I Used To Know That Part 8

* 1861-65: AMERICAN CIVIL WAR Eleven breakaway Confederate states objected to the antislavery sentiments of the North. These sentiments (and eventual policies) had their roots in the Abolitionist Movement, which was spearheaded by Northern Transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Th.o.r.eau, and Louisa May Alcott, and in large part by Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin.

The Southern plantations had become well off from the extremely profitable combination of slavery and the Cotton Gin (Eli Whitney's then recent invention). This fact, combined with Southern fears regarding the North's control of the banking system, would lead to the idea of states' rights, from which was born the Confederacy of the Southern states.

A few decades earlier, a geographic border divided the North from South, and it became known as the Mason-Dixon Line. The Confederate secession was led by Jefferson Davis, and the war began with a Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, South Carolina (the first state to secede from the Union). Later key encounters included the Confederate victory at Bull Run, Confederate General Stonewall Jackson's campaign in Shenandoah, and the Union victories in the Seven Days' Battle and at Gettysburg (where Lincoln delivered the famous Gettysburg Address).

The Battle of Gettysburg lasted for three days and is still considered the largest battle in the history of the Western Hemisphere. The casualties of the war were horrific, with as many as 23,000 dead and wounded at the Battle of Antietam alone, which to this day remains the single bloodiest day in American history. After this battle, President Lincoln announced the Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation, which freed "all people." After Union general William T. Sherman's brutal march through the South in 1864 and the capture of Atlanta and Savannah, much of the South would soon be in Union control. Within months Confederate general Robert E. Lee (who commanded the feared army of Northern Virginia), would surrender to future president Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House. Following the Union victory and the a.s.sa.s.sination of Abraham Lincoln, there was a painful reconstruction period in the South, where some cities, such as Vicksburg, would not celebrate the Fourth of July until 1938.

* 1880-81 and 1899-1902: BOER WARS These were revolutionary wars fought by the Afrikaners (Boers, descended from Dutch settlers) of South Africa against British rule. The first, in which the Boers were led by Paul Kruger, gained a degree of independence for Transvaal, which became known as the South African Republic. The second involved lengthy Boer sieges of Ladysmith and Mafeking. Lord Horatio Kitchener was one of the leaders of the British forces; Robert Baden-Powell, who went on to found the Boy Scouts, distinguished himself in the siege of Mafeking. British public and political opinion was polarized by the second Boer War, and it led to a lot of rising and falling of governments.

* 1914-18: WORLD WAR I The princ.i.p.al players were an alliance of Britain, France, Russia, and others (the Allied Powers, united by the Entente Cordiale and later the Triple Entente), against Germany, Austro-Hungary, and Turkey (the Central Powers); the United States joined in 1917. The complicated causes included the Allies' fear of German expansion in Europe and various colonies, particularly in Africa; and a conflict of interest between Russia and Austro-Hungary in the Balkans.

Although war was looming for years, it was sparked by the a.s.sa.s.sination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, by a Serb nationalist, Gabriel Princip. Austro-Hungary declared war on Serbia, Russia backed the Serbs, and you can guess the rest. Much of "The Great War" took place on what is known as the Western Front in the trenches of northeastern France and Belgium after Germany's thwarted attempt to invade France and take over Paris. It is most notable for the horrific loss of life: over a million men in the Battle of the Somme alone, with Ypres and Pa.s.schendaele not much better. On the Eastern Front the Gallipoli Campaign in Turkey killed many Australians and New Zealanders. The Central powers not only suffered great loss of life but were losing resources and support on the homefront, which led them to agree to the armistice treaty and subsequently the Treaty of Versailles, which ended the fighting.

