As so often in Australia’s history, Melbourne was founded through fraud when explorer John Batman, an Australian who spoke in several aboriginal dialects, made a “deal” with aborigines to lease land on behalf of investors.
While offering the Aborigines any compensation at all was progressive in a colonial culture that preferred to simply run them [...]

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Almost everyone who comes to Copenhagen visits the little mermaid harbour. Hans Christian Andersen’s popular fairy tale is about a young mermaid willing to give up her life in the sea and her identity as a mermaid to gain a human soul and the love of a human prince.
Love is capricious. In the end, [...]

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Tehran is currently among the most densely populated capitals on the planet, yet for many centuries Tehran was nothing more than a small, insignificant city on the stage of world history.
Aga Muhammed Khan, founder of the Qajar dynasty, chose Tehran as the capital of the Persian Empire in 1795, largely because of its location on [...]

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