Having secured Leyte, the Americans under General MacArthur attacked Mindoro, the large island south of Manila Bay that would provide air cover for an assault on Luzon and the capital. The Western Visayan Task force reached Mindoro on 13 December and the Americans quickly secured the island, constructing an airbase... More
Post-colonial Africa was divided into 54 countries with a myriad different ethnic, cultural, religious and linguistic groups. It is widely believed that this has led to decades of coups, border conflicts, violent insurrection and war and organized guerrilla activity throughout Africa. Internecine conflict has created many displaced persons on the... More
Unlimited Access for library users. Once your library subscription is in place, and you have been supplied with your institutional log-on, your users will be able to access all downloadable products, watermark-free, for the specified period. When your users choose a map they will be able to download it directly... More
Before the 19th century, life was overwhelmingly ‘nasty, mean, brutish and short’; life expectancy was rarely above 30 at birth anywhere, and often significantly less through the impact of pestilence, famine and war. The Industrial Revolution, which began in western Europe, ushered in an age of rapidly increasing life expectancy... More
The predominant language of China, Han, with some 1.2 billion speakers, is divided into eight different dialect groups, each with hundreds of sub-dialects and variations which all belong to the Sino-Tiebetan family of languages. China’s official language, Mandarin (literally ‘the speech of officials’), is based on the language spoken by... More
Unsupported by fixed supply sources, the English army often resorted to seizing produce and money from the local French population during its various campaigns in in France during the Hundred Years’ War. Campaigns of deliberate pillaging for supplies, known as chevauchées, were also seen as a method of reducing the... More
When Confederate commander George Crittenden reached the emplacements of his subordinate Felix Zollicoffer’s in eastern Kentucky, he understood their peril. On a headland surrounded by the swollen Cumberland River, they were at grave risk of being trapped by Union General Thomas’s advance. With Union reinforcements due to arrive, Crittenden decided... More
The year 590 marked the death of Authari, king of the Lombards, a Germanic tribe that had originated in Scandinavia, who ruled much of the Italian peninsula from 568. His wife Theodelinda, a Bavarian princess, later remarried and did much to promote Nicene Christianity within Lombardian society. This was at... More
The 19th century saw London’s population grow from one million to nearly seven million inhabitants. There was huge immigration, notably Irish, and people flocked to the great metropolis seeking work. Initial building development along key main roads sprawled to become a mass of built-up areas while, further afield, the suburbs... More
In the 1820s London overtook Beijing as the world’s largest city. By 1900, it was a metropolis of almost seven million, and capital of a global empire of unprecedented scale. Headlong growth created notorious slums, and insanitary conditions resulted in a successive cholera epidemics (1831–66). In response to the ‘Great... More
The first part of the 20th century saw rapid geographical growth outside the County of London through suburban expansion into Essex, Kent, Hertfordshire, Surrey and Middlesex. Middle-class residents relocated to less built-up districts, seeking lower density suburban housing, while ‘Homes for Heroes’ were available for soldiers returning from war. The... More
Following a brief spike in the economy known as the ‘Barber Boom’ after the introduction of new economic measures in the 1972 budget, the UK economy had returned to a state of stagnation by 1974. High inflation led to strikes and a general rise in unemployment as UK manufacturing jobs... More