"The story of the epic friendship between John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, the golden era of improv, and the making of a comedic film classic that helped shape our popular culture. "They're not going to catch us," Dan Aykroyd, as Elwood Blues, tells his brother Jake, played by John Belushi. "We're on a mission from God." So opens the musical action comedy The Blues Brothers, which hit theaters on June 20, 1980. Their scripted mission was to save a local...

"Amelia and Kylee, two young sisters, were found unharmed in their upstairs bedroom the night their teenage cousin Grace, who was babysitting them, vanished from the farmhouse in rural Missouri, leaving behind evidence of a violent struggle. Grace had been on the verge of escaping their dead-end town, the first in their family to go to college instead of getting married and going to work at the meatpacking plant. Her disappearance is a warning to...

In the second half of the eighteenth century, approximately three quarters of the Mediterranean coastline and its hinterlands were controlled by a vast Islamic power, the centuries-old Ottoman Empire. However, by the end of the First World War, this great civilisation - once regarded by Christian Europe with awe and fear - had been completely subjugated, its territories occupied by European powers. The history of imperialism in the Mediterranean involves...