Dates with History Midweeker
The historical joyride for a curious mind
Dates with History Midweeker — Spend a few minutes with me exploring historical snippets and fascinating facts relating to this week. 3rd June 2026.
Happy Wednesday!
Another great midweek line-up for you, so let’s dive straight in.
Hiram Bingham III and the Inca Empire
When Hiram Bingham III, the son of missionaries, was born in Honolulu in 1875, his parents rather hoped he would follow their lead. Hiram had other ideas. A historian of Latin America at Yale, his mind was perpetually elsewhere—obsessed with the lost cities of the Inca.
At its height by the 1530s, the Inca Empire ran like a spine down the Andes—today’s southern Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, all the way into Chile and Argentina.
In barely a century, the Inca had constructed near-impossible road systems through mountainous terrain, with cities of interlocking stone so precisely cut that they needed no mortar. Then Francisco Pizarro arrived in 1532, murdered the emperor, and the whole extraordinary enterprise began to unravel.
A century of empire isn’t nothing—Alexander the Great’s empire collapsed within a decade of his death in 323 BCE, while France’s First Empire under Napoleon barely managed ten years (1804–1814). On the other hand, Byzantium carried the Roman flame for around 1,100 years and—depending on where you start and stop the clock—you can stretch ‘Rome‘ itself across more than two millennia.
