French Revolution - HISTORY - 0 views
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began in 1789 and ended in the late 1790s with the ascent of Napoleon Bonaparte
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The upheaval was caused by widespread discontent with the French monarchy and the poor economic policies of King Louis XVI,
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Not only were the royal coffers depleted, but two decades of poor harvests, drought, cattle disease and skyrocketing bread prices had kindled unrest among peasants and the urban poor. Many expressed their desperation and resentment toward a regime that imposed heavy taxes – yet failed to provide any relief – by rioting, looting and striking.
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Napoleon Bonaparte - 0 views
Ukraine Crisis: Putin Destroyed 3 Myths of America's Global Order - Bloomberg - 0 views
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Every era has a figure who strips away its pleasant illusions about where the world is headed. This is what makes Vladimir Putin the most important person of the still-young 21st century.
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Putin has done more than any other person to remind us that the world order we have taken for granted is remarkably fragile. In doing so, one hopes, he may have persuaded the chief beneficiaries of that order to get serious about saving it.
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In the early 19th century, a decade of Napoleonic aggression upended a widespread belief that commerce and Enlightenment ideas were ushering in a new age of peace.
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François Hollande's Apology Tour-and What Americans Should Learn From It | Th... - 0 views
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Not only has France apologized for some past actions, it has also stopped boasting of others. in 2005, the government of Jacques Chirac quietly but firmly refused to mark in any but the most restrained way the bicentennial of the Battle of Austerlitz—arguably, the greatest French military victory of all time, carried out by Napoleon Bonaparte against Austria and Russia. Modern France, it was explained, had no business celebrating a bloodbath carried out by a repressive, undemocratic ruler as part of a campaign of naked imperial expansionism.
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in the past quarter-century, conservatives have successfully cast any attempt to discuss the country’s historical record impartially in the political realm as a species of heresy—“blaming America first,” as Jeanne Kirkpatrick put it as far back as 1984. A turning point of sorts came in 1994, when the Smithsonian Institution planned an exhibit of the aircraft that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, accompanied by material that highlighted the human toll of the bombing, inviting debate on its morality. The outcry from conservatives and veterans groups was deafening, and few politicians dared to defend the Smithsonian, which eventually canceled the exhibit.
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It would be wrong to say that the French have moved away from sentiments of patriotism and national pride. But the country’s cultural and political elites now tend, overwhelmingly, to phrase their patriotism in terms of “ideals” and “values” to which, they readily admit, the country has often failed to live up.
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History News Network | Why Historians Need Imagination - 0 views
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There are two types of imagination: Fantasy-directed imagination, and Reality-directed imagination.
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Fantasy-directed imagination is aimed at depicting a scenario that goes beyond reality. An example of fantasy-directed imagination would be the creation of Mickey Mouse.
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Reality-directed imagination, on the other hand, is aimed at depicting a scenario that reflectsreality, whether as it is known at present or as it is known to have existed in the past. An example of reality-directed imagination would be the study of Napoleon.
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Confessions of a Columnist - The New York Times - 0 views
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a year ago, I imagined that conservatism was sclerotic but ideologically committed, and that liberalism was wrong about the world but pretty good at fearmongering and voter targeting. But my intellect and experience were wrong, and Trump’s Napoleonic intuitions were correct: The Republicans were all low-energy men underneath, and the liberal elites were as vulnerable to him as the Cameron Tories and Blairites were to Brexit.
Spanish colonization of the Americas - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views
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Colonial expansion under the crown of Castile was initiated by the Spanish conquistadores
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During the Napoleonic Peninsular War in Europe between France and Spain, assemblies called juntas were established to rule in the name of Ferdinand VII of Spain
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The Spanish conquest of Mexico is generally understood to be the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire (1519–21) which was the base for later conquests of other regions.
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Trump is the GOP's Frankenstein monster. Now he's strong enough to destroy the party. -... - 0 views
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This would not be the first revolution that devoured itself.
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Then there was the party’s accommodation to and exploitation of the bigotry in its ranks. No, the majority of Republicans are not bigots. But they have certainly been enablers
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Then there was the Obama hatred, a racially tinged derangement syndrome that made any charge plausible and any opposition justified.
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The West's desire to 'liberate' the Middle East remains as flawed as ever | Voices | Th... - 0 views
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The West's desire to ‘liberate’ the Middle East remains as flawed as ever
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As General de Gaulle set out for the Middle East in April of 1941, he famously wrote that “towards the complicated Orient, I flew with simple ideas”. They all did. Napoleon was going to "liberate" Cairo, and Bush and Blair were going to "liberate" Iraq; and Obama, briefly, was going to "liberate" Syria.
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And so they still must be. But back in 1941, things went badly wrong for de Gaulle’s tiny Free French army. The "Army of the Levant" – officially fighting for Vichy France – did not surrender. Anxious to avoid the shame of the French military collapse before the Nazi Wehrmacht in April and May of 1940, it fought with great bravery against both de Gaulle’s rag-tag army and the British and Australians who accompanied them.
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How Should America Manage the Rise of China? - The Atlantic - 0 views
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America’s decline relative to a rising China has sparked interest among academics about power shifts in the international order—whether they can happen peacefully and under what conditions; what precedents exist and what they tell us. Now comes an important book, Twilight of the Titans, by Joseph M. Parent and Paul K. McDonald, who use quantitative analysis of power transitions to analyze the problem. What they find provides a warning to a rising China, and a road map for a declining United States to regain its standing.
