World History: Micro-Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education >>>>> Eighth in a Series, A Necessary Antidote to the Wretched Quality of Education in the Minneapolis Public Schools

World History:  Micro-Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education

 

Gary Marvin Davison, Ph. D.

Director, New Salem Educational Initiative

 

A Note to My Readers   >>>>>    Introduction to a Series, Micro- Fundamentals of An Excellent Liberal Arts Education

 

So wretched are curriculum and teacher quality at the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) that I have moved to expose the deficiencies of the district in my Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools:  Current Condition, Future Prospect;  and via my Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education provide to my students in the New Salem Educational Initiative with the education of excellence that they are not getting in MPS schools.

 

In the cases of students who come to me post-grade 8, time is of the essence;  thus, that I am now at work on a micro-version of Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, so that my students may take ACT or SAT exams and apply for and gain entrance to colleges and universities upon the essence of the education that they should receive but do not in MPS schools.

 

Below, readers will find World History:  Micro-Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, the eighth of fourteen chapters that condense my larger work to the most essential information pertinent to the subject areas covered.

 

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World History:  Micro-Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education     

   

Gary Marvin Davison, Ph. D.

New Salem Educational Initiative

 

The past covers all that has been, including the creation of the universe, the creation of the cosmos, the specific formation of planet Earth and all of its geological manifestations over time, the evolution of life forms, the appearance of hominids (human-like creatures), the arrival of homo sapiens (“sapient humans”:  true humans), and the cultures and civilizations that humankind have created. 

 

Prehistory

 

The universe banged into existence 13.7 billion years ago, the earth 4.5 billion years ago.  Simple cells took life just under a billion years, fish swam 500 million years ago (mya), amphibians crawled onto the earth 360 mya, reptiles roamed at 300 mya, mammals appeared 200 mya, birds flew 150 mya, and flowers bloomed at some 130 mya .  But not until 60 million years ago did the earth know primates, and the Great Apes did not make their terrestrial entrance until 20 mya.  

 

About 4 million years ago, the hominid Australopithecus dwelt in East Africa;  this creature had a much smaller brain than would be the case for homo sapiens but its body featured many characteristics of the human.  Australopithecus came down from trees to roam the terrain of East Africa for long periods of time and, although it did still walk on all four limbs, it had the capacity to walk upright. 

 

Around 2.5 million years ago, the hominid homo habilis sidled up alongside Australopithecus on that same East Africa turf, representing a more highly developed form of proto-humanity;  this creature had a larger brain than did Australopithecus;  most notably, homo habilis could fashion tools from rocks and objects of wood, using crude tools to do work more easily than the use of bare hands would allow.

 

Approximately 1.5 million years ago, the hominid homo erectus lived contemporaneously with homo habilis, superseding that creature as a still more highly developed hominid:  Homo erectus walked upright and made decisions with a brain bigger than did homo habilis.  Homo erectus was the first creature to consciously induce fire.

 

Then, just approximately 200,000 years ago, homo sapiens appeared in places just a bit northward in the same general region of East Africa, looking physically like modern humans, manifesting abilities made possible with the same convoluted, three-pound brain that humanity possesses today.  Homo sapiens made its way out of Africa, as had homo erectus;  while the latter had headed generally on a northeastwardly trek, into Southeast, South, Central, and East Asia,  homo sapiens would initially head most notably to what we today know as Europe, encountering the creature homo neanderthalensis (Neanderthal human).  The latter did not have the facility of speech that did homo sapiens, but its brain size was actually just a bit larger, and it manifested remarkable ability to generate paintings on the walls of caves, fashion rudimentary musical instruments, and arrange burial and other sites in a way that strongly suggests sophisticated philosophical and spiritual contemplation.

 

The Neanderthals coexisted with homo sapiens but by about 75,000 years ago had been variously absorbed or competitively overwhelmed by these true humans.  Human beings then spread out with remarkable swiftness over the globe:  They ventured into most regions of Eurasia by about 150,000 B.C., boated to Australia by 100,000 B.C. (BCE),and by this time had crossed the Bering Strait into the Americas by about 17,000 B.C. (BCE).  At that point, humanity was poised geographically and physically to inhabit the entire Earth.

 

For tens of thousands of years, people grouped themselves into bands, tribes, and clans of hunter-gatherers, foraging for food and seeking or building shelter as suited their itinerant circumstances.  In time, some peoples---  first of all in the far western areas of Asia that we now call Turkey and the Middle East---   began to use the seeds of certain wild plants more dependably to grow crops.  By 10,000 years ago, people were congregating in villages in places that we now call Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Israel, and Palestine;  and growing food from an ever more sophisticated use of seeds from plants cultivated for food.  Thus did these farmers create the conditions for settled agriculture, soon adding the domestication of pigs, goats, sheep, and cows to their list of achievements.   

 

In time, people in some of these villages were so agriculturally successful that they generated a surplus which they could use to trade for goods that they did not have, or which they determined would be more efficient or convenient to obtain from others.  In this manner did trade and commerce become defining aspects of human economy;  and together this dizzying array of developments created the conditions for civilization---  and for history.

 

History

 

I. The Ancient World  (3,000 – 700 B.C. [BCE]

 

The first civilizations appeared in Sumeria  (Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates, c. 4,000 B.C. [BCE]), Egypt (along the Nile, c. 3,500 B.C. [BCE], Pakistan (Indian subcontinent, along the Indus River,c. 2,500 B.C. [BCE]), 4) Crete (Mediterranean island, c. 2,500 B.C. [BCE]), and China (along the Yellow River, c. 1,500 B.C. [BCE]).  These societies were thus with the exception of Crete located in River Valleys.  They had the defining characteristics of civilization:  writing system, cities, occupational specialization, and social stratification

 

Sumeria and other civilizations nestled between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Mesopotamia featured a priestly class, strong monarchical rulers, and a vigorous commercial life that sent traders throughout West, South, and Central Asia.  In the course of the years 3,000-1,200 B.C. (BCE), various people challenged the power of the Sumerians for dominance in Mesopotamia and in West Asia (Near East, Middle East):  Ur (3,00-2,000 B.C. (BCE);  Akkadian Empire (c. 2300 – c. 2083 B.C. (BCE);  Babylonian Empire (c. 1900 – 1595 B. C. (BCE);  Hittites (c. 1700 – c. 1200 B.C. (BCE).  

 

As the time known as the Bronze Age (3,500 – 1,000 B.C. [BCE]) came to an end, the above states declined, giving way to new powers in West Asia, including the Phoenicians (c. 1200 – 146 B.C. [BCE]---  great maritime traders and inventors of a seminal alphabet) and the people of the Assyrian Empire (c. 2000 – c. 610 B. C. [BCE]).

 

Egypt is famous for cities along the Nile, from which the pharaohs collected taxes, maintained extensive irrigation works, organized the building of the pyramids, and kept armies that variously fended off and succumbed to outsider attacks.

                                                                               

Indus Valley urban communities maintained sophisticated drainage and sewerage systems, featured mercantile as well as priestly and ruling classes, and sent traders ranging in all directions, including points of contact with their counterpart from Mesopotamia.

 

Crete (an island south of Greece, in the Mediterranean) had minimal agricultural resources, thriving on a far   -flung trade throughout the Mediterranean region.  The people of this civilization are known as the Minoans;  their successors were the people of Mycenae,  who inherited the institutions of Minoan society and thrived on the basis of these in the aftermath of Minoan decline.

 

China was ruled from urban centers along the Yellow River, thriving on the basis of agricultural surpluses claimed by the rulers of the Shang Dynasty, known especially for great ceremonial works in bronze.

 

Major Faiths emerged from the years falling between 1800 B.C. and 1500 B.C. [BCE] that would give rise to others in their respective geographical areas.  Detailed in the World Religions chapter,

these seminal faiths were Judaism, originating in today’s Israel and Palestine;  and Hinduism,  evolving in today’s India. 

 

II.  Classical Civilizations (700 B.C. [BCE] – 600 B.C. [BCE])

 

Greece   (c. 500 B.C. [BCE])

           

From the 5^th century forward, the ancient Greeks created an astoundingly sophisticated civilization that over time featured the likes of Thucydides (historian), Socrates (philosopher), Plato (philosopher), Aristotle (philosopher), Archimedes  (scientist), Pythagoras (mathematician) and Euclid (mathematician).  The Greeks organized themselves into city states (Athens, Sparta, Thebes, Syracuse), all of them oriented toward trade in the Mediterranean.  The city state of Athens is famous for establishing the first political system of democracy and for giving world civilization splendid examples of architecture such as the Parthenon (temple to Athena).  Whereas Athenians were especially skilled in maritime activity and maintained an effective navy, people in the city state of Sparta responded to tough, authoritarian rulers with an ethic based on intense physical conditioning and highly disciplined behavior productive of a highly skilled standing army.  The Greek city states united to fight off the Persians in wars spanning the years 490-477 B.C. [BCE], fought a series of destructive battles in the internecine Peloponnesian War (432-404 B.C. [BCE] among the Greeks themselves, dominated on one side by Athens and on the other by Sparta.  Sparta emerged victorious but the heyday of the Greek city states came to an end with in the aftermath of this war.

 

In Macedonia, to the north of Greece, the monarch known to history as Phillip of Macedon oversaw the establishment of military and political institutions that his son, Alexander used to expand a base of power from which his extended his hegemony with astonishing speed and skill.   Alexander was both physically vigorous and intellectually astute;  he had trained academically under the great philosopher Aristotle.  

 

Alexander the Great  (c. 336 - 323 B.C. [BCE])

 

Alexander led his armies southeastward through Asia Minor and on toward Persia.  There Alexander challenged the great regional power of Persia, a state with which the Greeks had contended and which for centuries would be a rival of Rome for dominance in West Asia and the Mediterranean. 

                                                                       

Persian power had first become a factor under the Achaemenid Empire (550 – 330 B.C. (BCE) during the reign of Cyrus the Great (r. 550 – 529 B.C. (BCE).  Administered from the palace at Susa but with Persepolis as the grand city of treasures and cultural capital of the Achaemenid rulers, Persian power under rulers such as Darius I (r. 521 – 486 B.C. [BCE]), Xerxes, and Darius III was a factor throughout the Mediterranean and West Asian areas and even at times to the borders of India.  Great successor states of Parthian Persia (247 B.C. [BCE] – 226 A.D. [CE]) and Sassanid Persia (226 – 651 A.D. [CE]) would continue as the progenitors of a major faith (Zoroastrianism, which stresses a great competitive dualism between Supreme God Ahura Mazda and Spirit of Darkness Angra Mainyu) and unique visual and literary arts in the region that we today know as Iran.  But in 333 the Achaemenid phase of Persian power came to an end with the invasion of Alexander the Great.

 

Alexander led his armies into Egypt, across West Asia, and on to northwestern India.  But in India, Alexander’s armies mutinied and he was forced to retreat---  eventually to Babylon.  In Babylon, malarial fever got the best of Alexander:  He died, his body was sent to Egypt, and his empire was divided among competing generals.  By 301 B.C. (BCE) three Alexandrian successor states had emerged:  the Antigonids in original homeland of Macedonia;  the Seleucids in Mesopotamia and Syria, and the Ptolemies in Egypt.

 

Alexander’s conquest left many other cities and clusters of cities in West Asia and North Africa in the hands of Greeks.  The importance of this cultural phenomenon is witnessed in the continuing intellectual output of the mathematician Euclid (c. 300 B.C. [BCE]), scientist Archimedes (287 -212 B.C. [BCE]), comic playwright Menander (342 – 293 B.C. [BCE]) and historian Polybius (c.200 – 118 B.C. [BCE]).

 

Rome      (c. 500 B.C. [BCE])

 

Phase One:  The Roman Republic, 509 -  250 B.C. (BCE)

 

By tradition, the story goes that Rome was founded on 21 April 753 B.C. (BCE) by a son of the god, Mars.  The son’s name was Romulus;  he and brother Remus, the story continues, developed the first community at this site, destined to be the location of a great civilization that would rock the world with its cultural splendor and imperial rule.  This first settlement overlooked the Tiber River from Palantine Hill.  Leaders of Rome from the mid-8^th century through the 6^th century B.C. (BCE) absorbed

influences from the Etruscan and Latin peoples of the region and began a process of political centralization. 

 

During the years of the Republic (509 – 250 B.C. [BCE]), laws were established by the Senate, a deliberative body of patricians (landowning elite or aristocrats) led by two consuls, the dual authority of which was meant to prevent despotism.    Another body, the Tribunal, comprised of plebeians (non-aristocratic commoners) provided their own tandem of leadership, two tribunes.  Legislation typically originated in the Senate, but the Tribunal had veto power.  The first codification of Roman law was published in 445 B.C. (BCE) as the “Twelve Tables.”

 

The territory of the Roman Republic expanded geographically as its institutions were developing politically.  During 500-300 B.C. (BCE) Roman soldiers won battles throughout Italy..  Three Punic Wars, waged over the course of the years 264 – 148 B.C. (BCE), at first posed major challenges to Roman dominance in the Mediterranean region but ultimately resulted in Roman victory over the great Carthaginian general Hannibal (defeated by Roman general Scipio in 202 B.C. (BCE)) and conclusive success in the destruction of Carthage (located in today’s Tunisia (North Africa) itself in 148 B.C. (BCE).

 

The outcome of a series of struggles among powerful leaders (Sulla prevailed over Marius, 82 B.C. [BCE];  Julius Caesar defeated Pompey, 48 B.C. [BCE]) was the assassination of Caesar in 44 B.C. (BCE) by republicans under the leadership of Marcus Brutus after Caesar had maneuvered two years earlier to have himself declared “Dictator for Life.”  By 27 B.C. (BCE) Caesar’s adoptive son, Octavian, had prevailed over rival Mark Antony and took the title “Augustus.”  With the rise of Augustus Caesar to power, the period of the Roman Republic ended and that of the Roman Empire began.  Thenceforth, an emperor ruling atop the Roman government contended with the Senate and the Tribune for power.

 

Phase Two:  The Roman Empire,  27 – 476 B.C. (BCE)

 

Territorial expansion by military units known as the legions brought Iberia, Armenia, Syria, and many areas of North Africa under Roman control.  During these years between 69 and 180 A.D. (CE), the Roman Empire matured as one of the world’s great civilizations.  Roman rule at its height reached across the continent of Europe and onward to insular Great Britain in far northern Europe, many cities of northern African, and territories across West Asia (Anatolia and today’s Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel---  to the borders of Persia). Into these areas came word and physical manifestation of the splendor of Rome.  The Romans were above all great builders, engineers, and architects known for their aqueducts, sewage and drainage systems, paved roads, and architectural marvels (Colosseum, Forum, Trajan’s column).   But they also inherited the great tradition of Greek drama and visual art, as witnessed in the work of Roman creative spirits who built upon and in some cases advanced the Greek legacy.

 

Roman creative ingenuity would continue to be manifested right up until the empire’s official demise in 476 A.D. (CE).  But with the death of Marcus Aurelius in 180 A.D., Rome entered a period of severe political and military challenges to which its leaders and citizens eventually succumbed.  During these years, Rome faced rebellions in Gaul, Syria, and many other places.  The so-called barbarians ---  such as the Franks and the Goths---  became contentious competitors in Gaul and in areas along the Danube River that Rome had previously ruled securely.  During the 4^th and 5^th centuries, Goths (378 A.D. {CE), Visigoths, Franks, Vandals, and Goths won victories in widespread parts of the Roman Empire.  By 476 A.D., the imperial armies could not control Rome.

 

Itinerant Peoples  (c. 600 B.C. [BCE] – 800 A.D. [CE] )

 

Across the expanses of Eurasia during the glory days of Rome, various peoples were on the move and staking their own territorial claims.  Across central and western Europe rushed the Celts toward the British isles.  The Franks prepared to settle more permanently in Gaul (France), where from 481 A.D. (CE) Clovis and his Merovingian house would rule until giving way to the Carolingian rulers Pepin (r. 747 – 768 A.D [CE]) and, most notably, Charlemagne, (768 – 814 A.D. [CE]).  The Goths split into the Visigoths, who eventually found most permanency in Spain.  The Ostrogoths moved through eastern Europe to strike the moral blow in Rome.  Across the steppes of Central Asia from the 6^th century B.C. (BCE) through the 2^nd century A.D. (CE) came superior horse-riding  Scythians appellation became synonymous with the very term, “barbarian.”  Most fearsome in reputation of all were the Huns, who during the 4^th and 5^th centuries A.D. (CE) struck fear in the hearts of those in southern Russia, central Europe, or the Balkans whom they harassed or engaged in combat.  Moving southward from the well-trodden Central Asian Steppes from the early 1^st century B.C. (BCE), the people known as the Kushans (seemingly originating in the nomadic Yuezhi of China) arrived in India. 

