The History of the World in Bite-Sized Chunks

The Assyrian state was finally defeated in 612 BC by a coalition of Medes (

The Enlightenment, or Age of Reason, was a cultural and philosophical movement underpinned by a belief in the power of reason

The drastic population decline brought about by the Black Death also brought huge social and economic changes. A shortage of labour and more available land, particularly in Western Europe, increased the bargaining power of the peasant worker. Uprisings among the peasantry increased and by the sixteenth century, serfdom (a type of bonded labour) had largely disappeared in places like England, although it remained a feature of Eastern Europe and Russia, areas less affected by the Black Death