Terra Tempus Daily #143 · October 21, 2026

Round 1

Alaska Purchase

1867 · 19th Century

Why there: Russia's remote North American colony was costly to defend and nearly indefensible against British Canada next door, so selling it to the neighboring United States made more strategic sense than losing it in a future war.

Why then: Russia, weakened and cash-strapped after the Crimean War, wanted to offload the territory before Britain could seize it, while a post-Civil War United States had the treasury and expansionist appetite to buy it in 1867.

• This was the Alaska Purchase, agreed in 1867, when the United States bought Alaska from the Russian Empire for $7.2 million.
• Secretary of State William Seward negotiated the deal, derided as 'Seward's Folly' and 'Seward's Icebox.'
• The territory later proved enormously rich in gold, fish, and oil.

Round 2

Withheld from the archive

This round was played, but we do not republish it here. Recent events involving mass civilian casualties are excluded from our public archive under our content policy, whatever their place in the day’s puzzle.

Round 3

Battle of Lake Khasan

1938 · 20th Century

Why there: The lake sits at the tripoint where Soviet, Korean (Japanese-controlled), and Manchurian territory met, so the vaguely defined hills overlooking Lake Khasan became a flashpoint where Soviet and Japanese claims physically overlapped.

Why then: By 1938 Japan had occupied Manchuria and was pressing into China, while the USSR was fortifying its Far East, and both militaries were eager to probe each other's strength and modern armored doctrine before the wider war they both anticipated.

• This was the 1938 Battle of Lake Khasan, fought between the Soviet Union and Imperial Japan near the junction of present-day Russia, China, and Korea.
• The Soviet victory, though costly, helped set the stage for the larger Battles of Khalkhin Gol the following year.
• It marked one of the first major engagements of escalating Soviet-Japanese border tensions in the late 1930s.

Round 4

Battle of Covadonga

718 CE · Medieval

Why there: The steep, easily-defended valleys of the Asturian Picos de Europa in the far north offered refuge to Christian fighters where Muslim cavalry lost its advantage, at the edge of a peninsula that Umayyad armies had swept across but never fully subdued in its rugged mountains.

Why then: The clash came in the aftermath of the rapid 711 Umayyad conquest of Visigothic Iberia, when Muslim forces were overstretched at their northern limit and a local resistance could coalesce before central control solidified.

• This battle is traditionally dated to between 718 and 722 CE.
• Pelagius (Don Pelayo) led the Asturian resistance against Umayyad forces (the Battle of Covadonga).
• It is regarded as the symbolic beginning of the Reconquista and the founding of the Kingdom of Asturias.

Round 5

Battle of Edessa

260 CE · Antiquity

Why there: Edessa lay in northern Mesopotamia along the contested Roman-Persian frontier, a fortified crossroads guarding the invasion routes between the two empires, making it a natural flashpoint whenever either power pushed east or west.

Why then: The mid-3rd century was the Roman Empire's 'Crisis of the Third Century,' when plague, civil war, and constant usurpations left its armies overstretched just as the newly aggressive Sasanian dynasty under Shapur I replaced the weaker Parthians and seized the initiative on the frontier.

• At the Battle of Edessa (260 CE), the Sasanian king Shapur I captured the Roman emperor Valerian.
• Valerian was the only Roman emperor ever taken prisoner by a foreign power.
• Shapur commemorated the victory in monumental rock reliefs at Naqsh-e Rostam in Persia.