Some of the provisions of the treaty required Germany and its allies take full responsibility for the war, pay reparations, and essentially redraw the map of Europe. Austria-Hungary was sliced into Austria, Hungary, Czechoslavakia, and Yugoslavia. The Ottoman Empire was distributed among the Allied Powers (with the Turkish core remaining as the Republic of Turkey). The western frontier of the Russian Empire became Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. As a result of the treaty, the League of Nations (later replaced by the United Nations) was founded to help countries settle disputes through negotiation, diplomacy, and the global improvement of the quality of life.

* 1917: RUSSIAN REVOLUTION Actually two revolutions-one in February and one in October of the same year. The first, sparked by a shortage of food, led to the abdication of the Romanov czar Nicholas II; the second involved the Bolsheviks (led by Vladimir Lenin and Trotsky) seizing power, executing most of the royal family, and establishing the first communist state. A civil war between the "Red" Bolsheviks and the anticommunist "White" Russians lasted until 1921. After Lenin died in 1924, Trotsky lost a power struggle with Stalin, went into exile in Mexico, and was murdered there.

* 1939-45: WORLD WAR II Hitler rose to power in Germany in the early 1930s and proceeded to take over various parts of Europe. Britain and France had promised to protect Polish neutrality, so they were forced to declare war when Germany invaded Poland. The Berlin, Rome, Tokyo pact bound Germany, Italy, and j.a.pan together, known as the Axis powers.

Hitler's invasion of France led to the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of Allied forces, many of them in small boats, from Dunkirk, in 1940; Britain now faced the threat of invasion and months of bombing (the Blitz). The war in the air that followed (1940-41) is known as the Battle of Britain. The previously neutral United States began selling arms and goods to Great Britain, provided it sent its own ships to U.S. ports for "cash and carry."

In 1940 the United States implemented a series of embargoes against j.a.pan, and in September of that same year, the United States agreed to swap American destroyers for British bases. In December 1941 the j.a.panese bombed the Hawaiian naval base at Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States into the war and opening up a whole new theater of conflict in the Pacific.

Exactly six months after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Navy defeated a j.a.panese attack of the Midway Islands, sinking four j.a.panese carriers and a warship. This defense severely weakened j.a.panese Naval power, turning the tide in the United State's favor. The Battle of the j.a.panese island, Iwo Jima, const.i.tuted another hard-fought victory for the Allied forces and was a stepping-stone toward the j.a.panese heartland. The j.a.panese had built an elaborate bunker and tunnel system on the island through Mount Suribachi. Allied forces used flamethrowers and grenades to clear them out. Eventually the j.a.panese ran out of water, food, and supplies. Most of the 21,000 j.a.panese soldiers fought to their deaths, and one in four U.S. soldiers died during the attack-over 26,500. One of the most reproduced photographs in history is the flag raising by U.S. soldiers on the top of the mountain, which was converted into a statue at Arlington Cemetery and a war memorial in Harlingen, Texas. Three of the six flag raisers would die soon after the photograph was taken.

After Iwo Jima, another major win for the Allied forces-the Battle of Okinawa-took more lives than the atomic bombs later dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kamikazes, or suicide aviation bombers, sunk almost 34 Allied ships and crafts of all kind, damaging 368; the fleet lost 763 aircraft. The cost of this battle in lives, time, and material weighed heavily on the decision to drop the atomic bombs six weeks later, which forced the j.a.panese to surrender.

Far away, Germany made the mistake of attacking western Russia in July of 1942. The Russians held out in Stalingrad and launched a counteroffensive in the bloodiest battle in human history, with combined casualties of over 1.5 million. The n.a.z.is were held up in the winter on their way to Moscow, some freezing to death. The Germans were ill-equipped and ill-prepared for winter conflict. Stalingrad continued until February 1943, when the last German forces surrendered. This paved the way for the Normandy (D-Day) landings in June 1944, the turning point for Germany, which surrendered in May 1945.

