Thermopylae, or the 'Gates of Fire,' was an ancient mountain pass held during its eponymous battle during the Persian invasions of Greece in the 5th century BCE. Fighting back the 'Immortal' soldiers of Achaemenid Emperor Xerxes, King Leonidas led his Spartan and allied Greek soldiers in a glorious warriors' suicide mission. They held off the Persian invasion for long enough, however, to stall the Persian advance until they were betrayed by a local Greek named Ephialtes.

Wales is a country that composes part of the United Kingdom. It makes up one of the smaller nations of the island of Great Britain often unhappily as a result of their eastern neighbors, the English. Similar to Scotland, Wales was conquered and ruled by an outside ethnic group, the English. In the 1200s, Wales was conquered by the rising English who steadily beat back Viking incursions. Wales regained independence in the 1500s briefly, but it was reclaimed soon after by the English.

Known as one of the birthplaces of great ancient civilizations, Egypt in the early 1700s had fallen far from its height under the Pharoahs. From the 1600s until the 1800s, Egypt was under Ottoman rule with its provincial capital at Cairo. Ottoman rule did not stop the Egyptian economy, nor its culture, and it remained an extremely important international trade city widely known for its high quality textiles and carpets. Despite that, the relations between the Turkish imperialists and the Egyptian subjects were often violent as a result of ethnic and religious clashes.

St. Eustatia, or Sint Eustatius in Dutch, is a Caribbean island originally colonized by the French and English. Trading hands for decades in the 1600s, the island eventually stabilized as a main stop on the Atlantic Slave Trade's Triangular network, trafficking captured slaves and other cargo to the New World. It's in this context that Olaudah Equiano writes about the island, as he believes he is readily approaching his freedom, which gets put off for just one more minute over and over again. He is a ship hand on a boat sailing into the port of the St.

Versailles is a massive royal palace complex originally built outside Paris by Louis XIV of France, the Sun King. As the model for a European monarch's palace grounds, it was repeatedly used for diplomatic meetings to end wars, resulting in dozens of "Treaties of Versailles." The most important one, however, was brokered at the end of the Great War, also known as World War I. The peace deal crafted at this conference was criticized as overly punishing to Germany, a defeated power, which partially resulted in another war just two decades later.

20 Upper Baker Street is the home address of the Lorimer sisters, the protagonists of Romance of a Shop. Part of London's City of Westminster, Upper Baker Street was also the home of famous literary detective Sherlock Holmes. While it originated as an upper class residential neighborhood, commercial businesses moved in over time, which actually was indicated in Levy's work with the mention of a local chemist and photographer's studio (which would become extremely important to the plot).

Paternoster Row is the geographic home of England's publishing scene, with book stores and publishers lining the street. In Medieval England, monks would recite the Lord's Prayer while processing down the road, the Latin "Pater Noster" being exclaimed as the clergy marched.