Missy Sullivan

Throughout human history, children have played with and cared for dolls. Miniature facsimiles of human beings have been found around the globe from all periods of history, using all kinds of materials. They range from carved wooden paddle dolls discovered in ancient Egyptian tombs to scarily realistic soft vinyl dolls programmed with artificial intelligence—and everything in between.

They weren’t all battles and bloodshed. There was also coexistence, political compromise, trade, scientific exchange—even love. MISSY SULLIVAN UPDATED: SEP 3, 2018 It’s often said that winners dictate history. Not so for the medieval holy wars called the Crusades. Muslim forces ultimately expelled the European Christians who invaded the eastern Mediterranean repeatedly in the 12th and 13th centuries—and thwarted their effort to regain control of sacred Holy Land sites such as Jerusalem.

When Jackie Robinson started at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947, he not only integrated Major League Baseball. He was signaling to the nation—on one of its biggest stages—that Black Americans would no longer accept second-class status. “Jackie Robinson gave all of us—not only black athletes, but every black person in this country—a sense of our own strength,” wrote slugger Hank Aaron in his introduction to Robinson’s autobiography I Never Had It Made.