 

Developments in India (c. 321 B.C. [BCE] -  570 A.D. [CE])

 

During a period roughly corresponding to the timespan including the Roman Republic and Roman Empire, India was dominated chiefly by two dynasties:

 

The Mauryan Dynasty extended through much of northern India and at times included areas in today’s herat, Baluchistan, and Orissa.  It was in the latter area, at Kalinga, that the Emperor Ashoka led a victorious but bloody battle that turned him ever more firmly toward a Buddhist ethic of nonviolence, the creed of which was engraved on stone pillars that Ashoka had placed throughout Mauryan-held territories.  Despite his noble ethic, though, violence and confusion succeeded Ashoka’s own rule, culminating in the assassination of the last Mauryan emperor in 185 B.C. (BCE). 

 

As the competing Kushans also declined in the 4^th century A.D. (CE), a ruler taking the prestigious name of Chandragupta I (r. 320 – 330 A.D. [CE]) founded the Gupta Dyanasty at the old capital of Pataliputra.  The Guptas expanded eastward into Bengal and maintained rule in northern India until incursions by the White Huns undermined the empire, which shrunk to a region around Magadha before disintegrating around 570 A.D. (CE).

                 

Developments in China (c. 481 B.C. [BCE] -  220 A.D. [CE])

 

Matching the splendid cultural creativity of the Romans during a similar chronological period, the Chinese people during the years from 481 A.D. (CE) to 220 A.D. (CE) laid the groundwork of an imperial system that would endure long after the Roman heyday had passed:  The last emperor of China would not vacate the throne until 1911 A.D. (CE), so that the style of traditional Chinese governance persisted into the early 20^th century.

 

By 481 B.C. (BCE), the Zhou Dynasty had reached a crisis stage at which the ruler of the central government at Luoyang (in today’s Henan Province) no longer held much control over local aristocratic feudal lords.  Seven competing states officially allied to the Zhou intensified their warfare by the 3^rd century B.C. (BCE), the doctrine of Legalism (governance according to laws with clearly stated rewards for obedience and punishments for disobedience) took hold in the state of Qin (Ch’in).  The latter dominated battles among the seven regional powers until one by one these states succumbed to the military might of the Qin.  Thus it was that the First Emperor Qin Shi Huang founded the first dynasty to rule in centralized fashion throughout much of today’s China;  this was the Qin Dynasty (221-206 B.C. [BCE]), short-lived but enormously influential on the imperial system that would endure into the 20^th century.

 

During a period lasting from 202 B.C. (BCE) until 220 A.D. (CE), the rulers of the Han Dynasty built upon the foundations of Qin, combining elements of Legalism with an official promulgation of Confucianism as official state doctrine.  Han emperors sent forth armies that expanded centralized Chinese authority from the capital at Chang-an throughout an empire that at times stretched southwestward to Vietnam, westward to the Central Asian steppes, northward into Mongolia and northeastward toward Manchuria.  During the latter centuries of the Han, innovations  pertinent to the development of paper, printing, and the compass gave humankind three of its greatest inventions;  gunpowder would eventually be added as another example of Chinese technological creativity with worldwide implications.  Also emerging during the Han was a scholarly and cultural elite that prided itself in mastery of landscape painting, a form of chess, poetic expression, and numerous musical instruments as the “arts of the scholar.”

 

Developments in the Americas (c. 500 B.C. [BCE] -  c. 900 A.D. [CE])

 

In the Americas of the Classical World, particularly notable civilizations were located in Mexico, Guatemala, and Peru.

 

In the valley of Oaxaca near Mexico’s Gulf coast, over a 14-century period lasting from c. 500 B.C. (BCE) to 900 A.D. CE, there flourished the Zapotecs, based for most of this period at the leveled hilltop city of Monte Alban.  This civilization is especially notable for a sophisticated calendar, unique writing system, and ambitious public works such as a grand main plaza at Monte Alban and the city’s Temple of Danzantes, which contained hundreds of stone carvings representing defeated rivals).

 

In central Mexico the urban center of Teotihuacan thrived from the 2^nd through the 7^th century A.D. (CE) on control of the agricultural resources of the Valley of Mexico, and on domination of trade routes extending to the Gulf and Pacific Coasts of Mexico, and as far as the city of Kaminaljuyu, a Mayan center in Guatemala.  Teotihuacan was an enormous city for its day (population 200,000), organized along a major axis called ”Avenue of the Dead.” At the northern extreme of the axis was the great Pyramid of the Moon, at the southern end the Pyramid of the Sun;  at the center was a large palace complex.

               

Classic Maya culture (c. 300 – c. 900 A.D. [CE]) flourished especially in the Yucatan Peninsula and in today’s Guatemala.   Numerous city-states graced Maya territory, frequently featuring huge pyramidal stone temples, carved stone and stucco (plaster) relief statuary, and palaces, open plazas, terraces, and ball courts (for playing a game that had both recreational and sacred ritual purposes).  The Maya developed sophisticated writing, mathematic, and calendrical systems

 

Succeeding the seminal Chavin Culture (c. 1250 – c. 200 A.D. [CE]) in southern coastal Peru was the Paracas culture (c.  500 B.C. [BCE] – 200 A.D. [CE]), known for adaptations of Chavin iconography (notably feline images carved into pots), splendid textiles (sumptuously decorated with animals, both real and mythical); and the production of gold ornaments.  In another area of southern Peru, the village-dwelling people of the Nazca culture flourished from 200 B.C. (BCE) until 500 A.D. (CE);  they lived in simple homes but constructed intricate temple complexes.  In the northern valley of Peru from about 100 A.D. (CE) through the late 6^th century there flourished the Moche people, especially known as talented artisans in textiles, metalwork, potter and wood cups carved in the form of images such as a fox-headed human with a handle or spout reminiscent of a stirrup. 

 

III.  Medieval Period (600-1450 A.D. [CE])

 

The term, “medieval” refers to the time period between the years spanning the classical civilizations of Greece, Rome, India, China, and the Americas;  and the rise of those geopolitical powers and institutions that we identify with modernity. 

 

Medieval Europe, 500 – 1500 A.D. (CE)

 

The Frankish Dynasties of the Merovingian and Carolingians

 

From an original power base in Belgium and Holland, the Frankish leader Clovis (r. 481-511) moved with his forces into Gaul, there establishing  control continued by his four sons, who as the leaders of the Merovingian Dynasty secured Gaul and brought much of northern Italy under their control.   Merovingian power waned in the 7^th century, though, opening the way for a now more vigorous Frankish house, the Carolingians, to take power.  Seeking and gaining approval from the pope, the Carolingian ruler Pepin III (“Pepin the Short, ” r. 747-768)) officially deposed the last Merovingian ruler in 747 and inaugurated the Carolingian Dynasty.

 

Under Pepin’s son, Charlemagne (“Charles the Great,” r. 768-814), the Carolingians conquered

Saxony, annexed the Lombard kingdom in Italy, and moved eastward as far as the Danube in today’s Hungary.  Charlemagne gained recognition as Holy Roman Emperor from the pope in 800, increasing an already prestigious reign that witnessed this dynamic ruler reforming the Frankish church in accord with the formalities of Roman liturgy and law, sponsoring a splendid cultural life at a new capital in Aachen, Germany, and ordering the minting of a common coinage on which he himself appeared wearing the military cloak and laurel crown of a Roman emperor.  By 967 the Frankish aristocrat Hugh Capet deposed the Carolingian Louis V and founded the Capetian dynasty. 

 

The eras of Merovingian, Carolingian, and Capetian rule at the heart of Europe represented the heyday of European feudalism.  At the apex of the feudal system, the monarch and a hierarchy of aristocrats agreed to a system of mutual obligations in lord-vassal relationships.  Aristocrats owned land, the larger estates going to the highest ranking.  Land was farmed by serfs, who could not move but had the right to cultivate their tracts in perpetuity;  they gave a large portion of the harvest to the landowning lord.  Aristocrats had the obligation to provide military service;  in this capacity, they were knights and were dubbed “vassals” in “accolades” (ceremonies) pledging them in loyalty to the king or more prestigious aristocrat.

 

The Power of the Roman Catholic Church

 

Secular rule in the city of Rome continued to be in dispute throughout the medieval era, but under the institution of the papacy ecclesiastical power emanating from that great city grew into a major force of the Middle Ages.  Over the centuries, monarchs in Germany, Austria, and Austro-Hungary with landholdings extending at times to Iberia, the Balkans, and into the Italian peninsula itself claimed authority as Holy Roman Emperors (christened by popes) that ranged over territory and according to an imperial status far greater than feudal power.

                                                                                               

The prestige and influence of the church is witnessed also in the practice of monasticism, whereby monks submitted themselves to lives of seclusion in a monastery, each having particular codes of conduct, such as the famous “Rule of St. Benedict” of Nursia (c. 480 – 550).  Two of the most famous orders attempted at the genesis of their formation to commit to higher standards of discipline:  Franciscan friars followed the simple life of poverty and service modeled by St. Francis of Assissi in the early 13^th century;  and Dominican friars valued stringent academic study.

 

A religious imperative to spread the Gospel and the feudal impulse to knightly glory in battle led to the Crusades (1095-1291), which ultimately failed to defeat Muslims for control of the Holy Land (Palestine).  From 1346 until 1351, fleas carried on rodents brought the bacterium Yersinis pestis into numerous cities of Europe, bringing the Black Death:  Bacterial infection spread to humans by parasitic fleas produced bubonic plague, pneumonic plague, and blood poisoning.  About 35 million people, roughly a third of the European population at the time, died.  In the same 14^th century, the Hundred Years’ War between England and France also caused turmoil and death.

 

Contenders for Control of the Mediterranean , 395 – 1453 A.D. (CE)

 

The Byzantine Empire (395-1453)

 

The mystique of the Roman Empire can be seen in the efforts of secular European rulers to secure papal blessings as Holy Roman Emperors, but the Byzantine rulers based in Constantinople more genuinely laid claim on the Roman Empire’s territories around the Mediterranean.

 

In the year 313 A.D. the Roman Emperor Constantine, beset by barbarian threats, oversaw the construction of an alternative capital at Constantinople;  by 395 this had become an independent seat of power and the locus of a new empire that would endure until 1453.  Defeat at Manzikert in 1071, though, resulted in loss of Asia Minor;  and another defeat in Constantinople itself brought the Byzantine Empire to an end.  Both losses came to Turkish Muslims, the first known as the Seljuks, the second known as the Ottomans.

 

The Rise and Spread of Islam, 630 – 1453 A.D. (CE)

 

Upon Muhammad’s death those who would become known as Sunnis squabbled with those who would gain recognition as Shi’ites over who should be the leader as caliph (“successor” to the prophet Muhammad).  Moving forcefully as proselytizers and soldiers, Shi’ites became prominent in Persia, while the Sunnis spread Islam through most of West Asia and North Africa. 

 

During 661-750, Mu’awiyah, the governor of Syria and a distant relative of Muhammad, set up the Umayyad Dynasty with Damascus as capital, then proceed to sponsor military campaigns all across North Africa and into Spain.  From the beginning, other clusters of Sunnis ranged themselves as factions in common opposition to Umayyad rule.  By 750 another Sunni group, the Abbasids, defeated the Umayyads.  But the Abbasids, though long-lived, were not consistently powerful throughout their domains.  Rebels were successful in Spain in 756, a rival Fatimid Caliphate took power in Egypt on 969, and similar revolts spread throughout West Asia and North Africa until the Abbasids controlled little but Baghdad and immediate vicinity by the 11^th century.  By this time, the Seljuk Turks dominated the titular Abbasid caliphs, and in 1258 the Mongols stormed into Baghdad, bringing the Abbasid Caliphate to an end.  

 

In the 12^th century a rival Turks under Osman gained position to take many Byzantine cities in western Anatolia.  Encountering a devastating attack at Ankara from Mongols under the leadership of Tamerlane in 1402, the Ottomans recovered only very slowly until regainng Anatolia and the Balkans under the rules of Mehmet I (r. 1413-1421) and Mehmet II (r. 1421-1451.)  In 1453, the Ottomans took Constantinople, thus ending Byzantine rule.  Eventually Constantinople would be renamed as Istanbul, and the Ottoman Empire became the dominant new power in the Mediterranean.

 

India, too, was affected by the global sweep of Islam during the medieval era.  By the early 13^th century, an era of Muslim dynasties began in India, first with the Delhi Sultanate during 1206-1526, later with the Mughals (1526- 1739/ 1858). 

 

Sub-Saharan Africa during the Medieval Period

 

At a time when European feudalism was in its heyday;  and as Muslim empires spread Islamic civilization throughout northern Africa, West Asia, Central Asia, and into India;  succeeding empires of West Africa grew powerful on the strength of trade in goods that moved along routes extending from the Mediterranean region across the Sahara Desert and into the savanna (grassy plains) region known as the Sahel.  Trade in gold was especially important, often obtained by the West African empires in exchange for salt mined in the desert.  The empire of Ghana dominated the governmental and economic life of West Africa from the 8^th through the 11th century;  then from the early 13^th century until the early 16^th century the empire of Mali took control in the Sahel, expanding from the same essential area wherein the rulers of Ghana had been so strong.     

 

The Mali empire was founded by Sundiata Keita and became particularly renown under the rule of his grand-nephew, Mansa Musa.  These rulers were Muslims with firm connections to the power centers and mercantile economies of Islamic North Africa and West Asia.  Mansa Musa (r. 1312-1337) superintended an empire of enormous wealth, vigorously sponsoring construction in the capital at Timbuktu;  a huge library and other cultural institutions of international renown attracted an ethnically diverse congregation of scholars who gave to this imperial center great intellectual vitality.  So wealthy was Mansa Musa himself that his volume of purchases and habits of generosity on a trip to Mecca during 1324-1325 caused a greatly enhanced circulation of gold, inducing inflation that raged in North Africa for a decade thereafter.  In the early 15^th century, the state of Songhai (with capital at Gao, 250 miles [450 kilometers] downriver from Timbuktu) broke away, flourished independently, then in the 16^th century inflicted a decisive military defeat on the Mali empire---   emerging as the new imperial power of West Asia.    

 

Elsewhere south of the Sahara, the Yoruba people of southwestern Nigeria established the kingdom of Ife during the years 700-1200.  The people of Ife were adroitly governed, economically vital, and artistically creative.  Ife culture is particularly well known in the world of art for exquisite bronze sculptures, often featuring naturalistic heads signaling an intensity of spirit and dignity on the part of the subject.  As the 14^th century came to a close, the empire of Benin supplanted the Ife as the dominant power in the region centered on today’s Nigeria.  Located west of Ife, Benin grew territorially to encompass 31,000 square miles (80,000 square kilometers).  Sculptors producing both superb bronze and terracotta heads rivaled the Ife in artistry.  Merchants and traders grew wealthy on the strength of monopolies on exchanges with European commercial interests.  Trade with the Portuguese in the 15^th century brought great profits from exchanges of ivory, palm oil, gold, pepper, and slaves.

 

To the east and then southward through much of the southern part of Africa, the Mwenemutapa empire flourished from the 11^th through 15^th centuries.  The center of the empire was the Great Zimbabwe, a settlement stretching three square miles (seven square kilometers).  The settlement had over 300 buildings typically enveloped in stone enclosures.   Traders working out of this commercial and political center were able to access gold resources from the interior and make great fortunes in the international trade that flourished on the east coast of Africa.  

 

Developments at the European Periphery

 

On the periphery of Europe during the medieval period, vigorous peoples were shaking things up in ways portentous for the future.

 

In England, from the 5^th through early 11^th centuries, people moved into the isles and posed themselves against the Celtic population, which by that time had intermingled with peoples descended from the Roman legions.  Jutes, Angles, and Saxons settled and displaced the Romano-Celtic population.

 

From the late 8^th century, the Vikings ventured forth from their European homelands, first striking terror in the hearts of those whom they encountered in raids through northwestern Europe.

They struck the Midlands and for a while ruled a territory known as Danelaw.  Skilled on land and sea, they sailed to and settled Iceland (870) and Greenland (late 10^th century), and they were the first Europeans to land in North America (at points now in Nova Scotia and in borderlands between the United States and Canada---   near the very end of the 10^th century).  Another group of Vikings set up bases on the Volga and Dneiper rivers.  They moved into through and associated territories, in 879 seizing Kiev in the Ukraine.  This became the focal point for an enduring principality;  in 988 the ruler Vladimir was baptized, setting a precedent for influence of the Greek Orthodox Church, which would in this vast land become known as the Russian Orthodox Church.   

 

In 911, the leader Rollo led one Viking band in that part of France known as Normandy, first serving one Carolingian contingent against its rivals.  The Vikings held territories in Normandy bequeathed to them for their military assistance, and here they build a powerful domain grounded heavily in French culture and language.  In 1066 of the leader of the dukedom of Orange led an audaciously successful invasion of England, thereby earning for himself the appellation, William the Conqueror.  William used French and Norman administrative practices to build the strongest monarchy in Europe, and in succeeding centuries these would be integrated with the English common law and practice to create an increasingly centralized and powerful monarchy. 

