In 1806 the tenuous alliance between Prussia and Napoleonic France became increasingly strained by French expansionist policies and Prussia declared war in October, beginning the War of the Fourth Coalition. Except for its ally Saxony, Prussia was alone in its fight against France during this opening phase of the war.... More
The Pueblos Native American Indians were a collection of tribes living in Arizona and New Mexico. They lived in villages, frequently in dwellings carved out of cliffsides, and their economies were primarily agricultural. The Spanish colonized what was to become New Mexico in 1601. Once there, they persecuted and subjugated... More
The pharaohs of Ancient Egypt were not just all powerful temporal rulers, they expected to become gods in the afterlife and constructed massive funerary monuments, filled with all the everyday objects they could possibly need, to serve them in the next world. The first pyramid at Giza, the oldest of... More
In 1774, the British Parliament signed the Québec Act, which outlined new legislative structures and territorial boundaries for the territory of Québec. Québec was the former French territory of New France, which had been ceded to Britain under the 1763 Treaty of Paris following the Seven Years’ War. The act... More
After victory in the Seven Years’ War, the British gained possession from France of vast Canadian territories together with the western hinterlands of their American colonies. In the aftermath of the war, those American colonies became increasingly alienated by the British government’s attempt to recoup its war debts by ‘taxation... More
The Race to the Sea was the last mobile phase of the war on the Western Front until the German Spring Offensive in 1918. It arose when the Allied advance after the First Battle of the Marne was halted by well-fortified German defences at the Battle of the Aisne. Each... More
The Rashidun (‘Rightly Guided’) were five close companions of the prophet Muhammad who were, successively, caliphs during the expansion of the Islamic Empire (632–61). The empire dissolved into civil war with the assassination of Caliph Uthman (656–61 (the ‘first Fitna’) and again with the death of the first Umayyad caliph,... More
The Great Schism of 1054, a dispute between Rome and Constantinople over who held jurisdiction over the Church in Sicily, permanently divided Christianity between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church. By 1100 Roman Catholicism reached into most of western and central Europe, with the Pope acting as the centralized... More
Following Saladin’s decisive victory at Hattin in 1187, the Kingdom of Jerusalem sans Jerusalem, was reduced to isolated pockets of coast round Antioch, Tripoli and Tyre. Three armies arrived at intervals in the Holy Land: Leopold V of Austria commanding the imperial German forces; King Philip II with the French;... More
John Knox, the leader of the Scottish Reformation, spent 18 months as a French galley-slave for his early muscular non-conformity. In 1555, with influential lairds, the ‘Lords of the Congregation’, now espousing Protestantism, he returned to Scotland, and soon local ‘reformations’, featuring the ‘cleansing’ of churches and friaries of ‘popish... More
A few month of economic revival following the May 1924 election sent the minority coalition of the DVP (German People’s Party), Centre (Zentrum) Party and DDP (German Democratic Party) back to the polls on 7 December 1924 in the hope that they would gain a working majority. This resulted in... More
Once again the presidential government, led by Franz von Papen (Zentrum/Centre) went to the polls on 31 July 1932, in the hope of securing a parliamentary majority. The elections were held against a backdrop of economic depression, with unemployment at nearly 30 per cent. The were accompanied by political violence;... More