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The Harvard political scientist Graham Allison called the problem “the Thucydides Trap,” in which the country in relative decline so fears the rise of a challenger that it chooses to go to war to prevent it. And while Allison’s book Destined for War has its detractors, it served the worthwhile purpose of drawing us all back to Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian Wars and sounding the alarm that U.S. policies designed to confront China risked accelerating American decline.
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History has really seen only one peaceful hegemonic transition: Britain to the United States in the late 19th century. It remains an open question whether nuclear weapons will stabilize hegemonic transition.
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NATIONAL UNITY: ITALY (1848-1876) - 0 views
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After Napoleon I was defeated, the Congress of Vienna restored Italy to its status ante-bellum; it was divided into a number of territories, most of which were ruled by outside powers.
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His prolific output of propaganda, including his The Duties of Man, helped the unification movement stay active in its more dormant phases.
Can Anyone Hear What Caitlin Fink Is Saying? - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Feminists have wrestled with their relationship to pornography ever since the early ’70s, when the Rimbaud-loving Jersey girl Andrea Dworkin joined forces with America’s most lighthearted legal scholar, Catharine MacKinnon, and created sex-negative feminism. Their arguments about the nexus between violence against women and hard-core pornography were powerful, but the whole enterprise was a hard sell in the midst of the sexual revolution.
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“No woman needs intercourse; few women escape it,” Dworkin said—what happened to Rimbaud?—from deep within her overalls, and she lost the crowd. MacKinnon’s legal argument depended on pornography’s potential violation of the equal-protection clause, a delicate proposition, and one she was advancing at a time when free speech was at the very center of the youth movement
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The women were raising important questions, but in 1988 the World Wide Web arrived, blotting out the sun and giving us porn without end
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Comparative Colonization in Asia - 0 views
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Several different Western European powers established colonies in Asia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Each of the imperial powers had its own style of administration, and colonial officers from the different nations also displayed various attitudes towards their imperial subjects.
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Nonetheless, British colonials held themselves apart from local people more than other Europeans did, hiring locals as domestic help, but rarely intermarrying with them. In part, this may have been due to a transfer of British ideas about the separation of classes to their overseas colonies.
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to Christianize and civilize the peoples of Asia, Africa, and the New World
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Charles III of Spain: an Enlightened Despot, Part II | History Today - 0 views
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Hercules for his brave struggle with the hydra of the Inquisition
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With him in charge of the government, Charles was able to get into his stride as an enlightened despot: schools were founded to fill the void left by the expulsion of the Jesuits; the currency was reformed; a census was taken; and Madrid became, for the first time, a city worthy of Europe
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He did not like it, but he believed that the Spaniards wanted it, and the events of 1766 had taught him the danger of offending national prejudices
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Nicholas I: Russia's Last Absolute Monarch | History Today - 0 views
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Nicholas’ power as an Autocrat was indeed so absolute that any command, even as extreme as the one to march on France, was fully within his power should he choose to exercise it
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Throughout his reign, Nicholas jealously guarded the recognized prerogatives of the ruler in all aspects of government and he exercised a more personal control in state affairs than any other ruler since Peter the Great
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Only a strong Emperor could bear the crushing burden of such a system of personal government and, as events after 1848 made clear, even Russia’s iron-willed Emperor himself could not bear such a burden in the face of serious crises.
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The Throne of Zog: Monarchy in Albania 1928-1939 | History Today - 0 views
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September 1st, 1928, Europe gained a new kingdom and its only Muslim king: thirty-two year-old Zog I of Albania
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the birth of the Kingdom of Albania – a native monarchy, not an alien imposition – did attract a flicker of international attention
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For five decades, Albania was synonymous with hard-line Marxism-Leninism
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Power of the Court | History Today - 0 views
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Courts are a key to understanding European history. Defined as ruling dynasties and their households, courts transformed countries, capitals, constitutions and cultures. Great Britain and Spain, for example, both now threatened with dissolution, were originally united by dynastic marriages; between, respectively, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile in 1469; and between Margaret Tudor and James IV King of Scots in 1503, leading to the accession a hundred years later of their great-grandson, James I, to the throne of England.
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The House of Orange was crucial to the formation of the Netherlands, the House of Savoy to the unification of Italy, the House of Hohenzollern to that of Germany. Dynasties provided the leadership and military forces that enabled these states to expand. As Bismarck declared, while asserting the need for royal control over the Prussian army, blood and iron were more decisive than speeches and majority decisions.
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Like previous European conflicts, including the Napoleonic Wars and repeated wars ‘of Succession’, the First World War was in part a dynastic war; between the Karageorgevic rulers of Serbia, whose supporters had murdered the previous monarch from the rival Obrenovic dynasty, and the Habsburgs, determined to oppose Serb expansion, symbolised by another Serbian victim, the assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand; and between the Hohenzollerns and Romanovs for domination in Eastern Europe. The fall of four empires in 1917-22 – Romanov, Hohenzollern, Habsburg and Ottoman – was a European cataclysm comparable to the fall of the Roman Empire 1,500 years earlier.
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Europe in the Caribbean, Part I: The Age of Catholic Kings | History Today - 0 views
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remote but wealth-providing islands on the other side of the Atlantic was always lively and inquisitive
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The islands may be said to have European status not only because from the age of Queen Elizabeth to that of Napoleon they were involved in quite as many wars, rivalries and conflicts as were the great powers of the Old World themselves. The Spanish, English, French, Dutch, Swedes, Danes and, for a brief moment
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Unlike the Spaniards, the British understood from the beginning the importance of a numerous and agile merchant navy
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