 

Originating much farther away, but also appearing on the European periphery during the medieval era, were the most vigorous people of all, the Mongols.  The breadth of their roaming and impact is astounding.  In 1203 the Mongol leader Temujin led highly mobile soldiers on horseback, foot in stirrup, with more skillful rapidity than any such mounted juggernaut in history---   across northern and northwestern China, then in 1218 road southward to demolish the Kara Khitan khanate in Central Asia.  Temujin, having taken the name Genghis Khan, then led his ever more effective warriors in a six-year campaign against the Khwarezmid empire that had included much of today’s Iran and Afghanistan.  The Mongols sacked the Silk Road cities of Samarkand and Bukhara and wiped out everyone in any town who dared to resist.  The Golden Horde contingent of Mongol forces overran Russia and took Kiev under Ogedei;  another Mongol force led by Mongol challenged the Abbasid caliphate;  another force took control of Baghdad in 1279 and by the same year Kublai Khan had established control over China that last as the Yuan Dynasty until 1368, the Mongols would rule in China.

 

East and Southeast Asia during the Medieval Era

 

China

 

Prior to the arrival of the Mongols as an outside ruling force, three native Chinese dynasties---  Sui (581-618), Tang (618-906), and Song (960-1279)---  made a major impact on this most influential civilization in East Asia. Sui Emperors Wendi and his successor, Emperor Yangdi, were successful centralizers and vigorous builders:  They superintended construction of a Grand Canal (linking North and South for swift shipments of grain and other goods) and oversaw elongation of the Great Wall.  Rebel Li Yuan supplanted Sui r founded the Tang Dynasty in 618 and, now ruling as Emperor Gaozu, secured control over all of China by 624.  The Tang Dynasty is known for administrative effectiveness, intellectual vitality, and cultural cosmopolitanism;  across the Old Silk Road came traders and people who were the masters of many fields who would arrive at the terminus of Chang’an, where they invigorated the great Tang capital with their painting, sculpture, scholarship, and religious ideas, prominently including those of Buddhism.  During the Song Dynasty, the Chinese empire

was not as centrally powerful or as territorially extensive as previous dynasties and those to come, but Song innovators introduced paper currency;  utilized wise field rotation, new irrigation works, and adept applications of natural fertilizers to doubled rice production;  experimented with gunpowder, and via the examination system created the most merit-based civil service in the world during the medieval era. 

The Mongols moved aggressively into northern China during the 1260s and by 1279 had occupied all of Song Dynasty territory, inaugurating in Beijing their own Yuan Dynasty.  The Mongols famously stormed on through the Korean peninsula and attempted to cross the East China Sea to Japan,

once in 1274 and again in 1281;  each time, though strong tempests foiled their but their plans.  In Japanese characterization and lore, their natural benefactors became known as kamikaze:  “divine winds.”

 

Japan

 

The Japanese by this time had evolved as a society heavily influenced by China but very much a land of its own identity and traditions.  The first Japanese cultures to leave significant physical remains were known as the Jomon and Yayoi, during the late centuries BC (BCE) and early centuries AD (CE).

From the 4^th century A.D. (CE), politically powerful occupants of the Yamato plain (the area enveloping Nara and Kyoto) emerged dominant.  They established a Chinese-style capital at Nara in 710, then in 794 moved the imperial court to Kyoto.  In Kyoto, from 794 until 1185 (known as the Heian period), a dynasty of emperors came under the dominance of the Fujiwara family, women from which  frequently married men of the imperial house.  The period became known for a refined aesthetic that represented an aristocratic synthesis of Chinese and indigenous ideas into forms uniquely Japanese.  Court nobles valued poetry, visual art, and music.  During 1180-1185 warring clans fought the Gempei Wars, with Minamoto Yoritomo leading his clan to dominance.  Under the Minamoto, the institution of the shogunate (with its own power base at Kamakura) developed, whereby military forces of great physical vigor and highly defined ritual replaced the Fujiwara family as the power behind the throne.  By 1392, another military clan, the Ashikaga, successfully challenged the Kamakura Shogunate and until 1573 dominated a government (Ashikaga Shogunate) in which both this clan’s military institutions of government and the imperial house were located in Kyoto.

 

Korea

 

Long under Chinese influence, Korea was conquered in 108 B.C. (BCE) and held for two centuries by the forces of the Han Dynasty.  But by the second century A.D. (CE) the Kaya city-states at the southeast of the peninsula functioned independently of Chinese control, as did three larger states: Silla (southeast Korea) emerged as the most frequently dominant power over rivals Baekje (southwest) and Koguryo (to the north).  After centuries of struggle, Silla forces in 660 defeated those of Baekje, sending the nobility of the latter in flight as far as Japan, where some of these led ancestral houses that gave rise to Japanese warlords known as the daimyo.  Silla military units then defeated those of Koguryo in 668.

 

But efforts on the part of the Silla leadership to establish an imperial government of the centralized Chinese type foundered;  by the 9^th century, the peninsula was rent by civil war.  In 935,

Wang Geon founded the Goryeo Dynasty, prosperous but continually dealing with local aristocratic assertions until falling to the Yuan Dynasty Mongol forces in the late 13^th century.  Goryeo endured in reduced territory and power, though, until rebellious general Yi Songgye ended the dynasty for good in 1392.

 

Yi Songye thus founded the Yi Dynasty (also known as the Choson Dynasty) in 1392.  Yi Sejong (son of Yi Songye) adopted both the Neo-Confucian philosophy (in pursuit of social harmony) and the exam-based civil service system of China;  he also superintended the creation of a new phonetic alphabet (hang’ul) for the Korean language.  Multi-intellectual in his pursuits, Yi Sejong also patronized scientists, overseeing advances in astronomy, meteorology, and agriculture;  practical improvements in the latter greatly improved crop yields.  People in Korea suffered greatly during two Japanese invasions during the 1590s, but the Yi Dynasty proved to be enormously resilient, surviving and then thriving again by the 17^th century.  Two centuries of general peace ensued until Koreans were subject to the imperialist rivalries of China, Russia, and Japan in the 19^th century;  not until the latter imperialist power took control of Korea in 1910 did the Yi Dynasty come to end.

 

Southeast Asia

 

Around 800 A.D. (CE), the forces of King Jayavarman II (r. 802-855) dominated competing states, establishing the state of Kambujadesa, which expanded as the Khmer empire in Cambodia.  In 889, Emperor Indravarman established the Khmer capital at Angor, at which the Emperor Suryavarman II (r.113-1145) oversaw the construction of the astonishing temple complex, Angkor Wat, of both Hindu and Buddhist inspiration.  The Khymer Empire endured until a Thai invasion of 1431 brought the Cambodian empire to an end.

 

Chronicles in Burma attest to the founding of the city of Pagan by King Pynibya in 849 A.D. (CE).  Under King Anawrahta (r. 1044-1077), and empire expanded from Pagan that came to envelop the Indian settlements of Thaton and Arakan.  Forces from Pagan also brought the Nan-chao people into the empire.  The religious impulse in Burma proved so strong that energetic construction efforts resulted in the establishment of a large Hindu-Buddhist temple complex east of Pagan.  But a concomitant inclination to expand militarily brought Burmese forces into contention with magnificent Mongol warriors, who sacked Pagan in 1287, sending Emperor Marathihapate fleeing for his life and the empire into permanent decline.  

 

In Vietnam, Ngo Quen established the Dai Viet (“Great Viet”) state after a successful revolt against the Chinese.  The rulers of Dai Viet’s Tran dynasty fended off the Mongols about the same time that the latter were doing damage to Pagan.  By 1471, forces of the northern-based Dai Viet brought the southern kingdom of Champa under control, thus uniting most of Vietnam.  Ironically, having successfully fought off the Mongols and conquered their Vietnamese rivals, the rulers of Dai Viet squabbled in the context of internecine rivalries, precipitating a decline that resulted in the end of the state in the aftermath of particularly damaging conflicts in 1528.

 

Meanwhile, in Indonesia, enterprising commercial folk from Sumatra and Java established important mercantile settlements on the Southeast Asian mainland.  By the 7^th century A.D. (CE), the Javanese state of Srivijaya controlled most of Sumatra and the Malay peninsula.   Vigorous rulers of the competing Sailendra kingdom of central Java superintended the construction of the splendid Buddhist temple complex at Borobodur.  Conflicts with Sailendra and other Indonesia rivals weakened the Srvijaya kingdom, so that by 1400 new maritime powers dominated the Malacca straits and exerted great influence throughout Southeast Asia.  Chief among these was the Majapahit empire on the Malay peninsula.

 

Developments in the Americas and Polynesia during the Medieval Era

 

On the periphery of the great interacting world of Afro-Eurasia, splendid cultures and civilizations thrived in the Americas and Polynesia in ways that would eventually add mightily to the historical inheritance of humankind.

 

The Americas

 

In the Americas, the Toltecs and Aztecs of Mexico, the Maya of Mexico and Central America, the Incas of South America, and various North American cultures put intriguing ideas and physical creativity into the storehouse of humanity’s treasured past.  The Toltecs flourished in central Mexico from c. 900 A.D. until c. 1180 A.D.  Under their ruler Tolpitzin Quetzalcoatl, the Toltecs established a regional power that dominated the Mexico, Puebla, and Morelos valleys from their capital at Tollan (today’s Tula). 

 

By, 1180 AD, the Aztecs had supplanted the Toltecs the most powerful force in Mesoamerica. Technologically innovative, they built dams to trap fresh water that flowed into the shallow lake surrounding the capital of Tenochtitlan;  they also created artificial islands in the lake.  The ruler Itzecoatl (r. 1428-1440) leveraged an alliance with those governing the cities of Texcoco and Tlacopan to the benefit of the Aztecs, expanding quickly over all of Mexico and even securing tribute from fro power-holders in Guatemala and El Salvador.  The Aztecs would endure as the most powerful people in Mexico until the arrival of Hernando Cortez in 1517, after which the diseases and the weaponry of Spaniards demolished the Aztec people and their vast empire. 

 

In southern Mexico and in Guatemala, the Maya developed one of the world’s most creative and intriguing societies.  A certain mystery surrounds the collapse of lowland Maya states during the 9^th century A.D. (CE), from which time all important Maya settlements were located in the Yucatan peninsula.  Of these settlements, Chichen Itza was led and occupied by highly innovative people.  The occupants of Chichen Itza experimented with new rituals and forms of shared government, adapted Toltec forms of architecture with strikingly independent flourishes, painted vivid murals, understood and applied the concept of zero, and created one of the world’s most accurate calendars.  The Maya held out much longer against the Spaniard onslaught than did the Aztecs, only succumbing in 1697, when the final Itza capital of Nojpeten (Tayasal) fell.

 

Around 1300 A.D. (CE), the Incas began to establish settlements at the high altitudes in the Andes Mountains near today’s Cuzco;  by 1438, their ruler Pachacuti (“transformer of the earth”) oversaw military initiatives that led to domination over an area the Inca called Tawantinsuyu that covered much of today’s Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia.  With the absorption of its most dangerous rival, the Chimu, the Inca had a clear path to regional dominance;  by 1493, the empire extended northward to Quito in Ecuador and southward to Sucre in Bolivia.  A network of roads (many of which were paved) led from the provinces to Cuzco, the capital;  the buildings of the latter were arranged to form the shape of a puma.  The Inca built numerous large temples honoring especially the sun god, Inti.

 

Early North American cultures of what is now the Southwest had by about 700 A.D. organized themselves into three main groups:  Hohokam, Mogollon, and Anasazi.  By 900 A.D. the Hohokam had built canals that stretched as long as nine miles (15 km.) and irrigation networks that allowed them to harvest corn twice a year.  The Mongollon people were skilled potters who lived in pueblos (large adobe complexes).  The Anasazi people flourished especially vigorously during the years 900-1100;  originally living in pueblos, they eventually became famous for constructing settlements on sheer cliffs surrounded by canyon walls.  By the 8^th century in the Middle Mississippi Valley, a separate group of cultures built sizable towns featuring large, rectangular mounds;  these were administrative and ceremonial centers for the Adena and Hopewell peoples.  Cahokia was the largest of these towns;  by the 13^th century, this settlement had 30,000 residents and more than 100 low-lying mounds where excavations revealed luxury items suggestive of a social class of considerable wealth.

 

From about 200 B.C. (BCE) the progenitors of those who would settle Polynesia were on the move, sailing originally from Southeast Asia across the vast ocean distances to the South Pacific Islands.  These oceanic travelers reached the Marquesas Islands about 200 B.C. (BCE);  Easter Island, Tahiti, and Hawaii around 400 A.D. (CE);  and New Zealand about 1000 A.D. (CE).  In each of these locales, chieftains led hierarchical societies.  The Maori people of New Zealand had to rely more exclusively on fishing, hunting, and gathering than on agriculture, since of the typical Polynesian mix, only the sweet potato took hold;  and in any case, much of South Island is not suitable for agriculture.  After 1350, the Maori of North Island built sizable earthwork burial sites, and forts of similar material that grew into larger and larger complexes with terraces and ditches---  giving evidence of the political disunity that worked to their disadvantage when faced with European invaders in the 19^th century.

 

Easter Island (Rapa Nui) lies 1,290 miles (2000 km.) from the closest South Pacific island.  The people occupying the island around 400 A.D. (CE), eventually gave great labor to the construction of moai statues in honor of ancestors, expending tremendous reserves of energy in moving heavy stone (formed of compressed volcanic ash) from quarries to areas for sculpting and display. 

 

IV.  First-Stage Modern Period (1450-1750)

 

Europe

 

Just as an astonishing array of seminal thinkers exploded onto the scene in 4^th and 5^th century Greece, so would creative spirits of like magnitude power their way into the intellectual life of Italy in the 14^th and 15^th centuries.  Italy was a logical place for the new explosion to happen, serving as it had as the base for the Roman Empire and for the Roman Catholic Church, the latter itself an entirely original institution that had held much sway in the life of medieval Europe.

 

Thinkers of the Renaissance (the name given to this new cultural explosion) were both dedicated to that institution and willing to think outside of its strictures.  Scholar Erasmus (c. 1466-1526), working from the Netherlands as the Renaissance spread northward from Italy, was an ordained priest who in his classic, In Praise of Folly.  Filippo Brunelleschi worked his innovations upon the legacy of Roman architecture in his design for the cathedral of Florence, topped by a striking dome.  Sandro Botticelli’s painting, The Birth of Venus, drew from classical mythology rather than the Bible.  Michelangelo Buonarroti did stick to intensely biblical themes but with a manifest interest in the human form,  abundantly evident in his masterwork :  the painted ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, finished in 1512 (four years after the commission from Pope Julius I), giving evidence of astonishing skill in representing biblical figures as flesh and blood creatures.  This interest in humanity could be seen abundantly in the work of the painter Raphael (e.g., The Coronation of the Virgin [1503]) and the astonishingly diverse talent of Leonardo da Vinci.  Best known for painting The Last Supper and Mona Lisa, Da Vinci was the very definition of the “Renaissance Man”:  He was at once engineer, painter, sketch artist, sculptor, and futurist who contemplated flying machines and many other ideas and devices that were centuries ahead of their times.

 

The focus of Renaissance creative spirits on the potential of humankind led them to seek an authentic spirituality in which ethics and church practice were in harmony.  Erasmus and other critics of the Church were intensely religious people who sought this reconciliation of ethics with practice.  This was true, too of Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Huldrych Zwingli;  but these thinkers and activists in what became known as the Reformation lost hope in the capacity of the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church to mend their ways.   On 31 October 1517, Luther posted his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Wittenberg (Germany) Cathedral, launching a revolt against the Roman Catholic Church that would be carried forth by John Calvin in France and Zwingli in Switzerland.  Most dramatically, if not for religious reasons, King Henry VIII (r. 1509-1547) of England took his entire nation out of the spiritual sway of Rome, launching what would become the Church of England (Anglican Church) in essence because Church authorities would not annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon.  Churches formed in opposition to the church are, quite logically, known as Protestant .

 

The Roman Catholic Church mounted a multi-faceted rebuttal known as the Counter-Reformation, centered on a series of meetings collectively known as the Council of Trent during 1545-1563.  Members of the Council agreed to end corrupt practices while holding fast to Church doctrine. Roman Catholic authorities terminated religious orders deemed too inflexible to change practices, while creating vigorous new orders, most notably the Dominicans and the Jesuits, the latter under the leadership of the brilliant scholar Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556).  

 

Johannes Gutenberg was the first to produce a lengthy work (a Bible, printed in 1455) with the printing press of European type (the Chinese invented moveable type), makin books, many of them classics of Greek and Latin but also works in vernacular languages, much more widely available.

 

A series of wars were fought in Italy during 1494-1559, with France, Spain, England, the Habsburg Empire (the incarnation of the Holy Roman Empire, then encompassing many lands in Germany, Austria, Eastern Europe, and Iberia), and the Papacy all staking claim on territory on the Italian peninsula;  ultimately, the dignity of the Papacy proved resilient, but Spain emerged most territorially influential.  In France, conflicts between Protestants and Roman Catholics led the King Henri IV (r. 1589-1610, from the Bourbon line and originally supportive of the Huguenots [French Protestants]) to lower tensions by converting to Catholicism while granting Protestant rights in the Edict of Nantes (1598).  The Spaniards overplayed their hand in challenging the might of the British navy with their own formidable Spanish Armada, losing the contest in the English Channel in 1588. 

