The names are grouped by order of the historical period in which they were writing, which is not necessarily the same as the period in which they specialised.
Chroniclers and annalists, though they are not historians in the true sense, are also listed here for convenience.
Japanese
Japanese might mean:
Marco Polo
Marco Polo was born in 1254 and died on January 8,1324. He was an Italian trader and explorer. He was one of the first Europeans to explore Central Asia and East Asia. Many other explorers, including Christopher Columbus, looked up to him. He could speak four languages.
Marco Polo was known for the book, "Travels of Marco Polo," where he talked about Asia.
Marco Polo was born in Venice, one of the most successful trading cities. Polo's mother died when he was very young and he was raised by his aunt and uncle. His father and uncle returned from their Silk Road travels when Marco was about 15 years old. Two years later, the three of them started their journey to Cathay (China). His family were well-known merchants, not explorers. He learned about writing, reading, and arithmetic, and how to do business.
Polo went on a 24-year trip to China with his father and uncle during the Mongol Dynasty. He left Venice at the age of 17 on a boat that went through the Mediterranean Sea, Ayas, Tabriz and Kerman. Then he travelled across Asia getting as far as Beijing. On the way there he had to go over mountains and through terrible deserts, across hot burning lands and places where the cold was horrible. He served in Kublai Khan's court for 17 years. He left the Far East and returned to Venice by sea. There was sickness on board and 600 passengers and crew died and some say pirates attacked. Nevertheless, Marco Polo survived it all.
Some scholars believe that while Marco Polo did go to China, he did not go to all of the other places described in his book. He brought noodles back from China and the Italians invented different sizes and shapes and called it pasta. Polo returned to Venice with treasures like ivory, jade, jewels, porcelain and silk.
His father had borrowed money and bought a ship. He became wealthy because of his trading in the East. His nickname was Marco Il Milione, due to an ancestor of his called Emilione.
Soon after Polo returned from his journeys he fought in a war against Genoa, got captured and put in prison. When he was in prison, he became friendly with a fellow prisoner, Rusticello, who was a writer of romances and novels. He told the writer about all his adventures, which became a book called "The Travels of Marco Polo". The published version was written by Rustichello da Pisa, based on what Polo had told him. It became famous throughout Europe. In the book he said that Kublai Khan's wealthy new empire had a postal system. He also talked about the Chinese people. China used paper money that was made from mulberry bark.
Herpes zoster
Herpes zoster (also known as shingles or zona) is a disease in humans. The same virus that causes chickenpox also causes shingles. The symptoms are pain and a rash with blisters. The shingles vaccine reduces the risk of shingles. Antivirus medicine can reduce the seriousness and duration of shingles if started within 3 days of the rash.
Shingles is a viral disease produced by the (VZV), the same virus that causes chicken pox. Its symptoms include pain and a blistering rash that occurs along the nerves that contain dormant virus. You can not catch shingles. However, you can catch chicken pox through direct contact with someone who has shingles, by touching the area of the rash. Most people who get shingles are old. It sometimes infects younger people, or people with a weakened immune system. Stress may trigger shingles. The disease starts with tingling, itchiness, or pain on an infected person's skin. After a few days, the disease causes a blistering rash. This rash may be on the trunk or face. The rash grows into small blisters filled with fluid. These blisters dry out and crust over for several days. The rash causes anything from mild itching to extreme pain. The rash stays in one region of the body.
The shingles virus is contagious from person to person only by direct contact. For this reason, persons with shingles are advised to limit contact with those who are not immune to chicken pox, those with increased risk are young children and pregnant women. Contracting chickenpox when one is pregnant can be dangerous to the unborn child.
If people have had chickenpox, they cannot get chickenpox from someone else again. However, it is thought that contact with a shingles patient may trigger a person's own dormant chickenpox virus to become shingles.
Doctors recommend antiviral drugs, steroids, antidepressants, anticonvulsants, and topical agents to treat shingles. The antiviral drugs acyclovir, valacyclovir, and famcyclovir can reduce the severity of shingles.
Shingles can be very painful and itchy. It is not very dangerous to healthy people, and it usually ends without major problems. The rash and pain last 3 to 5 weeks. Sometimes, serious problems like temporary, partial facial paralysis, ear damage, or
encephalitis may occur. Persons with shingles on the upper half of the face need immediate medical attention: the virus may cause serious damage to the eyes. Most people who have shingles have only one attack of the disease in their lifetime. However, people with AIDS, cancer or weak immune systems may have multiple attacks.
A Brief History of Time
A Brief History of Time (1988) is a book written by the scientist and mathematician Stephen Hawking. The subject of the book is cosmology, the story of the universe.
There are two other versions of this book: The "Illustrated A Brief History of Time" and "A Briefer History of Time". The Illustrated A Brief History of Time has pictures to help explain its ideas. It was also updated because new information was found. A Briefer History of Time is shorter than the first version and was also updated.
This book is very popular and well-known. This book was on the "London Sunday Times" bestseller list for over 4 years.
In this book, Hawking talks about many theories in physics. Some of the things that he talks about are the history of physics, gravity, how light moves in the universe, space-time, elementary particles (very small objects that make up things in the universe), black holes, the Big Bang (the theory that the universe started from one point), and time travel (the idea that travel can be done to the past and to the future.)
In the first part of the book, Hawking talks about the history of physics. He talks about the ideas of philosophers such as Aristotle and Ptolemy. Aristotle, unlike many other people of his time, thought that the Earth was round. He also thought that the sun and stars went around the Earth. Ptolemy also thought about how the sun and stars were located in the universe. He made a planetary model that described Aristotle's thinking. Today, it is known that the opposite is true; the earth goes around the sun. The Aristotle/Ptolemy ideas about the position of the stars and sun was disproved in 1609. The person who first thought of the idea about the Earth going around the sun was Nicholas Copernicus. Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler, two other scientists, helped to prove that Copernicus's idea was right. They looked at how the moons of some planets moved in the sky, and they used this to prove Copernicus right. Isaac Newton also wrote a book about gravity, which helped to prove Copernicus's idea right.
Hawking describes the motion of planets moving around the sun and how gravity works between the planets and the sun. He also talks about the ideas of absolute rest and absolute position. These ideas are about the thought that events stay in place over a period of time. This was found not to be true by Newton's laws of gravity. The idea of "absolute rest" did not work when objects move very fast (at the speed of light, or light speed).