The Holocaust. Prior to and during the war, the German country became involved in state-supported genocide of Jewish people (the Holocaust or Shoah). Many German nationalists held deep-seated resentment, hatred, and prejudice against the Jewish people. Before World War II the Depression hit Germany hard, especially because of reparations required after World War I. Germans blamed communists for WW I, calling it a Judeo-Bolshevist conspiracy and even went so far as to blame Jewish Bankers for the Treaty of Versailles. Many Germans resented Jewish successes and felt that the Jewish people were taking German jobs. Hitler believed in supremacy of the German/Aryan race and considered Jewish, Polish, gay, Gypsies, Slavs, Russian, and mentally challenged people as subhuman. Hitler preached hatred, and the ignorant ma.s.ses followed, looking for a scapegoat for their desperate situation. Some believed the propaganda that the Jews were being jailed for their "crimes," whereas others simply went along in fear of the n.a.z.is as they essentially brutally beat up or killed anyone who opposed their power.

* 1950-53: THE KOREAN WAR After WWII Korea was divided into the communist Northern half and the American-occupied South, with the dividing line at the 38th parallel. This war began when the North Korean communist army, armed with Soviet tanks, invaded South Korea. Although the territory was not strategically important to the United States, a deep-seated fear of communism led to the country's involvement in what was termed a police action, so Congress did not need to make an official declaration of war. General Douglas MacArthur and his U.S. and U.N. troops orchestrated an invasion of Inchon and then recaptured Seoul, pa.s.sing the 38th parallel to the Northern side, which prompted China to send in troops to protect its interests in Manchuria. MacArthur continued to push northward until he was relieved of his duties by President Truman, a politically unpopular move since MacArthur was a WWII war hero. Both sides tried to negotiate a peace treaty but disagreed over many of the provisions, so fighting continued. In 1953 at Panmunjom, a treaty was signed that brought about a cease-fire and returned the divided line to its prewar coordinates. The war would later inspire the novel and subsequent film and television series M*A*S*H, about the doctors and support staff stationed at the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, which was located near Ouijongbu during the war.

* THE COLD WAR Difficult to date because it wasn't really a war, but a period of intense mutual distrust between former World War II Allies-the United States, U.K., and France on the one hand and the USSR on the other-at its height during the 1950s. Winston Churchill coined the term "iron curtain" for the ideological and political barrier that separated east from west. Tensions began to diminish during the 1970s and 1980s, especially with the introduction by Mikhail Gorbachev of the policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (reconstruction-specifically of the economy), which led to the breakup of the USSR.

* 1959-75: THE VIETNAM WAR Much of the fighting occurred between 1964 and 1975 in South Vietnam and bordering areas of Cambodia and Laos. Several bombing runs over North Vietnam also occurred.

The United States, Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea all joined forces with the Republic of Vietnam to fight the North, with its communist-led South Vietnamese guerrilla movement and the National Liberation Front backed by USSR-supplied weaponry.

The seeds of the Vietnam War were planted during the First Indochinese War, when the communists, under Ho Chi Minh, fought the French for independence. After a socialist state was established in the North, ma.s.s killings of "cla.s.s enemies" followed. Eventually, a U.S.-backed government in the South launched its own anticommunist campaign. However, the South's autocratic and nepotistic president, Ngo Dinh Diem, had trouble with insurgencies. The CIA apparently alerted generals in the South that the United States would support a coup, and Diem was eventually a.s.sa.s.sinated. This caused chaos in the South, and the Viet Cong gained ground.

At this point U.S. president John F. Kennedy increased U.S. forces in the area to help train troops. Three weeks after Diem's death, Kennedy was also a.s.sa.s.sinated. The Vietnamese War was fraught with controversy; some Americans strongly feared a communist scourge, whereas others did not feel that the United States should police the world, toppling regimes out of fear, causing even more unrest. President Nixon ordered a suspension of the action in 1973 and soon afterward signed the Paris Peace Accords, which ended U.S. involvement in the conflict. After that, the North ignored the cease-fire agreement, invaded the South, taking Saigon (being renamed Ho Chi Minh City), and forming the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Many supporters of the South were jailed or executed.

