The Inca empire reached its peak in the 1500s, after emerging in under a century. From 1470 they ruled from their capital Cuzco, a vast area that reached the practicable limits of its expansion with the Amazonian rainforest to the east and the Andes to the south.
At the head of the organization was the royal family ruled by the Emperor, or Child of the Sun. The Incas believed that their royal family were direct descents from the Sun god through their ancestor Manco Capac, and therefore they ruled with divine right. Each member of the royal family was known by their title, used solely by the Inca royal family. These included Auqui for an unmarried son of the Emperor and Inca for a married son. It was necessary to make this strict legal hierarchical system to define the next heir to the throne; the Emperor’s wives could number into the hundreds and illegitimate sons by his concubines were not eligible for the succession.
Administration of the empire revolved around the taxpayers, or ‘commoners’. This social group made up the majority of the Inca population and were mainly agriculturalists. These subjects were expected to pay their taxes as energy or labour. The tight social categories were rigorously enforced because they dictated who was liable to pay tribute.
On the other hand, the agriculturists retained enough land to feed themselves but were close to government and the religious owned land to work on also. When it was sowing or harvesting time all other tasks, but urgent government business such as warfare, were postponed so the taxpayers could focus on the land.
There are many characters in our society we are familiar with whether from books and comic books or television and movies. One of the characters we know from a variety of media is Conan the Barbarian but little is known about how he came into being. Conan is a character from the sword and sorcery genre created by a writer from Texas named Robert E. Howard in 1932. Howard’s Conan stories began as a series of articles submitted to the fantasy magazine Weird Tales. Howard’s influences ranged from the Greek writer Plutarch to the mythology works of Thomas Bulfinch. Howard wrote many more Conan stories over the next 4 year completing 21 stories.
Robert E. Howard committed suicide in 1936 after a combination of depression and the unrecoverable coma his mother entered (she died the day after Howard committed suicide). In the years after Howard’s death the Conan copyright changed hands several times and eventually wound up in the hands of L. Sprague De Camp and Lin Carter. They revised the Howard stories and sometimes rewrote them.
Conan books have been written and published by various different authors over the last 50 years, many of them trying to imitate the style of Robert E. Howard. The original Conan stories written by Howard were allowed to go out of print and were unavailable in their original form. In 2003 the original Howard stories were collected and printed by British Publisher Wandering Star and were republished in the U.S. by Ballantine. These volumes included Howard’s original stories but expanded on them by offering his notes and letters on the setting and for the world of Conan which provided a more complete look at the history of Howard’s ideas and the genesis of the character. Regardless of the history of the character the books, comic books, and the movies of the 80s have kept the Conan character alive and well in the imagination of society since he was first put into print in the 1930s by Robert E. Howard.
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Tags: 1932, 1936, American fiction, Ballantine publishing, Conan, Conan the Barbarian, History DVDs, History Store, L. Sprague De Camp, Lin Carter, Plutarch, pulp fiction, replica guns, Replica Swords, Robert E. Howard, scale model kits, sword and sorcery genre, Thomas Bulfinch, Wandering Star, Weird Tales magazine
Of the dozens of texts held sacred by the school of Judaic mysticism known as Kabbalah, perhaps the most important is the Sefer Hazohar, (literally the Book of Splendor. Indeed, students of this collection of several lengthy Kabbalistic commentaries on the Torah — most commonly known in the West as the Holy Zohar – often assign it the same stature as Judaism’s two most holy books, the Torah and the Talmud. 
And there was good reason for Jewish scholars to keep to the Zohar away from public scrutiny. The book maintains that the Torah and, by extension, all of reality exists on two distinct levels: the exoteric and the esoteric. It further posits that there is no one true interpretation of the Old Testament and that every soul is given – and, more importantly, encouraged — to make its own unique reading of scripture. 
On October 27, 1871, the infamous Boss Tweed was arrested in New York on corruption charges. For many, the arrest was long overdue as he had a disturbing stronghold on the New York political system for many years.
The growing population of New York created a need for large construction projects, municipal improvements and contract workers. It was a fertile ground for manipulative individuals to make a few extra bucks on the side. Boss Tweed was a member of The Society of Saint Tammany a charitable organization that became a filter for money jobs and votes from the immigrant community.
Though oracles were commonplace throughout ancient Greece and Rome, the most famous dwelled at Delphi, a limestone temple on the western face of Mount Parnassus. Built in the 6th century BC, the complex was presided over by a chaste and elderly priestess called the Ptyhia who channeled the “breath” of the sun god Apollo into prophecy.
Those seeking divination at Delphi came from all social strata. From criminals to kings, many sought advice from the Oracle, though how they interpreted her predictions differed wildly. Legend holds that King Croesus of Lydia went to war over the Oracle’s prediction that if he battled the Persians a great army would fall. Unfortunately for him, the army in question turned out to be his own.
