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10,045 illustrations — Lessons from history, biography, and world events
In the spring of 1940, Gladys Aylward — a former parlour maid from Edmonton, London, barely five feet tall — faced an impossible task. With...
SermonWise.ai generates complete sermon outlines for any passage across 17 theological traditions.
In 1937, as the German church fractured under Nazi pressure, a young Lutheran pastor named Dietrich Bonhoeffer sat in the illegal Confessing Church seminary at...
On March 30, 1842, in the small town of Jefferson, Georgia, Dr. Crawford Williamson Long did something no surgeon had ever done. He soaked a...
On the night of January 7, 1610, Galileo Galilei aimed a telescope he had built himself toward Jupiter from Padua, Italy. What he saw puzzled...
In the autumn of 1943, a slim Polish social worker named Irena Sendler walked through the gates of the Warsaw Ghetto carrying a carpenter's toolbox....
On February 23, 1944, fourteen-year-old Anne Frank climbed to the attic of 263 Prinsengracht in Amsterdam and peered out through the window. For nineteen months,...
In 1988, Grete Winton was rummaging through her attic in Maidenhead, England, when she discovered a worn scrapbook. Inside were lists of children's names, photographs,...
The schedule for the 1924 Paris Olympics arrived weeks before the Games, and Eric Liddell studied it carefully. The 100-meter heats were set for Sunday,...
In the spring of 1940, as Japanese forces closed in on the city of Yangcheng in Shanxi Province, a small British missionary named Gladys Aylward...
On Easter Sunday, April 9, 1939, Marian Anderson stood before the Lincoln Memorial and opened her mouth to sing. Months earlier, the Daughters of the...
On July 11, 1924, Eric Liddell stood in the starting blocks at Colombes Stadium in Paris — but not for the race anyone expected. The...
On the morning of March 12, 1930, a sixty-year-old man in a simple white dhoti stepped out of the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, India, carrying...
In the spring of 1924, Eric Liddell was the fastest man in Scotland and favored for Olympic gold in the 100 meters. But when the...
On the morning of October 6, 1536, guards led William Tyndale from the damp stone cells of Vilvoorde Castle near Brussels to a wooden stake...
In 1904, Mary McLeod Bethune — the fifteenth of seventeen children born to former slaves in Mayesville, South Carolina — traveled to Daytona Beach, Florida,...
On May 5, 1945, Japanese machine gun fire swept across the Maeda Escarpment on Okinawa — a jagged thirty-five-foot cliff face the Americans had nicknamed...
On February 18, 1943, twenty-one-year-old Sophie Scholl climbed the marble staircase of the University of Munich carrying a suitcase full of contraband. Not weapons. Not...
In August 1936, the Olympic Stadium in Berlin was packed as Adolf Hitler watched from his private box. On the field below, two long jumpers...
In June 1752, Benjamin Franklin and his son William walked to an open field on the outskirts of Philadelphia, carrying a silk kite fitted with...
In the winter of 1748, Johann Sebastian Bach sat at his desk in Leipzig, his eyesight failing, his hands stiffened by age. He was sixty-three...
On August 5, 1942, German soldiers arrived at the orphanage on Sienna Street in the Warsaw Ghetto with orders to empty it. Inside were roughly...
On October 3, 1904, Mary McLeod Bethune welcomed five little girls and her own son into a rented cottage in Daytona Beach, Florida. She had...
In 1723, Johann Sebastian Bach took up his post as Thomaskantor at St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, Germany. The position was grueling — he was...
On the evening of February 23, 1807, the House of Commons erupted in something rarely heard within those walls — a standing ovation. Members of...