shithole than it had previously been between...er, now and the 2010 Haitian earthquake, I guess. Suffice to say that the country's history looks like a comedy of errors mixed with the occasional horrific genocide/war crime...

Alexander III of Macedon famously went on a conquering spree, extending Hellenic power and culture as far south as the Nile's first cataract and as far eastward as modern Tajikistan, Pakistan & NW India, before dying a month short of his 33rd birthday while on the cusp of launching a campaign...

The Treaty of Sèvres between the Entente Powers and the Ottoman Empire at the end of the latter's lifespan would have crippled and dismembered Turkey: carving out a demilitarized and internationalized 'Zone of the Straits' including Constantinople/Istanbul (though it seems it was British dudes...

19th-century Paraguay was a strange place. Ultimately their record of erratic leadership caught up with them and their mid-century dictator Francisco Solano López charged into a war with Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay over his ally in the latter Guay losing a civil war to the Brazilian-backed...

In 84 BC the Roman Republic was on the precipice of its first major civil war between the Populares (populists) and Optimates (conservatives). Unfortunately for the former their chief since Gaius Marius died at age 70 a few years prior, and then his co-Consul & Popularis co-leader Lucius...

The most famous factions of the French Revolution's chaotic early years were the radical Jacobins and their slightly less radical Girondin rivals, who they destroyed in the Terror. However, long under-discussed in the threads on the Revolution that I have seen over the years were the Feuillants...

Per the title, what if the infamous and ill-fated John Lackland never ascends to rule England and the Angevin Empire following the death of his brother Richard the Lionheart, but was displaced by their underage nephew (son of the middle Plantagenet brother, Geoffrey the duke-by-marriage of...

With Christmas a few days away, this seems like a good time to pitch this question. During the mid-to-late Sengoku period, several Japanese clans were enamored not only by the trade goods brought by the 'Nanban' (Europeans - at first Portuguese & Spaniards for the most part) but also their...

After 14 years of fighting, the Rhodesian government of Ian Smith reached an accord with the moderate opposition led by Bishop Abel Muzorewa and former ZANU leader Ndabaningi Sithole (who had been ousted by Robert Mugabe). This 'Internal Settlement' provided for black majority rule by striking...

10 years ago as of this writing, then-President Barack Obama issued his 'red line' threat - that is, if Bashir al-Assad (then fighting the early stages of the Syrian Civil War) used chemical or biological weapons against his enemies, he would provoke an American military response. A year later...

In 1969, tensions between the Soviet Union and PRC were at an all-time high. Longstanding border issues from Xinjiang to Manchuria had been exacerbated by the ideological break between the two Communist powers, with Chairman Mao disavowing the Soviets after Khrushchev succeeded Stalin and began...

Historically, besides being extremely brutal and killing off a huge swathe of Germany's population, the Thirty Years' War was infamous for refusing to end as every time it seemed someone was on the verge of victory, they'd either hit a major reverse (ex. Gustav Adolf getting killed at...

The Templar Order was one of the three most famous military orders of medieval Christendom alongside the Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights, and also the only one of the three to not have survived into modernity (even if only as defanged, pale shadows of their former selves - certainly as far as...

History is replete not only with glorious victories and crushing defeats, but also conflicts where one side was so overwhelmingly, laughably outmatched by the other that it's very difficult (to put it charitably) to figure out how they could possibly win, and in many of these cases, it may even...

France was plunged into a number of civil wars, collectively called 'La Fronde' after the slings used by Parisian rebels, immediately after its victory in the Thirty Years' War. To keep a long and complicated story short, basically the rebel 'frondeurs' opposed the French Crown's efforts to jack...

The Biafran War is something of a meme on account of how jumbled up its warring sides' backers were, and less humorously it was also the site of a major famine. In one corner you had Nigeria, which had just gone through two coups within six months and violent pogroms targeted at the Igbo ethnic...

I've always thought the frontier hero Davy Crockett was an interesting mirror to Andrew Jackson. Both men were from Tennessee, both were veterans and both went into politics as populistic advocates for the common man. However for one reason or another, Crockett usually ended up on the opposing...

The Taiping Rebellion was one of modern history's strangest civil wars, and certainly one of its bloodiest & most destructive as well. A farmer named Hong Xiuquan supposedly had a religious vision while in the midst of a nervous breakdown caused by failing the imperial exams one too many times...

After the Fourth Crusade, one of the successor states which emerged from the Byzantines' husk was the Despotate of Epirus in what's now Albania & western Greece, founded by the Komnenodoukai - bastard cousins of Isaac II Angelos. The second Despot, Theodore, got quite far: he conquered...

Ronald Reagan first ran for the presidency in 1968, when he was still on his first term as Governor of California, and quickly became Nixon's main opponent from the right wing of the Republican Party. Apparently he actually had a slim window for success despite being way behind Nixon in...