* 1991: THE GULF WAR The Gulf War involved the high-tech conflict between Kuwait and U.N.-led forces against Iraq in order to remove Iraq forces that overran Kuwait in a surprise a.s.sault. The Iraqis had several claims for the attack, including that the Kuwaitis were stealing their oil through slant drilling on the border, and that Kuwait had been part of the Ottoman Empire's province of Basra. This war was largely fought from the air and from tanks, with U.N. forces grossly outnumbering the Iraqi forces. U.N. forces liberated Kuwait and attacked southern Iraq. The troops pulled out after Iraq agreed to a U.N. resolution requiring the Middle Eastern country to destroy major weapons, not develop new ones, and cease its support of terrorists groups.

* 2003-PRESENT: THE IRAQ WAR The U.S. sought to remove the corrupt Iraqi government and military establishment from power. The American government claimed that the Iraqis were hiding weapons of ma.s.s destruction. And it also hoped to protect and secure U.S. interests in the Middle East, which many people believe to be oil. Many U.N. allies opposed the war, especially the Arab countries, but an abbreviated coalition was sent into Iraq nonetheless, toppling the Saddam Hussein regime. Through the years, a long and continued war in Iraq has lost popularity with most U.S. citizens, but the plan to exit the country was not as well executed as the plan to enter, and many fear the inevitable civil unrest that may ensue upon U.S. departure. Others fear that pouring manpower and trillions of dollars into a war that could last for many years could have futile and catastrophic consequences to a nation that needs to concentrate its money and human resources into conservation and clean and renewable energy.

African American History

Another scantly covered period in American history involves the ma.s.s atrocities committed against Africans; they were kidnapped, captured, and sold into slavery. Revolts ensued but were quashed. African Americans persisted and held strong against their persecutors, eventually gaining freedom after the Civil War and affecting major positive changes in the United States and Canada. This small section cannot do justice to the major obstacles that were overcome and the progressive advances made by the African American community. Slavery was finally abolished in 1865 by the 13th Amendment of the Const.i.tution, and less than 150 years later Barack Obama, of half-Kenyan ancestry, announced his candidacy for president of the United States.

* SLAVERY In 1619 a Dutch trader exchanged Africans for food in the marketplace of Jamestown, Virginia. By the 1660s a race-based slave system became popular with tobacco planters in the American South, who at the time also enslaved Native Americans; slavery soon spread among the colonies. Slaves were not treated as people but as property; they were mistreated, punished harshly, and killed. In the 1700s England's abolitionists, and later the Quakers, within the colonies sought to pet.i.tion government against slavery. The American abolitionist movement began to gain ground. In 1793 Eli Whitney patented his invention, the cotton gin, increasing demand and production of U.S.-grown cotton. Although this proved positive for the economy, it caused a resurge in slavery trade, especially in the cotton-growing South, since farmers needed more workers to glean the cotton. In the North small progress was being made, and in 1830 the first National Negro Convention was held in Philadelphia, where one point of discussion involved emigration to Canada.

* THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD The date marking the start of this movement remains unknown. During the 19th century Canada played a key role in the battle to abolish slavery, with at least 30,000 slaves escaping by secret routes to flee enslavement in the American South.

This political movement crossed the racial and geographic borders and exemplified Th.o.r.eau's concept of civil disobedience, which also planted the seeds for the women's suffrage movement. In 1790, Philadelphia became Underground-Railroad Central for the Northern states, since it contained a large number of emanc.i.p.ated black individuals and Quakers. In fact, Harriet Tubman originally escaped to Philadelphia before conducting 13 missions for the Underground Railroad to free slaves; she would later serve as a Union spy in the Civil War, and then struggled for the women's suffrage.

