Pakal reigned for almost seventy years from the city of Palenque in the Mayan civilization. He is remembered as a builder of great works and a recorder of historical events.

The collapse of the classical Mayan civilization has long been considered somewhat mysterious. It happened around the eighth or ninth century CE, so long before the arrival of the Europeans. The leading theory is that drought and agricultural failure led to a massive famine and the loss of much of the population. Once such a large proportion of the population had died, there were not enough people left to maintain the administration of the empire.

The Aztec were a warring civilization who lived in what is now Mexico before the arrival of the Spanish in the sixteenth century. The Spanish quickly obliterated the Aztec Empire and massacred its people. The Aztecs were certainly not a peaceful people, and they engaged in human sacrifices for religious purposes. It is true that they did not have a written language. 

Cuzco is a city in modern-day Peru. It was once the heart of the sprawling Andean civilization of the Incas. The famous city of Machu Pichu is very close by. The Incans were an imperial civilization who conquered and enslaved neighboring peoples, but they themselves were quickly conquered once the Spanish arrived and brought with them superior technology and disease.

Chichen Itza was built by the Maya people in what is known today as Yucatan, Mexico. Its exact date of establishment is unknown, but was abandoned in 1400 AD.

The world's first printing press was invented in China, several centuries before its independent invention in Europe, but the history of the world is often Eurocentric, and so when we ask the question "Who invented the printing press?" the most common answer is a German named Johannes Gutenberg, who invented his printing press in 1439. The printing press allowed manuscripts to be mass-produced for the first time in European history, allowing a far greater number of people to access literature and education.

From the sixteenth century through the eighteenth century, the Dutch were major players in global trade. To help encourage the spread of wealth and to facilitate risky trading ventures over immense distances, the Dutch pioneered several banking institutions which quickly spread to England and the rest of Western Europe. 

Gunpowder was invented in China during the Song Dynasty, likely in the ninth century. Existing from the ninth to the eleventh centuries, the Song Dynasty was a very innovative society; many inventions are credited to China during this time period. Gunpowder spread slowly westward and was a part of European society by the twelfth or thirteenth century.

The Battle of Nagashino is often considered to be a turning point in Japanese social and military history. It is also often wrongly claimed to be the first time gunpowder was used in a Japanese battle. The correct answer is that it was the first battle in which rotating volleys of fire were used by an organized group of well-trained soldiers under the leadership of the infamous Oba Nobunaga. This revolutionized Japanese society because it changed the rules about who could fight a battle effectively. Suddenly the Samurai, with their lifetime of dedicated training, were less useful than a well-drilled regiment firing in a rotating fashion. The Feudal System would begin to erode as a result, at least until firearms were banned among the peasantry of Japan.

The Monroe Doctrine was issued by the United States’ President James Monroe in 1823. It was issued in response to the wave of South American independence movements that had swept the European powers out of almost all territory in the Western hemisphere. The Monroe Doctrine threatened that the United States would intervene on behalf of the Latin American republics if the European powers tried to recapture territory in the Western hemisphere. It is one of the most significant foreign policy tenets in United States history and remains influential to this day.