 

Fought mainly on German turf but originating in Dutch unwillingness to be subsumed under the Holy Roman Empire based at the time in Spain, the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) drew activity from Bohemia (in today’s Czech Republic), Spain, the Dutch Republic, and Sweden;  in the end, the territorial integrity of the Dutch Republic gained recognition and European borders stabilized in the Peace of Westphalia (1648), with the reach of the Habsburg-led Holy Roman Empire curtailed and the power of Spain further diminished. 

 

The emergence of a powerful new force in Europe also led to violent confrontations and sharper territorial definition;  expanding from the principality of Muscovy, a more united and territorially expansive Russia took form during the reigns of Ivan III (1462-1505) and Ivan IV (“the Terrible,” r. 1533-1584).  After a period of famine, civil war, and external invasion, a new line (the Romanovs) took power in 1613.   The most dynamic and effective leader from this house was Peter the Great (r. 1682-1725).  Peter superintended economic and political transformations in Russia with the adaptation of European Renaissance and Enlightenment ideas, which along with improving weaponry had invigorated monarchical rule, backed by stronger armies and more centralized governmental bureaucracies. 

 

By this time, a new intellectual trend deserving of its own appellation---  the Enlightenment---  had gained force.  The Renaissance had represented the tendency of intellectuals and creative spirits, especially in art and literature, to focus on human beings as physically beautiful and possessing enormous potential to think through the dogmas and assumptions that they had inherited from the medieval world, using the works of the Greeks and Romans as referents.  The Reformation had opened a still overwhelmingly Christian people to the possibilities of applying rational thought processes to religious dogma;  leaders of the Reformation in fact created their own dogmatic theologies and pressured their supporters to accept them, but the appeal of interpreting religious texts independently, without institutional mediation, had been put into play on a great field of humanity.               

 

In 1453, Nicolaus Copernicus published his tome, On the Rotation of the Celestial Spheres, depicting a heliocentric universe with the Earth and five other planets revolving around the sun.  In 1543, the Flemish scholar Vesalius published his De Humanis Corpus Fabrica, with detailed pictorials and commentary on human anatomy.  In 1608, Johannes Kepler (informed by the work of Copernicus) showed that planets orbited the sun in elliptical (rather than circular) patterns.  In 1610, Copernicus’s challenge to a strictly biblical geocentric universe (with all celestial bodies revolving around the Earth), gained much elevated backing when Galileo Galilei spied four moons revolving around Jupiter with his telescope.  In 1628, William Harvey (personal physician to King Charles I of England) gave an accurate description of blood circulation, and in 1661 observation through the recently invented microscope gave views of capillaries and other circulatory structures that substantiated Harvey’s work.  And in 1687, Isaac Newton published his Principia Mathematica, detailing the operation of gravity as a force affecting the motion of all objects, celestial and terrestrial.  

 

The scientific method, with observation and experiment in pursuit of factual truth, guided the great intellects of the age.  Denis Diderot, with his 28-volume Encyclopedia assembling in clear prose most fundamental knowledge available in the 17^th century, contained essays by most of he major scholars of the time and symbolized a passion for facts.  Renes Descartes (1596-1650), the “father of modern philosophy,” argued that logical deduction should be trusted over sensory perception and asserted that only through reason could mathematical and universal truth be discovered.  The

philosophes sought to apply reason and the values of tolerance and equality to challenge the way people thought about government and society, and in so doing put an end to superstition, injustice, and tyranny.  Voltaire (Francois-Marie Arouet) maintained that the meaning of freedom was “to reason correctly and know the rights of man.”  Jean-Jacque Rousseau derided moral decadence and inequality, warned that material progress could mean moral peril, and stated that, although people are born with the right and the potential for freedom, the human condition of his day found them “everywhere in chains”;  in his Social Contract, Rousseau argued that “The consent of the people is the sole basis for a government’s authority.”  Montesquieu in his Spirit of Laws (1748) sought to limit absolute monarchical power with a three-way division among the executive (king), legislature (parliament), and the judiciary (high court).

                                                                       

And indeed two counter-tendencies prevailing in the early modern world were reshaping Europe and the globe.  There was indeed the tendency for monarchs to gather more and more power into their own hands, backed by weaponry that made the old aristocratic knight on horseback obsolete;  but there were competing notions of natural rights shared by all people.

 

The demise of the feudal aristocracy strengthened the hands of centralizing monarchs.  King Louis IV (r. 1643-1715) of France was the supreme example of the absolute monarch, centralizing power with the help of a succession of astute advisers:  Richelieu, Mazarin, and Colbert;  and symbolizing his power by commissioning the Palace of Versailles, which became home to the French court in 1682.  But lavish spending during the era of this “Sun King” would eventually lead to economic problems, just one of the precipitants of the French Revolution that would break out 74 years after Louis’s death.

 

This was the tension of the times:  monarchical centralism vs. humankind’s natural right to liberty.  The English Civil War (1641-1651) put England on an irreversible long course toward the greater participation of people outside the nobility.  Charles I lost his head to the forces of parliamentary opposition in 1649    and his son Charles II went down to defeat at Worchester in 1651.  A period of republican rule under Oliver Cromwell ensued before the era’s excesses opened an opportunity for monarchical resurgence.  But in the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689, dual monarchs William and Mary accepted the legislative power of parliament as limitation on their own executive power, so that prime ministers, parties, and parliament now carried more day to day sway than did any king or queen of Great Britain.

 

Asia

 

China

 

During the 1350s, a series of revolts against Mongol (Yuan Dynasty) rule created conditions whereby a wily commoner by the name of Zhu Yuanzhang outmaneuvered his rivals, entered Beijing at the helm of a large, well-trained, and highly motivated soldiery to seize Beijing, ensconce himself in a new capital at Nanjing, and take the title Hongwu as the first emperor of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). 

Hongwu instituted a system of secret agents to root out lingering aspirants to the throne, and similarly sent well-paid and tightly controlled tax agents to improve collections and shore up finances that had languished during the latter years of Mongol rule.  Hongwu’s rule  (1368-1398) was followed by the brief reign of Jianwen (1399-1402), and then by the imperial administration of the energetic and ambitious Yongle, who transferred the capital back to Beijing, where he superintended construction of the vast palace complex of the Forbidden City.  Yongle dispatched troops northward to quell remaining Yuan enthusiasts and southward to annex Vietnam as a province.  He also famously commissioned palace eunuch Zheng He to lead seven oceangoing voyages during 1405-1433 to Java, Sumatra, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), the southern India coast, the Arabian peninsula, and the east coast of Africa;  for the only time in history, China was the unrivaled power of the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean.

 

Oddly, Hongwu’s outward looking spirit gave way to the conservative insularity of later emperors such as the long-ruling Jiajing (r. 1531-1567) and Wanli (1572-1620).  These emperors became increasingly isolated from the people over whom they ruled and to declining economic conditions in the provinces that led to a series of revolts in April 1644.  All of China came under foreign rule as Manchu invaders from the Northeast established the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).

 

Qing rulers proved more adept at ruling in the Chinese style than had the Mongols.  They proved to be enthusiastic sponsors of scholarship and art, and became skilled in the arts of the gentleman:  painting, chess, calligraphy, and music.  Under Qing rule, China looked outward again, advancing under emperors Sunzi (r. 1644-1661), Kangxi (1661-1722), Yongzheng (r. 1722-1735), and Qianlong (1736-1995) to absorb Outer Mongolia, to claim Tibet as a protectorate (1750), aggressively expand toward Central Asia, and establish a rather tenuous hold on Taiwan. 

 

Japan

 

In Japan, the Ashikaga Shogunate had evolved as a decentralized state in which authorities in Kyoto depended on daimyo powerful leaders large domains (han).  In 1560, one of these daimyo aspired to the leadership in the capital of Kyoto itself but was precluded in his advance by the forces of the ferocious Oda Nobunaga.  By 1577, the forces of Nobunaga had conquered central Japan and then moved outward toward the more remotely located daimyo.  When Nobunaga was assassinated in 1582, his chief general, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, took up the drive for unification;  by 1590 he had conquered five of the six most stubbornly resistant daimyo, and in the course of several months then finally forced the Hojo daimyo of Odowara to capitulate.  After Hideyoshi died in 1598, Tokugawa Ieyasu resolved an intense power struggle with a resounding victory at Sekigahara in 1600. 

 

Under the Tokugawa Shogunate, the imperial court enjoyed reverential prestige but the shoguns ruled with unprecedented central authority from Edo (today’s Tokyo).  Increasingly the Tokugawa turned inward, seeking to protect a carefully constructed social hierarchy derived from Confucian principles.  In 1612, the shogun Tokugawa Hidetada (r. 1605-1623) cemented a policy of national seclusion (sakoku);  Hidetada’s successors expelled the Portuguese (1639) and relegated the Dutch to a small island off the coast near Nagasaki.  Such caution did bring the Japanese two centuries of peace and the opportunity to refine their culture to include enduring arts:  haiku poetry, flower arranging, tea ceremony (chanoyu), Noh theater, and prints featuring Ikiyo-e “pictures of the floating world”). 

 

The Ottoman Empire

 

After their victory over the Byzantines in 1453, the Ottomans under Mehmet II made forays into eastern Europe but failed to achieve results that at that point seemed likely to provide much additional territory.  So the Ottomans turned eastward, concentrating on expansion in Asia rather than Europe.  In 1514, soldiers sent at the behest of Sultan Selim I (r. 1512-1520) defeated the Safavids of Persia in the Battle of Chaldiran.  Within three years, the Ottomans captured both Jerusalem and Cairo, thereby controlling the holy sites in the former and ending Mamluk rule in the latter.  In 1523, Ottoman forces captured the island of Rhodes, where the military order Knights of St. John had been powerful since playing an important role in the Crusades.  With these Asiatic and Mediterranean holdings secured, soldiers of the Ottoman Empire once again entered eastern Europe, taking control of part of Hungary but failing in an attempt to conquer troops defending Vienna, capital of the Habsburg Empire.

 

Safavid Persia

 

The Mongols ruled Persia from the 1250s until 1335, then in the 1370s Tamerlane (Timur the Lame) held Persia within the domains of his vast Central Asian empire.  When Tamerlane died in 1405, his successors held firm in the eastern part of Persia, while the Turkish Aq Qoyunlu and Kara-Qoynlu dynasties ruled in the western part.  In 1501, a new group, originally identified with a Sufi order known as the Safavids, began a series of military campaigns that ended Aq Qoyunlu power, brought all of western Persia under control by 1507, and turned with designs on eastern Anatolia. 

 

Shah Abbas I (r. 1587-1629) brought Safavid Persia to its peak of power and cultural glory.  He moved the capital from Qazvin to Isfahan, where he oversaw the construction of a dazzling array of new buildings facing Maydan Square.  Safavid power held generally firm, despite the loss of Baghdad to the Ottomans in 1638, during the decades following immediately upon the death of Shah Abbas By 1720s the Safavids faced numerous revolts, then in 1722 the Iranian plateau was occupied by the rebel Afghan leader, Mahmud Ghilzai, who dominated the area for just three years.  During 1725-1747, another Afghan tribal leader, Nadir Shah, ruled Persia first through Safavid puppets;  but in 1736, he made explicit claim to power in Persia, ending Safavid rule.  In the aftermath of Nadi Shah’s assassination in 1747, Persian culture (miniature paintings, elegant poetic verse, and distinctive musical composition) flourished, but the land was unsettled politically and militarily for many decades.

                   

Mughal India

 

In 1526, the ambitious Babur of Afghanistan led his forces (having followed a route from Kabul [captured 1504] through the Khyber Pass toward India) in the conquest of both Delhi and Agra;  by the time of his death in 1530, Babur had secured control of all the wealthy cities of northern India.   Babur’s son, Humayun, underwent a period of exile at the Safavid court after losing his father’s realm to the Afghan competitor Sher Shah.  But in 1555, Humayun returned, seized control from the successors of Sher Shah, and left a restored empire to his son Akbar (r. 1556-1605).  Just twelve years-old at the time, Akbar underwent a period of tutelage under the talented regent Bairam Khan, then went on to become the greatest of these Muslim rulers known as the Mughals.

 

Akbar expanded Mughal holdings from Kashmir in the north and Afghanistan to the northwest, to Bengal in the east and the Deccan plateau of southern India.  Akbar sought to secure the support of Hindus and those of other faiths, reducing the influence of Muslim scholars (ulama) on matters of government, abolishing taxes on non-Muslims (jizna), and deeming that a solar calendar, rather than the Muslim calendar, would prevail in matters of Indian state and society.  His reign was culturally splendid, with the patronage of Akbar abetting composition in a new musical style of northern India and painting in a unique synthesis of Persian and Indian styles.              

 

The reign of Akbar’s son Jahangir (r. 1605-1627) was turbulent ;  he faced numerous challenges from his sons, one of whom emerged dominant to rule as Shah Jehan (r. 1628-1658).  The prosperity of India at the time, flourishing on the strength of agriculture and trade, made possible the fulfillment of tremendous ambitions in architectural design and construction.  Shah Jehan superintended the construction of India’s greatest monuments from the Mughal era:  the Red Fort and Jama Masjid in Delhi (which Shah Jehan called Shahjahanabad);  and the brilliant Taj Mahal (inspired as an expression of devotion to Shah Jehan’s wife Mumtai) in Agra. 

 

Shah Aurangzeb (r. 1660-1707) took advantage of his father’s illness to prevail over the other sons of Shah Jehan and establish himself in a vigorous but poitically contentious rule.  The Mughal rulers who succeeded Aurangzeb were ineffective, their weakness further undermining Mughal power;  after Nadir Khan led Persian forces in a sack of Delhi in 1739, the Mughal Dynasty was left in the innervated condition that representatives of the British Empire would observe upon their arrival a few decades thereafter.

 

European Voyages of Exploration and Discovery

 

Seeking to avoid the costly fees demanded by Arab middlepersons for goods transported from the Indonesian Spice Islands to the Mediterranean,  Europeans sought a sea route, first by sailing the African coast.  The Portuguese led the way:  Bartholomew Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1588;  Vasco da Gama traversed the Indian Ocean to Calicut (southern Indian port) in 1498;  and Ferdinand Magellan’s crew would complete a circumnavigation of the globe during 1517-1521.  In the meantime, Christopher Columbus sailed westward across the Atlantic westward across the sea, intrepidly but with no sense of the North and South America land masses that separated the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.  He was the first European since the Vikings (10^th century) to land in North America, and this time prevailing international circumstances made the impact much more dramatic:  during 1492-1502, Columbus made in all four voyages across the Atlantic under the banner of Spain, never finding the all-water route to Asia that he sought, but pioneering an avid interest in the Americas that he had by happenstance rediscovered.  

 

John Cabot sailing for Great Britain, seeking a northerly route to Asia in 1497.  Spaniard Hernando Cortes utilized 15 mounted soldiers and 400 infantry to subdue the proud Aztecs of Mexico, led at the time by the powerful Montezuma in the course of 1519-1521.  Francisco Pizarro subdued the ruler Atahualpa and the Inca people of Peru in South America in 1532.  Meanwhile, North American explorations continued, notably with the arrival of the French explorer Jacques Cartier at the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 1534. 

 

During the 16^th century the government of Spain established rule over Mexico, Central America, and most of South America Portugal came to control Portugal).  Aztec, Inca, and other Native American populations were massively depleted due to small pox and other diseases.  Spaniards discovered abundant  silver ore at Potosi in Bolivia in 1545;  from that date until 1660 this single source of revenue yielded some 17,600 tons (16,000 tonnes) of silver.

 

Dutch, French, and British imperialists sought colonies in North America.  After a failed “Lost Colony” episode during 1584-1590, the British had more success in Jamestown from 1607.  In 1620, the British ship Mayflower arrived with its Puritan “Pilgrims.”  Soon the British had settlements in Maryland (1634), Rhode Island (1636), Carolinas (1665), and Pennsylvania (1682).  The Dutch laid claim to a territory around today’s Albany in New York (1623), establishing Fort Orange on the Hudson River.  Swedes, overall a minor participant in world exploration at this stage, nevertheless were the first to found a colony in Delaware (1638).  But by the late 17^th century, the British had taken control over the areas claimed by the Dutch and Swedes, occupying the expanse along the Atlantic coast from Georgia to New England.  The Spaniards held Florida (and lands to the American Southwest, including California);  and France (having founded Quebec in 1608) controlled a vast area from eastern Canada to the Rocky Mountains and southward to Lousiana).   The French benefited from a thriving fur trade, especially beaver;  but as a matter of public policy, they regarded overseas empire in strategic rather than commercial terms, using their occupation of territory to thwart British ambitions especially.

 

Internationally, Portugal played a role beyond Brazil, establishing forts at Goa (on the coast of India, 1510), Malacca (at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, 1511), and Ormuz (island in the Indian Ocean, 1515), and Macau (in China, 1517);  by the 1560s, the Portuguese were importing half the spice and three-quarters of the pepper traded in Europe.