As a youngster, a man named John Brown traveled northeastern Ohio guiding fugitives and vowed to dedicate his life to the freedom of slaves. In 1847 he laid out his plans to raid slave plantations and route the freed people through the Appalachian Mountains to a safe haven near Lake Placid, New York. Brown would free slaves by any means necessary. He met violence with more violence, meeting his own brutal fate during an unsuccessful raid at Harper's Ferry in 1859.

A year later the Southern States seceded from the Union, followed by the American Civil War, where emanc.i.p.ated blacks fought bravely in the Union Army for their own freedom.

Other Important Historical Dates

This small section just didn't fit anywhere else, but most of us will remember at least something about these notable events: * 1215: MAGNA CARTA, OR THE GREAT CHARTER Signed by King John at Runnymede, this was the first successful attempt to control the power of the English monarchy.

* 1453: FALL OF CONSTANTINOPLE You might not think it was a big deal (after all, cities were falling all over the place all of the time), but this was when the Muslim Ottoman Empire took over the Byzantine, or Christian, capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, and all those scholarly monks fled into Western Europe, taking their books with them. In other words, it marked the start of the Renaissance-which, in its narrowest sense, means a rebirth in interest in cla.s.sic literature, art, and architecture.

* 1605: GUNPOWDER PLOT A failed attempt by a group of provincial English Catholics to blow up the Protestant king, James I, and the Houses of Parliament. Somebody let it be known, and Guy Fawkes was caught in the cellars under the Palace of Westminster with a load of gunpowder.

* 1620: PILGRIM FATHERS A group of Puritans, persecuted in England because of their religion, set sail from Southampton in the Mayflower and in due course established a colony in Plymouth, Ma.s.sachusetts.

* EARLY 18TH CENTURY ONWARD: AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTION Larger, enclosed fields, inventions such as Jethro Tull's planting drill, and the concept of crop rotation pioneered by Viscount "Turnip" Townshend improved agricultural methods and increased food yield, which made it possible to feed the increasing numbers of people not working on the land following the Industrial Revolution.

* 1750 ONWARD: INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION The invention of Arkwright's water-powered spinning frame, Hargreaves's spinning jenny, and Crompton's mule revolutionized the production of yarn and therefore cloth, leading to the development of factories and ma.s.s production.

Explorers

Since this chapter has been talking about fighting over many regions of the world, here is a quick rundown of people who discovered some of them.

Eric the Red and Leif Eriksson (late 10th-11th century, Norwegian): father and son. Eric, brought up in Iceland, was the first European to settle in Greenland; Leif, blown (a long way) off course on his way from Iceland to Greenland, became the first European to reach America. He landed at a place he called Vinland, which may have been modern-day Newfoundland or Nova Scotia.

Bartolomeu Dias (c. 1450-c. 1500, Portuguese): trade routes to India were the big thing after the Turks blocked off the land route. Dias made an attempt at doing it by sea, being the first to round the Cape of Good Hope at the bottom of Africa. But he named it the Cape of Storms, which may suggest why his crew made him turn back before they got farther than Mozambique.

Christopher Columbus (1451-1506, Italian): born in Genoa but had his voyages sponsored by Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. The idea was to reach the East (that is, Asia) by sailing west, thus proving beyond all doubt that the Earth was round. Of course, America got in the way. Columbus never actually reached mainland North America, but he did discover the Bahamas, Hispaniola, Guadeloupe, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico, among others. His ships were the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria.

Amerigo Vespucci (1454-1512, Italian): discovered the mouth of the Amazon and the River Plate, which made him important enough to have a continent or two named after him.

Vasco da Gama (c. 1469-1525, Portuguese): persisted where Dias had failed and made it to Calicut in India.

Francisco Pizarro (c. 1478-1541, Spanish): the conqueror (or conquistador) of Peru and destroyer of the Incan Empire.

Ferdinand Magellan (c. 1480-1521, Portuguese): leader of the first expedition to sail around the world, although he was murdered in the East Indies. Like Columbus, he was trying to reach the East by sailing west, and this took him through the Straits of Magellan at the southern tip of South America.

Hernan Cortes (1485-1547, Spanish): did for the Aztecs in Mexico (whose emperor was Montezuma) much the same as Pizarro had done in Peru.

Francis Drake (1540-96, English): best known of the Elizabethan seafarers who were in constant battle with the Spaniards over control of the Caribbean (the Spanish Main) and its riches. Drake-in a ship called the Pelican, later renamed the Golden Hind-was the first Englishman to sail around the world. He was also pivotal in the English defeat of the Spanish Armada.

James Cook (1728-79, British): one of the great navigators of all time, made three expeditions to the Pacific in an attempt to discover the supposed great southern continent. He became the first European to land in New Zealand and also charted parts of Australia and Antarctica. His famous ships were the Endeavour and the Resolution. He is also remembered for devising a diet of limes-high in vitamin C, which protected his men against scurvy (the source of the nickname "limey" for the British). He was murdered in Hawaii.

Robert Falcon Scott (1868-1912, British): failed by a matter of days to become the first person to reach the South Pole, and died, with the rest of his party, in the course of the return journey. One of his companions was Captain Oates, who-knowing that his weakness was endangering the lives of the others-went out into the blizzard saying, "I may be some time."

Roald Amundsen (1872-1928, Norwegian): the one who made it to the South Pole-and back again. He was also the first to sail through the Northwest Pa.s.sage, the sea route from Pacific to Atlantic along the north coast of North America.

GEOGRAPHY.

"Geography is about maps," said E. Clerihew Bentley, and although geographers would take offense to that definition, a lot of what we learned as a kid was about the stuff that filled maps. The last section of this chapter should really be cla.s.sed as paleontology, but n.o.body told us that at the time.

The Countries of the World

The world is divided into seven continents: Europe, Asia, North America, South America, Africa, Australia, and Antarctica. It's a matter of debate to which continent you a.s.sign various island nations, because a continent is by definition a continuous landma.s.s. The islands of the Pacific are usually grouped together as Oceania, so for the purpose of this list, I am going to use that convention and place Australia under that heading, too. And I'm going to create a continent called Central America and include in it all the islands of the Caribbean, as well as the stretch of mainland south of Mexico.

Antarctica contains no countries-instead, it is a stateless territory protected from exploitation by an international treaty.

The countries listed here (with their capitals, continents, and any change of name since 1945) are the 192 members of the United Nations, the most recent being Montenegro, which split from Serbia in 2006; Switzerland, that long-term bastion of neutrality, finally succ.u.mbed in 2002. And they are given in the alphabetical order used by the United Nations, which provides such delights as The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, coming under T. SU or Y after a country's name means that it was formerly part of the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia.

The 50 United States of America

Listed below are the 50 states with their nicknames, their capitals, and the date they entered the Union. Those marked with an asterisk are the original 13 colonies that declared themselves independent from British rule in 1776. Those marked with two asterisks seceded from the Union during the Civil War and formed the Confederate States of America; all had been readmitted by 1870.

The District of Columbia is a federal district, not a state, sharing its boundaries with the city of Washington, D.C.

The Canadian Provinces and its Territories

In 1867 Canada became a self-governing dominion. The country is made up of seven provinces and three territories, the difference being that the provinces receive their power from the Monarchy, and the territories from the federal government. The territories are marked with an asterisk.

The World's Highest Mountains

All the mountains in the world that top 26,244 feet (8,000 m) are in the Himalayas, which is frankly a bit boring for a book like this, but what can you do?

There are another 20 that are above 22,966 feet (7,000 m), all still in Asia; then we shift to South America for Aconagua in Argentina, which is 22,835 feet (6,960 m).

And 19 more above 20,341 feet (6,200 m), all in the Andes, before it is worth even glancing elsewhere.

Here is a list of the top three from the other continents:

The World's Largest Bodies of Water