  

The prime interest of the English and the Dutch in matters of oceangoing empire was mercantile in nature.  The Dutch East India Company was established in 1602, with its first outpost at Java founded in 1604;  soon, similar Dutch “factories” would be soon be established in Sri Lanka, southern india, Bengal, Malacca, Taiwan, and Nagasaki.  The British formed with their own East India Company, founded actually a bit early than the Dutch counterpart, in 1600.  Territory in India was at least as important to the British as their holdings in North America;  on the subcontinent, they established bases in Bengal (1615) and at Bombay (1668) and Calcutta (1690).

 

Human beings were considered commodities if they had value for labor potential.  In surveying the globe, Europeans (overwhelmingly dominated by the British) identified Africa, especially West Africa, as the prime source of slaves.  Dealing with African slave trading empires such as the Ashanti and the Dahomey, European trades offered weaponry, metal goods, rum, and woven items in exchange for human commodities.  Across the Middle Passage came 78,000 per year during the 1780s, with up to 600 slaves transported per ship.  Chained together ankle to ankle and wrist to wrist between the deck and hold of ships, a high percentage of the human cargo did not survive---  a sustainable loss, given the profits for ship captains and investors.   By the time the slave trade mostly subsided with the passage of abolitionist legislation in Great Britain in 1807, more than 12 million human beings had been transported across the Atlantic for the purposes of human bondage.

 

 

V.  Second-Stage Modern Period (1750-1945)

 

From 1750 until 1945 (second-stage modern period) world civilization underwent dramatic change.  All of the major ideas still in force in our own time were put into play during those years.  In many ways, the period after 1945 that includes our own time has been an era in which we have tried to come to terms with the implications of the ideas and events that defined the second-stage modern period. The second-stage modern period that commenced around 1750 found Europeans initially in a position to dictate political and military terms to other occupants of the globe, including those of the venerable old civilizations of China, India, and the Ottomans.  The attitudinal forces of nationalism, imperialism, and industrialism impelled European imperial expansion.   

 

European Imperialism

 

Rivalry between Great Britain and France sparked many important global events during the late 18^th century.  These two powers as of 1750 were contesting for territory in many global areas, most especially in India and in North America (the part of this continent that today constitutes border regions of the United States and Canada).  In the end victories of the British at Plassey in India and Quebec in Canada, both in 1763, relegated France to an inferior imperialist position in both India and the Americas. 

 

Although the British Empire would prove enormously durable, one of the first strong assertions of that modern phenomenon known as nationalism came from the thirteen British colonies running along the Atlantic seaboard and cost the empire those holdings.  Especially in the area of Boston, there were those such as Samuel and John Adams who were identifying as Americans rather than as British subjects, and they took umbrage at being taxed without having a voice in the British Parliament.  In January 1776, Thomas Paine published his pamphlet, Common Sense, which urged a American colonial break with the British government;  then on 4 July 1776 Thomas Jefferson issued his Declaration of Independence as the documented colonial challenge for which Paine had argued:  The American Revolution had now formally commenced.

 

The colonial army was a rather motley organization, despite the skills of leader George Washington, but with the help of German, and especially, French advisers, persevered to ultimate victory at Yorktown on 19 October 1781.  In the Treaty of Paris (1783), American independence was affirmed:  The British were still in control of today’s Canada, but they had lost what now became the United States of America.

 

American independence signaled a trend whereby classes of people long left out of the halls of government demanded entry, and whereby people identifying in new national formations demanded release from imperial rule.  In France, the peasantry was burdened with taxes beyond their ability to pay under conditions of unfavorable weather and low yields;  and the French middle classes grew restless with the rule of the French monarchy and aristocracy.  Such discontent led to the formation of a National Assembly (consisting largely of “commoners” [non-aristocrats]) in May 1789;  and the storming of the Bastille prison in July 1789.  By 1792, a more radical assembly (the Convention) declared France to be a Republic and ordered the execution of King Louis XVI (carried out in January 1793).  By  June 1793, a group known as the Jacobins (led by the sincere and honest but fanatical Maximilien Robespierre) gained control of the Convention and began to conduct a “Reign of Terror” against all of those considered threats to the revolutionary republican regime.  This caused a backlash and the instalment of a five-man Directory as decision-making force in the French Republic.

 

Widespread dissatisfaction with the Directory and France’s two-chamber national parliament led to an appeal to Napoleon Bonaparte to come back to France from his military campaigns in Italy and Palestine to lead the nation.  Napoleon and his backers overthrew the Directory, then set up a new government in which Napoleon was First Consul;  in a quick move to capitalize on his popularity and his efforts to court favor with the Roman Catholic Church, Napoleon in 1802 declared himself First Consul for Life, then in 1804 prevailed upon Pope Pius VII to crown him Emperor.  Napoleon oversaw the founding of a new Bank of France, issued a new currency that included the napoleon gold coin, rationalized the departments of the central bureaucracy, oversaw the introduction of a new educational curriculum (greatly informed by new discoveries in math and science during the Enlightenment), and in 1804 established the Napoleonic Code that would endure to dominate the French legal system to this day.

 

The French Revolutionary Wars (1792-1802) resulted in French control of much of Europe, but Napoleon’s decision to invade Russia in 1812 was enormously ill-advised;  caught eventually in a brutal winter, French forces retreated and in the ensuing months endured other defeats.  Napoleon abdicated in 1813 and was exiled to the island of Elba;  after his escape and brief comeback as Emperor, defeat at the hands of Prussia and Britain at the Battle of Waterloo (Belgium) in 1814 brought permanent exile on the Atlantic Ocean island of Saint Helena.

 

The Napoleonic Wars had the ironic dual effect of spreading the ideas of liberty, equality, and nationalism.   Prince Metternich of Austria led the Congress of Vienna (1815) that attempted to maintain the monarchical and imperial status quo in Europe, but nationalists in Greece forced the Ottomans to recognize Greek independence, the Prussian Minister-President Otto von Bismarck was able to establish a unified German confederacy in 1871, and the efforts of nationalists Giuseppe Mazzini, Camillo Cavour, and Giuseppe Cavaldi resulted in a unified Italy under King Victor Emmanuel.    

 

In Latin America, Jose de San Martin and Simon Bolivar carried out revolutionary activities that culminated in the ouster of the Spaniards from most of South America by 1821;  and declarations culminated in governments in Mexico and Brazil that also threw off the rule of the Spaniards.

 

The imperialist activity of the major European powers also stirred sentiments of nationalism in Asia and Africa, but in most cases independence would have to wait until the 20^th century.  In 1885 the Indian National Congress began as an advisory body but eventually served as training ground for such leaders as Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah;  the road to independence would be long, thought, not coming until 1947.

 

Qing Dynasty rulers proudly resisted British, Dutch, French, Portuguese, and Russian advances until the Opium Wars (1839-1842) with Great Britain forced major concessions in the Treaty of Nanjing;  another conflict in 1856-1860 between the Chinese and the British resulted in another British victory and more concessions in the Treaty of Beijing (1860).  The British took the lead in staking imperialist claims in Oceania, expanding over the Australian land mass by 1861 and by 1864 in New Zealand.  Norwegian Roald Amundsen beat a British group led by Robert Scott to the South Pole in Antarctica by five weeks, landing on 14 December 1911.  The exertions of both groups (all of whom in Scott’s assemblage died on the return trip) established a European presence over most of the globe.

 

Throughout the 19^th century, Europeans also explored the vast continent of Africa and staked imperialist claims.  By 1914, only Liberia and Ethiopia remained independent.  The French were dominant throughout most of northern African, giving way mainly in Egypt, where the British exerted overwhelming influence from 1882;  the French also laid claim to West African areas that today include Sierra Leon and Ivory Coast.  The British controlled today’s Nigeria, Tanzania, Kenya, Zimbabwe, and South Africa (after ousting the Dutch in the Boer Wars [1899-1902]).  Belgium controlled the Congo.  Portugal dominated Mozambique and Angola.

 

Very seldom were people in Asia and Africa able to resist the 19^th century European advance.  In Southeast Asia, the Dutch took today’s Indonesia, the French established control over the territorial expanses of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam (known collectively as Indochina), and (in addition to Burma) the British governed Malaysia.  Thailand maintained formal independence but experienced significant influence from Great Britain and France.

 

The case of Japan is unique.  There, a group of former daimyo known as the “oligarchs” superintended what became known as the Meiji Restoration (1868), whereby the emperor retained power but the Tokugawa Shogunate came to an end.  The Japanese set about head-spinning modernization during the last decades of the 19^th century, until Japan itself became an imperial power, annexing Korea and Taiwan in 1910;  seizing control of Manchuria in 1932;  controlling the east China coastal cities by 1937;  and then expanding over Southeast Asia and many islands of the Pacific over the course of the 1930s in actions that would be among the reasons for the great global conflict known as World War II.  

 

Industrial Revolution

 

The European interest in the Americas, Asia, and Africa began in the search for an all-water route to the Spice Islands (Indonesia) and quickly involved the incongruent trade in human beings (the slave trade) and the spread of Christianity.  But slavery ended in Great Britain in 1805, in the United States in 1865, and for the most part had ended with the independence movements of South America as of the 1820s;  and while missionaries continued to be driven by the dictates of their theology to save souls worldwide, this was by the 19^th century a minor motivation on the part of any of the governments and commercial enterprises involved in the quest for empire.  By the mid-19^th century, Europe was undergoing an astonishingly quick industrial transformation, necessitating raw materials that for the most part lay outside the bounds of the continent of Europe.

 

The Industrial Revolution unfolded with a series of inventions, given with inventor in parentheses as follows:  the steam engine (James Watt, 1770s), the spinning jenny, the flying shuttle, the cotton gin (Eli Whitney, 1790), steam engine driven railroad car, and the many machines necessary to the production of  textiles and other goods in factory production.  Those providing the labor were for the most part rural folk, including many former serfs now free with the waning of the feudal system;  and many denied their livelihood because of tough times on the farm, including the fall-out from the Enclosure Movement in Great Britain (depriving yeomen farmers use of lands that until that movement could be used in common to graze animals).

 

The British led the way in the First Wave (1770-1820) of the Industrial Revolution that featured textile factories;  the building of railroads in Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, and the United States precipitated the Second Wave (1820-1890);  and the Third Wave occurred in Russia, Sweden, France, Italy, and Japan (1890-1914).  The invention of a new process for turning iron into steel (Henry Bessemer, 1855) gave makers of railroads, ships, and armaments a much stronger and more versatile metal.  The invention of the automobile in the late 19^th century, and especially mass production of these motorized vehicles on assembly lines for which Henry Ford was the pioneer, greatly increased the quest for iron for conversion into steel and for rubber needed to make tires.  Raw materials of many kinds were s wrought globally to make goods for expanding consumer bases throughout North America and Europe.

 

Work on the factory line brought steadier and sometimes better income than had been earned by those newly arrived from the countryside.  But the labor was tedious, the hours long, and the conditions frequently numbing in winter and stifling in summer.  Children as young as six or seven years old toiled alongside adults in confines wherein the air was poisonous, the floors dirty, and germs ubiquitous.

 

Under these circumstances, workers began to get the idea of organizing to improve their working conditions.  British spinners of cloth formed a union in 1829, and other trades initiated efforts to the same during the 1830s.  Revolutionary movements of 1848 within the Austro-Hungarian Empire failed in their nationalistic aims, but radicalized populations pressed forward with labor unionizing efforts.   In 1868, the forerunner of today’s Trades Union Congress was established, and subsequent efforts in the United States faced great difficulty until 20^th century breakthroughs occurred with the formation of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO); the latter eventually amalgamated as today’s AFL-CIO.

 

German philosopher and economic historian Karl Marx deemed trade unionism a partial step toward a revolution.  Marc steeped himself in history, arriving at the conclusion that most of the human past had featured class struggle.  At the primitive communism stage of hunters and gatherers people had known essential equality of circumstances and status;  but thereafter, historical stages evolved that successively featured a struggle between dominator and dominated:  master versus slave and then aristocrat vs. serf;  until the industrial era produced the fundamental struggle between bourgeoisie (the middle class, centered on factory owners and managers) vs. proletariat (factory workers and other wage laborers). Marx predicted that the proletariat would eventually rise up in a proletarian revolution, ceding for a time power to a “dictatorship of the proletariat” would scuttle the bourgeoisie aside and rule in behalf of the working people.  Under the dictatorship of the proletariat each person would give his or her labor for just compensation.  Since in industrial nations ;  and this would involve the masses of people, Marx predicted that fair treatment for the masses would instill a new spirit of cooperation and egalitarianism in which there would eventually be a “withering away of the state” and work given on the basis of ability, for the good of all, with all needs met accordingly---  without the necessity of wages.  On the political continuum both of these stages would fall to the far left:  the proletarian dictatorship stage would be described by radical socialism;  at the fading away of the state, society would move even farther to the left under communism.     

 

The 19^th century was thus a time of tremendous economic, political, intellectual ferment.  Big changes come, too, with a wave of scientific advances that rivaled the Enlightenment (Age of Science or Age of Reason).  Michael Faraday (1830s) observed that moving a magnet through a coil produced electric current and Samuel B. Morse invented the Morse Code (1837) making use of telegraph technology viable.  Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone (1876).  Guglielmo Marconi built on the work of Heinrich Hertz to produce the first wireless radio transmission via airwaves.  Marl Benz gave life to the automobile with his invention of the internal combustion engine in 1906, by which time brothers Orville Wright and Wilbur Wright had produced the first heavier than air flying machine.

 

Science also launched humankind on a new path for understanding its own origins and relationship to other living things.  In 1859, Charles Darwin published his On the Origin of the Species, having observed finches and other animals on the island of Galapagos for their adaptations to natural environment.  Through the ages, Darwin argued, those species that were most adaptable to change were those that survived to pass on their genes.  In his The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin presented the case for humankind’s descent from on originally ape-like ancestor.  Drawing furor that has not quite subsided in our own time, the essential notion is today embraced as fact among evolutionary biologists.

 

World War I

 

Nationalism and imperialism were on a crash course of global dimensions.  The Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires had for centuries competed for territory in Eastern Europe, but in the course of the 19^th century the Ottomans became less and less a factor.  The Ottoman Empire lost its control of territory in Serbia and Hungary early in the 19^th century, and after the Balkan Wars (1912-1913) had little power on the European continent.  The Austro-Hungarian Empire sought to include Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, and Montenegro;  the empire’s leaders were able to annex Bosnia in 1908, but the Serbians had fought hard  to throw off Ottoman attempts at re-conquest and proved formidable;  neither did they like Austro-Hungary’s control of Bosnia, because a large population of Serbians lived in Bosnia.  A young Serbian, Gavrilo Princip, showed his contempt for Austro-Hungarian policy by assassinating the empire’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand as he was riding a motorized vehicle through the streets of Sarajevo on 28 June 1914.

 

This was the precipitating event of World War I, setting into motion the latest alliances (Triple Alliance:  Germany, Austro-Hungary, Italy;  and Triple Entente: France, Russia, Great Britain) formed in an era of global competition and suspicion.  On 28 July 1914, Austro-Hungary declared war on Serbia when the leaders of the latter refused annexation.  Russia mobilized against Austro-Hungary, Germany declared war on Russia (1 August 1914) and then on France (3 August 1914), motivating Great Britain to declare war on Germany (4 August 1914).  In wartime, the Germans, Austro-Hungarians, and the Italians were known as the Central Powers, while France, Great Britain, and Russia were known as the Allied Powers, or Allies;  with Russia’s inaction from 1917 forward, the United States would effectively replace that country in affiliation with the Allies upon entry into the war as of 1917.

 

The British and French halted a German advance just 45 miles outside of Paris.  By late autumn 1914, the French and German opponents had dug a system of trenches stretching from the North Sea almost to Switzerland, forming the Western Front of the war.  Trenches moved by inches if they moved at all, day after day.  Soldiers died from multiple epidemics, including “trench foot” (with damp and infected flesh rotting away).  From February into December 2015, fighting at the highly strategic fortress city of Verdun cost 700,000 casualties, and a battle along the Somme cost 300,000 lives. 

 

On the much longer Eastern Front, digging trenches was blessedly impractical, so that Germany

and Russia fought more mobile battles that were bloody but not quite as strategically and tactically stupid.  War on the eastern front, though, was also largely inconclusive.  By June 1917, Russians were swiftly traveling down the road to the Bolshevik (Communist) Revolution in Russia, and many of their units were refusing to fight.  This allowed the Germans to refocus attention and commit more resources to the Western Front.

 

The war at sea involved mostly German and British fleets and was also generally indecisive, as in the Battle for Jutland (off Denmark, 31 May-1 June 1916).  The British did destroy the German East Asia  Squadron in December 1914, leading the Germans to resort to “unrestricted warfare” with submarine attacks.  But the sinking of the passenger liner Lusitania with United States citizens aboard in 1915 contributed to American entry into the war that year.

 

Great Britain, took the lead in demolishing the morale of those superintending administration in the old empire of the Ottomans, with British soldiers entering Jerusalem in December 1917 to deliver a crushing defeat in Palestine that pushed the tottering Ottomans into terminal disequilibrium.  The British were only thirty years away from having the foundations of their own empire destroyed by nationalist in India.

 

Then, in that very year of 1917, fresh troops from the United States entered the war and by 1918 four complete American divisions had arrived, contributing mightily to Allied victories along the Marne River in July, around Amiens in August, and at the last German fortifications running along the Hindenburg line in September and October.   The German Kaiser, facing a potential revolution, signaled that German understood defeat:  his agents signed an armistice on 11 November 1918 that brought this astoundingly foolish to war to an end.

 

At the Paris Peace Conference that convened on 18 January 1919, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and U. S. President Woodrow Wilson substantially relented to the desire of French Prime Minister George Clemenceau to inflict a punitive treaty on Germany.  By the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, signed by the German representatives on 28 June 1919, Germany acknowledged guilt for waging the war, agreed to pay onerous reparations, relented to the demand that the Kaiser be put on trial, assented reduce the army to 100,000 troops and no tanks, with its navy relegated to a token existence and its aircraft grounded.  Territorial concessions included Alsace-Lorraine (a long-disputed French-German border region) to France, the area of Schlesswig to Denmark, many square miles (kilometers) in Prussia and Silesia to Poland, and the Saarland region to an international force of occupation. 

 

Officials in Great Britain and France soon signed and ratified the treaty;  officials of the United States signed in Paris, but the two-thirds vote for ratification in United States Senate could not be secured.  Ironically, those Senators who refused to vote for ratification objected to the Treaty of Versailles not on the basis of overwrought punishment of German, but rather on the provision a League of Nations.   The idea for such an international convention originated in the Fourteen Points of Woodrow Wilson, part of his plan to “make the world safe for democracy” and to recognize the nationalist aspirations of people former living under empires.

 

Between the Two World Wars

 

Political and Economic Transformation in Russia

                                                         

Rural society in Russia continued to evidence a feudalistic character:  Not until the reign of Alexander II (r. 1855-1881) did serfs gain the freedom for which they had clamored all through the first half of the century.   But peasant (former serfs, now humble [mostly tenant] farmers) remained discontented with economic conditions, and intellectuals opposed the tsarist system as an anachronistic purveyor of tyranny;  members of a group known as “People’s Will” that harbored such anti-tsarist sentiments orchestrated the assassination of Alexander II in March 1881.  Marxists organized a party in 1898.

 

The backwardness of Russia by comparison with the advanced economies and political structures of western Europe seemed manifest in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905).  Tsar Nicholas II sought to maintain the traditional system by coopting moderate opponents with the formation of a Duma (parliament) in 1905, then turning violently on leftist revolutionaries.  Nicholas was in perpetual conflict with Duma that met during 1907-1912 and 1912-1917.  Inflationary economic conditions engendered via participation in World War I provoked strikes by industrial workers.  The turbulent year of 1917 then featured cessation of efforts in the war as violence on the streets of Petrograd and Moscow created pressures for the February Revolution and abdication of Nicholas II.

 

A Provisional Government under Prince Lvov tried vainly to maintain the option of moderate government, but the revolutionary Petrograd Soviet agitated for and and secured the prince’s removal.  The old guard then installed the moderate socialist Alexander Kerensky, but the latter also flailed vainly in the effort to forestall revolutionary forces from taking power.  Kerensky superintended a crackdown in July 1917, forcing the Bolshevik (revolutionary Communist) leader V. I. Lenin to flee to Finland.  But faced with the insubordination of General Lvar Kornilov, Kerensky  sought Bolshevik assistance.  The Bolsheviks gleefully complied, then seized the opportunity to plot Kerensky’s demise:  Leon Trotsky organized pro-Bolshevik units for the seizure of railroad stations and telephone exchanges, superintending a near-bloodless coup, resulting in Kerensky’s surrender and the Bolshevik ascension to power in the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) or Soviet Union.   

 

During 1918-1920, the Bolsheviks fought a civil war against the disparate forces ranged against them.   Socialist-Revolutionaries (SR) established an alternative government at Samara (on the Volga River).  Representatives of the military from the tsarist regime (the “White Army,” as opposed to the “Red Army” of the Bolsheviks) fought for power.  But the Red Army fought back effectively against these two major contingents in 1919 and by 1920 could turn attention to various internal opponents:  anarchists, nationalists, and Islamic militia.     

 

V. I. Lenin oversaw the establishment of a highly centralized government and firmly enforced the Communist Party line, but his New Economic Policy represented a flexible approach to the economics of rural life.

 

When Lenin died in 1922, Politburo (powerful decision-making directorate) member Joseph Stalin quickly maneuvered past his rivals, ousted Leon Trotsky from the Party in 1926, and beginning in 1928 instituted the first of several Five-Year Plans designed to speed the transformation of the Soviet Union into a highly industrialized state.  He also ordered a program by which the land of kulaks (prosperous peasants) was expropriated and transferred to collective farms.  These policies caused numerous economic and social dislocations.  With many segments of the new Russian (Soviet) society in misery, opposition was widespread but ultimately intimidated through the “Great Terror” of 1936-1938, during which secret police purged many in the party elite and army;  690,000 people were executed;  and many consigned to the gulag (network of prison camps).  Stalin proved adroit at rewarding those who supported his ruthless policies, keeping a firm body of support until his death in 1953.  He succeeded in the transformation of heavy industry that he sought, as Soviet factories churned out weighty producer goods;  but food and consumer shortages had left many suffering, and the political atmosphere in the nation had been oppressive, murderous, stifling.              

                                                                           

There two key problems with aspiring to Marxist revolution in Russia:  First, Russia was not industrially advanced enough for the masses of people to be of the proletariat (urban working class, especially factory laborers);   second, neither Lenin nor Stalin had been members of the proletariat.  Under Stalin’s leadership, “dictatorship of the proletariat” became “dictatorship of that segment of the Communist Party membership that will do the will of Joseph Stalin.”  More briefly, “dictatorship of the proletariat” became simply “dictatorship.”

 

The Great Depression

 

Optimism of spirit characterized life in the United States during “The Roaring 1920s.”  Women in the United States gained legal recognition as voting citizens with the passage of the 19^th Amendment in 1920.  Women felt freer in matters of dress and public presence, dancing to the Charleston and visiting ‘speak easies” at which owners of saloons found ways to disregard the 18^th Amendment banning the production and sale of alcoholic beverages.  Even many middle class people owned automobiles with the appearance of the Model T and other mass-produced vehicles.  And businesses seemed to be thriving as indicated particular by values listed on the stock exchanges.  

 

But those high prices on stock exchanges were a problem.  By 1927, factories were churning out goods for which the market was limited, business enterprise officials were overstating company profit levels, and investors kept on paying the inflated stock share prices.  By October 1929, some investors were realizing their mistake, pulling selling shares and scaling down the level of their investment.  Then, after several days of precipitous declines, panic reached a peak on 28 and 29 October 1929, with stock market share prices declining 25% across the two days.  The panic became general:  Businesses laid off workers, banks called in loans, customers claimed their bank deposits in full, bankruptcies and mortgage foreclosures became endemic. 

 

At the international level, investors from the United States withdrew loans across Europe, where economies were still recovering from the ravages of war;  also withdrawn was the network of loans that had been set up to facilitate Germany’s payment of reparations .  International commodity prices had by 1932 fallen to 45% of their 1929 value.  A harmful trend of economic protectionism set in, with the President Herbert Hoover administration in the United States ill-advisedly leading the way, imposing via the Smoot-Hawley Tariff (1930) taxes on imports in the 42%-50% range.

 

Discontented masses in Europe sought answers in the promises of brutal dictators:  Benito Mussolini, backed by his informal militia (“Black Shirts”), in Italy;  In the same year the authoritarian Marshal Pilsudski took power in Poland;  General Francisco Franco, in Spain;  and Adolf Hitler, in Germany.

                                                                                                                              

Extolling the Germans as first among an Aryan race of blond-haired and physically robust people, the Nazi (National Socialist) version of fascism branded Slavs, Catholics, homosexuals, the handicapped, dark-skinned people, and---  especially---  Jews as unfit for citizenship and candidates for extermination.  In death camps such as Auschwitz, an abominable tally of 6,000,000 Jews went to their deaths in gas chambers constructed by the Nazis at the death camps of Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmino, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka.  These death camps were labeled the “Final Solution” to the “Jewish Question,” with reference to the people many Germans accused of using their acumen to manipulate German economy and society for their own gain.            

 

World War II

 

During 1933-1936, Adolf Hitler contravened the Treaty of Versailles by conscripting soldiers again in the manner of the early decades of the 20^th century.  A substantial number of these troops were stationed in the Rhineland region so often contested with France and sent into Austria (the land of Hitler’s birth).  At a 1938 conference at Munich, Hitler secured permission from the leaders of Great Britain, France, and Italy for German occupation of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia.  Emboldened, Hitler ordered invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939. 

 

The Allies (Great Britain, France, Russia) declared war against Germany but dithered, giving the Germans time to build up their stocks of weapons, to get troops moving and the air force (Luftwaffe) flying.  German military commanders utilized a heighted mass attack known as Blitzkrieg, quickly bringing Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg under control, then stunningly gaining  France capitulation in 1940.

 

Hitler’s next major move was an ultimately failed bombing of London;  the last phase of the Battle for Britain began on 7 September 1940 and lasted into October;  by the end of that month, the Luftwaffe ceased the bombing.  Hitler then ordered invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.  German victories were swift until December, at which point the Germans were driven back after having mounted a serious threat to Moscow.  Foiled at their attempt to capture Moscow, and with temperatures turning so frigid as to freeze the lubricant in their tanks.  Tough fighting then focused on Stalingrad, continuing until February 1943, at which point the remnants of the 6^th army had to surrender, counting 170,000 of their troops dead.

 

The United States had entered the war on 8 December after the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese.  Japanese society had been militarized in the course of the early 1930s, and rapid industrial development had created the need for raw materials not found on nation’s islands.  Japanese naval leaders and their supporters lobbied for a quick strike against the United States naval base of Pearl Harbor on Hawaii to slow any response that the Roosevelt administration might decide to make to the planned Japanese advance in Asia and the Pacific.  Thus came the bombing of Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, the “date which will live in infamy” according to President Roosevelt in a speech that he gave as Congress declared war on Japan the next day.  Japanese Admiral Nagumo had sent forth two waves of bombers in an attack that had sunk 18 naval vessels (including eight battleships) and 400 aircraft---  compared with the loss of only 29 Japanese planes.

 

From January 1941 through May 1943, German and Italian forces waged a campaign in North Africa that was countered by British soldiers.  The Italians actually took the initiative in the early stages of the North Africa campaign, but eventually the German General Rommel (dubbed “Desert Fox” by the Allies for his slyness as a tactician) took charge.  Rommel’s forces achieved numerous early victories but were ultimately overwhelmed:  Rommel flew out to Germany in March 1943, and the last Axis holdouts in Tunisia surrendered in May 13.   

 

By this time, the Japanese were rolling from victory to victory in the Asia-Pacific theater.  Even before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese had built an empire that included Korea, Manchuria, Taiwan, Vietnam, and the major cities of eastern China.  During January and February 1942, Japanese troops swept through Malaysia and Singapore.  From bases on Taiwan, the Japanese launched an effort in the Philippines that would become their fulcrum for success in the South Pacific.  Burma had fell in Japanese attacks, forcing British retreat in March and April 1942.  The Japanese succeeded to victories in the Battle of the Java Sea, New Guinea, and the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia). 

 

Mussolini fell from power in Italy on 25 July 1943, fifteen days after the Allied forces made a move on the Italian peninsula.  The Italian campaign, though, did not go as smoothly or conclusively as the campaign in North Africa.  Fighting was tough, though, as German reinforcements landed and the American troops had to attempt to breach sturdy lines of defense.  Allied troops entered Rome on 4 June 1944 but did not secure German surrender in Italy until 2 May 1945, just six days before the official end of war in the European theater.

 

On 6 June 1944 (just two days after the entry into Rome), the Allies launched “Operation Overlord,” one of the most audacious and successful military efforts in history.   This was an amphibious landing on the northern European coast at Normandy, where the Germans (expecting the attack at Calais) were caught off-guard.  Heavy Allied air and naval bombardment at four landing points had the Germans reeling.  But a fifth bombardment, at Omaha Beach, did not have the same impact.  Here, the German positions were exceptionally well fortified;  the Allies did ultimately prevail in the course of that very same day (known as “D-Day”), but at the cost of 3,000 casualties.

 

Landing 130,000 troops by nightfall, the Allies linked the five beachheads into a front that allowed entry for armored vehicles, heavy artillery, and steadily arriving troops.  The Germans fought tenaciously, tough, so that victory at the city of Caen (a major objective) took until 18 July 1944. 

 

Allied troops marched southward from Normandy toward Paris from late July 1944;  Paris fell on 24 August 1944, and German troops in the Belgian port of Antwerp succumbed to Allied forces on 4 September, but from that temporal point the Allies faced eight months of strenuous fighting.  Tenacious German troops trapped 6,000 British Soldiers at Arnhem on 21 September.  During December 1944-January 1945, Hitler ordered an all-out, last-ditch attempt to put the momentum of the European theater back on the German side.  Over 500,000 German troops advanced in the maneuver called the “Battle of the Bulge,” at first stunning Allied soldiers with the ferocity and the numbers that they faced in the German onslaught.  But Americans survived such an advance on their positions at Bastogne, Belgium, and even were able to counterattack to reduce the “bulge” in the German formation.  The Germans suffered 100,000 casualties and saw 1,000 aircraft downed.  The allies crossed the Rhine River on 24 March 1945, faced only occasional resistance at the Elbe;  there, they linked up with the westward advancing Red Army of the Soviets.   

 

On April 30 April 1945, Adolf Hitler committed suicide;  on 1 May 1945, the Berlin garrison surrendered;  and on 7 May 1945, official of the German successor government at Flensburg (northwest Germany) signed documents of surrender.  The Allies signaled that the next day, 8 May 1945, would be designated Victory in Europe(V-E) Day).     

 

With the United States fully supplied and ready for the war in the Pacific by May 1942, the United States navy registered a major victory in the Battle of the Coral Sea, inflicting great damage on the Japanese fleet.  Then, in early June 1942, a Japanese attempt to take the Midway Islands from the Americans failed miserably, at a cost of four air carriers and 70% of the pilots in the Japanese navy.  In February 1943, the Japanese began to lose islands that they had held, as United States amphibious forces ousted them from Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands.  By November of that year, the Americans went on with their “island hopping” maneuvers, wresting the Gilbert Islands and the Marianas from Japanese control.

 

Victory at Leyte Gulf in October 1944 cleared sea lanes for United States reoccupation of the Philippines, which occurred in March 1945.  About the same time, in a multiple-week struggle that cost 23,000 United States Marine casualties, the Americans took Iwo Jima.  From there, United States air raids on Tokyo caused great damage.  Still, the Japanese committed 120,000 troops in defense of Okinawa (26 March-June 30 1945), losing all but 7,500 of these troops, who collectively and individually recorded ferocious and fanatical feats of supra-nationalistic spirit.   

 

Such rabid resistance convinced U. S. President Harry Truman that advisers urging use of the atomic bomb were correct in seeking to avoid the enormous United States casualties likely to be sustained with an invasion of the Japanese home islands.  Truman authorized dropping bombs on Hiroshima (6 August 1945) and Nagasaki (9 August 1945).  On 14 August 1945, Japanese Emperor Hirohito issued a proclamation ending Japanese resistance, and on 2 September 1945 Japanese officials signed the official document of surrender aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.

 

With the signing of this document, all theaters were quiet and World War II was at an end.  

 

VI.  Third-Stage Modern Period (1946-2019)

 

The Emergence of the United States as Leader of the Western World

 

The United States contributed mightily to Allied victories in both World War I and World War II, while having no battles from either war fought on American soil.   Two centuries into its existence, the United States was leveraging it its size and natural resource wealth to increasing advantage in asserting its international economic and military power.  On the strength of general prosperity, the United States assumed a position of leadership in the Western World that became counterpoised to the leadership of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe.

 

At the Yalta (on the Crimean peninsula) and Potsdam (in Germany) conferences of 1945 Josef Stalin made clear that in the aftermath of World War II he intended to assert the leadership of the Soviet Union over the Baltic states, Poland, and Eastern Europe in general.   Concerned that the Soviets would also make inroads in Western Europe if the tattered economies in those nations were not repaired from the devastation of war, in 1948 President Truman gave Secretary of State George C. Marshall the go-ahead to announce his “Marshall Plan” of ultimately $12 billion in economic aid to 16 nations of Western and Southern Europe, to be dispensed through 1952.  The recipient nations were mostly those who in 1950 had formed the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and in 1957 would form the European Economic Community (EEC) to facilitate greater economic integration and free movement of goods, services, and labor.

 

The Cold War

 

Early in 1948, the Western Allies (the United States, British, and French forces) decided to unite their areas of Berlin, which had been divided into four parts by the terms of an agreement at Yalta.  When Stalin ordered the closing of all land routes into Berlin in opposition to the proposed unification of all parts but that controlled by the Soviets, the Allies then countered by airlifting food and other supplies into the city, thereby feeding two million people.

 

In the atmosphere of what came to be known as the “Cold War,” the Allies in April 1949 signed a mutual security pact calling for the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO);  in 1955 Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev (Stalin died in 1953) countered with the Warsaw Pact for the mutual security of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc nations under Soviet domination.  The Soviets were also quickly establishing what Winston Churchill had dubbed an “Iron Curtain” across Europe, dividing East and West.  The Soviets demonstrated that they would tolerate no dissidence against their influence, most dramatically crushing a 1956 Hungarian revolt and in 1958 nixing the “Warsaw Spring” reforms of Alexander Dubcek, whose government was replaced with one in sync with Soviet policy preferences.     

 

From the late 1940s through the late 1980s, most of the world’s great conflicts were waged with implications for the Cold War.  In the aftermath of World War II, war broke out between contenders for power in Korea, with the North led by communist Kim Il Sung and the South led by conservative strongman, Syngman Rhee.  The Soviets had at the end of World War II occupied the Korea north of the 38^th parallel, while the United States stationed troops south of that line.  Both nations withdrew their troops in 1949, but after Sung sent troops into the South on 25 June 1950, United States troops returned as part of United Nations contingents sent to prevent the South from being overrun.  In September 1950, troops under the command of General Douglass MacArthur landed at Inchon, by October had crossed the 38^th parallel, and then pressed on to the Chinese border.  But at that point, Chinese troops came pouring over the border, pressing the attack to force United Nations troops back over the 38^th parallel. 

 

General MacArthur would have liked to have mounted a more aggressive response against Chinese forces, but President Truman considered the potential loss of life that would occur with a more intense and potentially protracted effort and settled for a stalemate.  MacArthur went public with his objections, prompting Truman to dismiss him from command.  MacArthur then issued the famous statement that “Old soldiers never die:  They just slowly fade away.”  The war did not officially come to a conclusion until both sides an armistice in July 1953.  The two sides confirmed their positions as divided at the 18^th parallel.  That is still the armed border in 2015.  North of the border, people are governed as the People’s Republic of Korea;  south of the border is the Democratic Republic of Korea.  The former is a repressive, totalitarian regime claiming to follow a communist ideology.  The latter for many decades was an authoritarian rightist regime but eventually evolved into an economically successful government of the liberal democratic republic type. 

 

The Chinese troops that had crossed the border to push back United Nations forces were those of the newly established (1 October 1949) People’s Republic of China, led by Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung).  Mao had led his Chinese Communist Party triumphantly over the Guomindang (Kuomintang) of Chiang Kai-shek in the Chinese Civil War of 1945-1949.  This was a blow to the United States, which had supported Chiang’s government (Republic of China) as it retreated to city of Chongqing in Sichuan Province and endeavored to retake the Chinese eastern seaboard from the Japanese in World War II. 

 

Chiang had seemed to be the heir apparent to Sun Yat-sen, who emerged as the most important revolutionary figure when the Qing Dynasty had fallen in 1912.  Sun established the Republic of China in that year, but during the 1912-1927 period most of China was actually dominated by warlords who sectioned China off into separately governed areas.  Chiang Kai-shek during 1927-1928 moved from his then-capital of Nanjing on a Northern Expedition to rout major warlord forces.  Largely successful in that effort, he then turned on the Chinese Communists, forcing them to leave headquarters in Jiangxi Province to head westward and then northward on the famous Long March (1934-1936) to the caves of Yan’an in Shaanxi (Shensi) Province.  There Mao wrote, thought, oversaw strikes against the Japanese in northern China, and constructed the strategy of peasant-based revolution that brought him eventual victory in 1949.  Chiang Kai-shek’s government, armed forces, and supporters retreated to the island of Taiwan;  although Chiang claimed that he and the Guomindang would return to power on the mainland, Chiang died in 1975 still ensconced on Taiwan.

 

Leaders in the United States were very unsettled in facing the reality of two huge nations now being under communist control.  Any real association of communism with the thoughtful dialectic and the cooperative ethic advanced by Karl Marx had little presence in the assessments of leaders and citizens of the United States.  Most Americans viewed communism in terms of its appropriation by Stalin’s totalitarian regime, the struggle with fellow the “superpower” in post-Stalinist Soviet Union, and the revolutionary, anti-capitalist spirit of Mao and other Chinese Communists.

 

Then Fidel Castro gave United States leaders another transformation about which to worry.   Castro was originally an ideologically vague, leftist revolutionary focused specifically on the overthrow of the rightist dictator Fulgencio Batista (in power since 1933), who was friendly to United States capitalist interests.  Batista’s forces proved inept and the dictator fled in panic in 1959, so that Fidel easily slipped into the power vacuum at the capital.

 

The administration of U. S. President John Kennedy was so concerned over these events that it sent an ill-fated contingent to the shores of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.  In the aftermath of this disastrous attempt to oust him from power, Castro accepted economic assistance from, and an alliance with, the Soviet Union.  In 1962, Russian leader Khrushchev dispatched missiles to bases in Cuba, prompting Kennedy and his advisers to consider a military response that in the nuclear age they knew might produce catastrophic consequences.  The nuclear threat loomed in any case from those Soviet missiles pointed at the United States.  In the end, though, disaster was avoided via negotiations conducted via telephonic and telegraphic communications:  The Soviets ultimately agreed to American demands for withdrawal of the missiles.

 

The Soviets launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, into Earth orbit on 4 October 1957;  the United States countered with the launching of its own satellite, Explorer, in January 1958, but the Soviets trumped that accomplishment on 12 April 1961 by launching the first human being (Yuri Gagarin) into space.  From that point forward, though, the momentum shifted to the United States:  Alan Shepard matched Gagarin’s feat on 5 May 1961;  Kennedy announced an acceleration of the space program, with the aim of a lunar landing within a decade;  and, indeed, U. S. astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped on to the moon on 20 July 1969.    

 

Since the middle 19^th century, the French had invested much imperial interest in the region of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam that they called Indochina.  But with the rising nationalist spirit among people around the globe, animating a people long steeled for struggle against a powerful outsider (for most of history, China), the Vietnamese agitated for independence in the aftermath of World War II.  They ousted their French overlords in 1954, then fought among themselves. 

 

On 21 July 1954, a Geneva Conference was held to formalize the French exit and to fix (at the 17^th parallel) the line dividing northern Vietnamese under the revolutionary guerrilla leader Ho Chi Minh (who increasingly identified as communist) from southern Vietnamese under anti-communist right dictator Ngo Dinh Diem.  But Ho urged the formation of a southern revolutionary group, the Vietcong, to oppose Diem;  the latter was assassinated in 1963, to be replaced after a few months of political jousting and jostling by Nguyen Van Thieu, who led South Vietnam  during 1965-1969. 

 

The Vietminh forces of the North and their Vietcong allies in the South were much more disciplined and ideologically committed than were their counterparts among the regular forces backing Thieu.  To bolster the latter, President Lyndon Johnson elevated the United States commitment in Vietnam by sending ground troops in 1965;  over the years, the monetary and bodily investment increased greatly, so that by the end of the war in 1973, approximately 57,000 United States troops and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese lives had been lost---  without the claim of victory.  In fact, the morale of the northern forces had become bolder with the “Tet Offensive” of 1968 that precipitated a drawdown of American troops, and that sort of organization and vigor led to a victory of the soldiers of the North (now the People’s Republic of Vietnam) in 1975.

 

All of this was unnerving in the context of the Cold War.  In China, the turbulent Cultural Revolution had raged through the late 1960s and still was a force in the 1970s.  The situation in Korea was unsettled, communist governments presided over Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam.   Revolutionary groups identifying as Marxist contended with established, often rightist authoritarian regimes in many areas of Africa, Asia and the Pacific, South and Central America.  The United States seemed insecure in its ability to stem the tide of communism, and in this insecurity often allied with governments that showed little regard for personal liberty and human rights;  this was true, for example, in the association of the United States government with leadership in South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Chile, and Zaire.

 

The United States also at best simply observed as major nationalist movements overturned one colonial regime after another.

 

Anti-Colonial Revolts    

 

India

 

At the end of world War II, the British, French, Portuguese, and Dutch all still held numerous territories overseas; but the nationalist impulse was strong and the days of colonial emopire were numbered.

 

Great Britain lost the biggest colonial prize of all with the concession of India’s independence in 1947.  The quest for independence had been a theme on the subcontinent ever since the founding of the Indian National Congress in 1885.  By the early decades of the 20^th century, leadership of the Indian independence movement was largely in the hands of Mohandas K. Gandhi, and advocate for nonviolent resistance in a movement that he called satyagraha. 

 

On the strength of Gandhi’s efforts, and those of other independence leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru, the British were compelled to grant independence.  But Indian independence was messy.  Gandhi had sought reconciliation between Hindus and Muslims in a unified state, but when independence came in 1947, it came on the basis of a division into the predominately Hindu state of India and the predominately Muslim state of Pakistan.  Even Pakistan was divided into segments, West Pakistan and East Pakistan (the latter of which became Bangladesh in 1971 after still more bloodshed) that were far-flung across hundreds of miles.  And in the violence and confusion that suffused Hindu-Muslim disputes in 1947, Gandhi lost his life:  The proponent of nonviolence and unity was struck down by a fellow Hindu who seethed at Gandhi’s empathy for Muslims and advocacy for their rights within a unified state.

 

Elsewhere in Asia

 

After Japanese invasion and occupation of Indonesia during 1942-1945 Dutch tried to reestablish colonial control but lost a bitter armed and diplomatic struggle to the backers of nationalist leader Sukarno:  The Dutch formally recognized Indonesian Independence in December 1949.

 

The late 1990s was an important time for the fading vestiges of colonial control in Asia.  The British relinquished control of Hong Kong in 1997 to the People’s Republic of China;  the Portuguese did the same with Macau in in 1999.  The Chinese themselves held people such as the Tibetans and the Uighers in an imperialist grip, but the European era of imperialist power had ended.

 

Africa

                                                                                                                             

Most British-held colonies in Africa became independent in the course of the late 1950s and 1960s, with the following nations emerging from British colonial control:  Ghana (1957), Tanganyika (now Tanzania, 1961), Uganda (1962), Kenya (1963), Zambia (1964).  In North Africa, the French mostly gave up colonial control in 1960 but held on to Algeria, where a large French minority had settled, until 1962;  liberation of Algeria came against stubborn French efforts to retain control and to guide political outcomes.  The struggle against Portuguese colonial rule in Angola and Mozambique was also protracted, featuring a vanguard of rebels who identified as Marxist;  independence for both nations came in 1973.

 

In Rhodesia, black African nationalists forced a new constitution upon the white minority government of Ian Smith.  The moderate Bishop Abel Muzorewa took power in 1979, but Zimbabwe African Nationalist Union (ZANU) leader Robert Mugabe won election as president in 1980 and served into the second decade  of the new millennium.

                                                                                         

South Africa’s president from 1958 through 1969, Henrik Verwoerd, devised the Apartheid system of formal racial segregation that endured until 1994.  In 1961, Nelson Mandela led fellow members of the African Nationalist Congress (ANC) in a campaign against government communications and transportation systems;  although venerated by the black populace for their courage, Mandela and others were arrested and confined to long prison terms in 1963---  in Mandela’s case, until 11 February 1990.  By that time, black Africans in the nation had been subjected to the system of Bantustans, enclaves to which Blacks had been relocated and denied rights of citizenship.  Police and army contingents made opposition difficult, but from June 1976 until November 1977 riots were common among the angry residents of the Soweto district. 

 

Pressure steadily mounted on the South African regime.  F. W. De Klerk became president in 1989, lifted bans on the ANC and other opposition groups, commenced discussions with Mandela upon the latter’s release from prison in 1990, and in March 1992 held a referendum on the end of Apartheid and a new system of racially equitable governance.  The vote went 68% in favor of the referendum, signaling the imminent termination of Apartheid.  The first elections on the basis of universal suffrage were held during 26-28 April 1994.  Then, on 10 May 1994, Mandela became the first black president of South Africa;  his tenure lasted until 1999. 

 

Momentous Events from 1980 through 2015

 

The Fall of the Soviet Union

 

By the 1980s, the economy and political framework of the Soviet Union were in trouble.  Chronic shortages of food and consumer goods cause discontent among the people, who as an abiding matter resented the suppression of dissent by the KGB security forces.  When Mikhail Gorbachev assumed leadership of the Soviet Union in 1985, he acknowledge faults in the system while maintaining paramountcy of Communist Party.  He said, rather, that the system needed perestroika (“restructuring”) and glasnost (‘opening”) so as to become more efficient and responsive to the Soviet people.

 

But in 1989 the communist regimes of Eastern Europe all fell from power, creating a momentum that overtook Gorbachev in 1991.  He was pressured out of office by opposition leader Boris Yeltsin, who served as president from 1991 until 1999.  He was succeeded in the presidency by Vladimir Putin, who has been the leading political figure in the Soviet Union from 2000 until 2015, remaining the power behind the presidency of Dmitry Medvedev during 2008-2012.  In the aftermath of the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, the nations of Central Asia and the Baltic region that had been included in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics gained independence.  The leaders of Russia put together an entity that became known as the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), consisting of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Russia itself, with the aims of economic cooperation and mutual security.  From the 1990s forward, the leaders and people of Russia have sought to promote greater democracy and to advance the economy on the basis of capitalist enterprise.  But Russia has borne the wait of centuries of authoritarianism under the tsars and the Soviets.  Economic dislocations have accompanied the struggle toward free enterprise, and Vladimir Putin has a penchant for authoritarian stances and actions.

 

The Nature of Conflict During the Post-Cold War Era

 

With the fall of communist government in Yugoslavia in 1990, the six socialist republics (Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzgovina, Montenegro, and Macedonia) that longtime Yugoslav dictator Josip Tito had assembled into a tenuous unity each clamored for independence.  When leaders and the public of Croatia and Slovenia demanded independence, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic bristled. Intervention in Slovenia (June 1991) failed, and a two-year assault on independence forces in Croatia resulted in great loss of life; a United Nations-brokered ceasefire brought tenuous peace in 1992.  Then Milosevic threw his support behind Serbs in a Bosnian civil war (1992-1995) wherein contending forces of a diverse population (43% Muslim, 31% Serb, 17% Croat) fought the bloodiest battles since World War II.  The Bosnian government massacred thousands of refugees at the supposed “safe haven” at Srebrenica.  A United Nations bombing campaign pressured Milosevic into withdrawing support for the Bosnian Serbs and signing a peace accord in December 1995.  Meanwhile, ethnic strife in Kosovo left that region in legal limbo, neither officially independent nor effectively part of Serbia.

 

Among the reasons for discontent among the public that led to the fall of the Soviet Union was a misadventure in Afghanistan.  In 1973 Marxists in that nation deposed King Muhammad Zahir Shah and then instituted a new government superintended by the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA).  But this government was in turn opposed by an Islamic resistance group, which termed their movement a jihad (holy war) against the PDPA and their backers from the Soviet Union, which sent in an increasingly elevated quantity of troops.  But the latter faced tough fighting against highly motivated mujahideen guerrilla units, who picked off Soviet troops across terrain that they knew much better---  and then began to down Soviet aircraft.  The war grew too costly and was overwhelmingly unpopular:  The Soviets withdrew. The mujahideen and PDPA continued hostilities but essentially were at the time in a stalemate.

 

This episode was one of many involving Muslims actively promoting their version of Islam.  The participants from one region to another might not agree on basic principles, and many ideas were at odds with the sacred precepts communicated to Jibrahil (Gabriel) to Muhammad in the Qur’an, but Muslims were on the move in the world, and they proceeded at a high level of ideological motivation.

 

In Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini came to power in 1979 with great popular backing.  An oddly constituted coalition (including leftists and middle class moderates, as well as conservative Shi’ite Muslims) had pressured Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi into fleeing the country.  A popular referendum favored an Islamic republic, and a new constitution named Khomeini the Supreme Leader of Iran.   The Shah, who had led Iran’s monarchical and Western-friendly government, since 1941, eventually landed in the United States for cancer treatment in October 1979.  Angered by the U. S. refusal to return the Shah to Iran for trial, student activists penetrated the U. S. embassy in Teheran, took 63 hostages, and held these citizens of the United States for over a year.  The Khomeini died in 1989 and was succeeded by Ali Hosseini Khamenei, who in 2015 was still Supreme Leader of Iran.  The foundations of the Shi’ite theocracy are still firm;  the premier of Iran has a great deal of power, but the Islamic Supreme Leader has great prestige and a large following, allowing him to object to any policy not to his liking.  Tensions remain high between Iran and the United States, but there has been some favorable movement in negotiations regarding a reduction of Iran’s nuclear capability.

 

The Iranian revolution caused concern in neighboring Iraq, where in the very year that Ayatollah Khomeini came to power, Saddam Hussein outmaneuvered rivals in the Sunni Muslim Ba’ath Party to become president in Iran.  Saddam ruled as a secular rather than religious Sunni Muslim, but he feared that the Shi’ite revolution in Iran would stir resentment of the Shi’ite majority in his own country.  Saddam seized what he thought was an opportune moment to invade Iran on 22 September 1980, with the aim of seizing part of Iranian territory and asserting Iraq’s preeminence as the major power of the Persian Gulf region.  The Iranians proved tough opponents, however:  By March 1981, the Iraqi offensive had stalled, and by June 1982 the Iranians had recovered almost all lost territory.  The war went on, causing 1.5 million casualties, but when the two sides agreed to a ceasefire in August 1988, Saddam’s quest for territory and assertion of preeminent power had gone unfulfilled.

 

Still seeking a showcase for manifestation of Iraqi military superiority, Sadam sent his forces into Kuwait in August 1990, claiming the nation as a province of Iraq and thereby asserting control over the nation’s oil reserves;  the latter would have helped mightily in covering the $100 billion cost of the 1980-1988 war with Iran.  But United States President George Bush put together a coalition that included many Arab states and in a one-two blow of air offensive (Operation Desert Storm, 15-16 January 1991) and massive land assault (24 February 1991), pressured the forces of Saddam back across the Kuwait border.  Some counseled Bush to pursue Saddam to Baghdad with the aim of removing him from power, but after moving through part of southern Iraq, the coalition forces pulled out, with Saddam still in power.

 

This tussle with Saddam, however, proved to be prelude to much greater confrontation with the Iraqi president, one that occurred due to a convoluted set of circumstances and, to many, rather convoluted logic:

 

On 11 September 2001, in the set of events that collectively came to be known as “9-11,” came four air attacks across the eastern United States:  High-jacked American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York City at 8:68 A. M. Eastern Standard Time (EST), then at 9:02 A. M. EST United Airlines Flight 175 hit the complex’s south tower; there then followed a 9:37 A. M. EST American Airlines Flight 77 crash into the Pentagon (Washington, D. C.), and at 10:03 A. M. EST United Airlines Flight 93 (probably redirected by hijackers toward the Capitol Building or the White House in Washington, D. C.) descended into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.    

 

Seeking to make a forceful show against these acts, and on the intelligence that the Sunni Muslim terrorist group Al-Qaida had planned and implemented the attacks on 9-11, the Bush administration formed two dramatic military responses:

 

First, knowing that Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden organized his followers in Afghanistan with the cooperation of the Taliban regime (another terrorist organization with a skewed interpretation of Islam, in power since August 1994), bombers from the United States Air Force struck Afghan cities on 7 October 2011.  As bombing continued, Kabul fell on 13 November 2011.  The United States went on to send advisers and ground troops into Afghanistan, maintaining a presence during both the George Bush (2001-2008) and Barack Obama (2009-2016) administrations in the effort to find Osama and to either rout the Taliban or prevent the return of the Taliban to power.  On 2 May 2001, Special Forces of the United States did eventually hunt down and kill Osama, not in Afghanistan but in neighboring Pakistan.  Meanwhile, the Obama administration sought to stabilize minimally competent and not very popular regimes in Afghanistan, while having to settle for keeping the Taliban away from Kabul and on the defensive.

 

Second, the George W. Bush administration launched airstrikes against Baghdad on 20 March 2003.  Thus, the son of George H. W. Bush was attempting to finish what his father had started, making an effort to destabilize the government of Saddam Hussein and remove him from power.  The pretext was the search for Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), given Saddam’s aversion to having plants thought capable of producing nuclear, biological, and chemical weaponry inspected by representatives from the United Nations---  as he had agreed to do in 1993.   No such weapons were ever found, but the Americans pressed on, landing ground forces (officially from an international coalition but mostly formed of United States soldiers) on 22 March 2003.  On  9 April 2003, these forces took Baghdad, and the last major city (Tikrit) fell on 13 April 2003.  With Saddam on the run and Baghdad in chaos, United States forces occupied the city and fanned out over the country, staying until December 2011.  In the meantime,  Saddam Hussein was eventually hunted down on 13 December 2003;  he languished in prison before trial and  execution, the latter occurring on 30 December 2006.

 

In all 6,677 United States troops have died in Iraq and Afghanistan;  4,448 U. S. soldiers have died in Iraq, 2,229 in Afghanistan.  United States troops are still harm’s way in Afghanistan, and reentry

to Baghdad is under consideration as the city and nation continue to be unsettled, and as the Sunni Muslim group, Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria[ISIS]), vows to expand over West Asia and North Africa. 

 

The Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) and the current aggressiveness of ISIS in Syria, Iraq, and North Africa show clearly that Muslims are often as divided against themselves (as has been historically true of the Christian world, of course) as against others against the Western world against which some Muslims harbor such abiding resentment.  But in the Arab-Israeli dispute, one does find Muslims and Jews frequently in conflict.  This has been true since a Zionist (determined Jewish relocation to Israel) movement began in earnest during the first couple of decades of the 19^th century.  Given the Jewish diaspora dating to the first two centuries A.D. (CE), when oppressive policies of Roman administrators in Palestine resulted in the scattering of Jews to Europe and places across the globe, the large-scale return to the land known variously as Palestine or Israel was a startling development.  There, Arab populations had dominated for centuries. 

 

Great Britain was the imperialist power of note in Palestine and Jordan.  The British tried many times to work out some settlement, but they evidence make conflicting promises to both sides.  This was notably true in the claim to respect Arab Palestinian interests in the British “White Paper” of 1916, while recognizing the Zionist aim of a Jewish homeland in the Balfour Declaration of 1917.  With the Holocaust taking six million Jewish lives during World War II, the intensity of desire for a Jewish state intensified.  Neither British nor United Nations effort brought reconciliation between the Jews and the Palestinians.  After the British announced that they would pull troops from the area on 15 May 1948, Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion declared the formation of the State of Israel.

 

The establishment of Israel as a Jewish state led to four wars---  1948, 1956, 1968, and 1973---  in which Israel faced off against the Arab states Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq ;  and steady conflict between Palestinian and Jew that still abided in 2015.  The Israelis generally got the best of these armed conflicts, but the struggle was more difficult in 1973.  As the Arabs leveraged their wealth in petroleum to cut back on oil supplies during the 1970s, with the resulting economic pain felt in many places, United States President Jimmy Carter coaxed Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Menachim Begin to the negotiating table in 1979, a historic deal resulted in territorial claims acceptable to both sides.  But the fundamental problem of counterclaims by Arabs and Jews on territory in Israel remains.  The Palestinians are restive in an small area designated for them as an autonomous zone;  and Israelis are ever vigilant against occasional Palestinian attacks on their territory and against the hostility that they perceive still abides among the leaders of Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Saudi Arabia for their right to exist in a state avowedly Jewish.  So far, no two-state solution (acceptable division of Israel’s territory between Palestinians and Jews) has materialized, nor did it seem imminent in 2015.       

 

The Historical Connection to Current World Conflicts

 

Somalia

 

Historically, Somalia was a crossroads of international trade, positioned as it is on the horn of Africa, along with Ethiopia and Eritrea.  The ancient kingdom of Meroe, a powerful state in east Africa that competed for territories against the might of the Egyptian pharaohs, held territories in today’s Ethiopia and Somalia.

                                                                                               

Northern Somalia was controlled by Great Britain from the 19^th century until 1960;  Italy controlled the southern half of Somalia until the end of World War II in 1945.  In 1960, when Great Britain gave up control of the northern part of the region, the northern and southern regions of Somalia were joined as the Somali Republic.  In March 1969, Muhammad Siad Barre came to power and in 1970 presided over the renaming of the nation as the Somali Democratic Republic.

 

During the years 1977-1988, Somalia and Ethiopia went to war over counterclaims to the huge eastern section of Ethiopia known as Ogaden, where many ethnic Somalis live.  Cuba sent troops to aid Ethiopia in 1978, but the war drug on until a peace agreement was reached.  By this time, 1.5 million ethnic Somali refugees had fled into Somalia, exacerbating economic and political problems.  Mounting pressures forced President Barre to flee.  Thereafter, the nation was torn by civil war, which raged until a peace deal was reached in January 2004.

 

Somalia, though, is a land in which power is divided among warlords operating outside control of the official government in Mogadishu.  People in the various regions of Somalia speak different dialects and feel little mutual political affinity.  Various militias are constantly fighting each other, so that people in the country feel under relentless siege, impelling many to seek refuge in the United States and elsewhere.      

 

Rwanda

 

Historically, the territory in central Africa that includes Rwanda was occupied by the Tutsi and Hutu ethnic groups.  The Tutsis comprise just 10% of the Rwandan population but have historically been the most politically dominant.  Rwanda was held from the 19^th century by Belgium, the imperial administrations of which favored the Tutsis.  But when Belgium relinquished control in 1959, the Hutus emerged as the most powerful political force, reversing the course of history.  Tutsis struck back frequently, including a major coup attempt in 1963, but for three decades could not wrest control from the Hutus.

 

Juvenal Habyarimana ruled as President from 1973 until 1994, when he died in a plane crash.  This created a power vacuum into which the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front RPF) and other groups

rushed in their competition for power.  Civil war of massive proportions then broke out, leaving a million dead and impelling two million refugees of both Hutu and Tutsi ethnicities to flee into Zaire (Democratic Republic of Congo) and Tanzania.  The international community was slow to react to the disastrous events in Rwanda;  only belatedly did French troops enter the nation under a United Nations mandate.

 

In late 1996 a peace accord was signed;  while many refugees remained in Zaire, a total of a million of those who had fled did return from Zaire and Tanzania.   In September 1998, Paul Kagame, a Tutsi and leader of the RPF became president, gaining reelection in 2003.

 

Democratic Republic of Congo (Zaire)

 

The nation that since the 1960s has been known variously as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Zaire, was ruled under the ironic name, Congo Free State, from 1884 until 1908;  it was controlled by a private group dominated by King Leopold II of Belgium.  In 1908 the government of Belgium took control from the private group and ruled until 1960.  Power struggles ensued, from which Joseph D. Mubutu (Mobutu Sese Keko) emerged victorious in 1965;  Mubutu changed the nation’s name from the DRC to Zaire and ruled as President until 1996.  Laurent Kabila ruled as president from 1996 until he was assassinated in 2001;  his son, Joseph Kabila, assumed the presidency and rules in that capacity still, in 2015.

 

But the DRC, now known under that name again, is rent by competing militias in the eastern region of the nation.   The national government in Kinshasha does maintain a presence in the region but competes there with various militia forces, some of them formed from various DRC populations, some of them comprised of Rwandans (especially Hutus) in opposition to their own government.  The DRC is the most mineral-rich nation in the world, with gold, silver, cobalt, coal, and various minerals used in the making of cell phones and other electronic devices.  These minerals bring high prices on the world market, the main motivation for the ferocity of competition over the eastern region of the nation.  To intimidate the local populace, militia forces have murdered male villagers and heaped atrocities on females, some of whom have been raped repeatedly.  A United Nations peacekeeping force has maintained a presence in the nation since 1999;  disturbing reports, backed by corroborating evidence, reveal that these putative peacekeepers have also engaged in rape of women from the villagers of this ravaged eastern part of the DNC.    

 

Ireland

 

During 1968-1997, the northern part of Ireland was the focal point for an intense and violent struggle between Catholics and Protestants.  After Irish violent expressions of opposition to British dominance in 1916, the British recognized Irish Free State (which became the Irish Republic) but excluded the heavily Protestant areas of northern Ireland, which remained in the United Kingdom.  During 1968-1969 violence intensified as the Catholic minority in northern island agitated for union with the Irish Republic, pitting the Irish Republican Army (IRA, asserting northern Catholic views) against Protestant paramilitary groups such as the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF).   On 30 January 1972 there occurred the “Bloody Sunday” episode in which British soldiers shot 13 Catholic protesters;  and on 21 November 1974 came a violent retort from the IRA, which launched bombs on a pub in the city of Birmingham that killed 21 people.  Violent incidents continued over the course of two decades, only abating in 1997 when the IRA negotiated a power-sharing arrangement with the Protestant Unionists.  The protracted violence in all had left 3,000 people dead.

 

Basque Region of Spain

 

Nationalist in the Basque region of Spain have long considered themselves a group apart, and in the 19^th century maintained a great deal of independence from Spain.  But Franco governed the region firmly and with repression as he deemed necessary.  In 1959 the armed group Euskadi ta Askatana (ETA, “Homeland and Liberty”) began persistent agitations for independence, attacking the local infrastructure, killing a police chief (August 1968) as one of a bevy of terrorist attacks, and even assassinating Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco (1973), the designated successor to Franco.  Tempers cooled a bit when at Franco’s death in 1975 the successor government granted a degree of autonomy to the provinces, with broad powers extended to the government of the Basque region.  But the ETA still insists on full independence, alternating between evanescent ceasefires and renewed violence.

 

Tibet and Xinzhang---  and Taiwan

 

Within the realm of the Peoples’ Republic of China there are those who view the government as an imperialist imposition in areas wherein people feel themselves culturally distinct from Han Chinese.  In Tibet there are people who heavily identify with the very particular school of Tantric Buddhism and who look for leadership of the Dalai Lama, rather similarly to the manner in which the Roman Catholics look to the Pope.  But Tibetan Buddhism suffuse the society and affects all manner of practices:  artistic, culinary (vegetarian), meditative.  A revolt in 1959 was brutally suppressed by the government of the People’s Republic, and a tight hold has been maintained ever since.  The Dalai Lama fled in the 1959 episode and has resided in India ever since, along with a large community of fellow Tibetan refugees.  There are other Tibetan communities far-flung across the globe, everywhere expressing the desire for and the right to independence.  Meanwhile, the Han Chinese population in Tibet has grown rapidly, and the government has overseen major infrastructural development as part of an effort to “modernize” Tibetan society.  

 

In the province of Xinzhang live a mostly Muslim people who do not in any sense identify as Chinese.  They are historically and culturally connected to groups that for centuries trekked the Old Silk Road through Central Asia.  These people would prefer to be independent, and occasionally they formally protest in demonstration of that sentiment.  But, as in the case of Tibet, the government of the People’s Republic of China rules Xinzhang firmly, invests considerable public money in infrastructure, and oversees migration of Han Chinese into the province.

 

Leaders of the People’s Republic of China actively promote policies designed to keep Tibet and Xinzhang in what is effectively the latest incarnation of the Chinese empire.  They assert that the island of Taiwan should also be governed by China.  The Qing dynasty did, at its territorially most extensive, and when the dynasty was militarily at its height, hold Tibet and Xinzhang within the empire.  This was true of Taiwan, too, although the society on that island has undergone phases of Dutch rule (17^th century) and Japanese rule (1895-1945),  Under the Qing, Taiwan until the 19^th century was a loosely governed frontier territory (administratively part of Fujian province).  At no time from 1895 forward has Taiwan been controlled by a government based centrally in China.  Today the majority of Taiwanese people are satisfied with their own government, based in Taipei (Taibei), still ruling formally under the banner of the Republic of China, a semantic vestige of the Chiang Kai-shek era.  But most citizens on the island, which underwent democratic transformation during the 1990s, consider themselves part of a geopolitical entity separate from the nation on the mainland;  and a sizable minority of the island’s citizenry would much prefer outright independence as the Republic of Taiwan.  With the leadership of the People’s Republic of China maintaining that Taiwan should be, and some day will be, formally governed from the mainland, the situation is potentially explosive;  but at present and for some time to come a military clash would be so destructive as to make such an event unlikely. 

 

Looking Toward the Midpoint of the 21^st Century

 

Despite the propensity of human beings to beat up on each other, there are numerous favorable developments as we peer from the year 2015 toward the midpoint of the 21^st century: 

 

The Green Revolution that ensued upon research from the International Rice Institute in has greatly improved the world’s food supply and has the potential to feed many more hungry people.  Genetic Modification (GM) has made crops more resistant to pests and disease;  although controversial or potential unfavorable health effects, if these prove insubstantial, GM could also abet expansion of the world’s food supply.

 

The middle to late 20^th century was replete with medical advances that are now more broadly accessed to the benefit of people across the globe:   Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin (1928); the development of other antibiotics for the treatment of killer diseases such as syphilis and tuberculosis (1950s);  the first successful human heart transplant (1967);  the successful international program for worldwide eradication of small pox (1969-1977);  the increasingly effective treatment of cancer;  and research auguring effective treatment for, and vaccination against, the HIV virus that causes AIDS;  all have improved the prospects for decreasing disease-related deaths. 

 

Establishment of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1944 and the World Trade Organization (WTO) have abetted economic linkage among nations with favorable results for the standard of living in many developing nations.  The successful economic surge of Taiwan and South Korea to join other “Little Tigers,” Hong Kong and Singapore (all following the lead of “Big Tiger” Japan), provided examples for those arguing for the benefits of globalization. 

 

But the environmental impact of rapid development in China (witness the cake-like smog of Beijing) provides a counterexample for those who see in globalization prospects for environmental degradation.  The concern over environment has increased as the reality of global warming  has gained more widespread recognition, spawning a Green Movement promoting recycling and reduced dependence on fuels and processes that produce greenhouse gases.  Wind turbines and solar panels promise a future in which renewable sources of energy are much more widely used for homes and industry.