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67 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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Warsaw Pact
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it was Stalin's response to NATO. He tightened his hold on his which were united by the Warsaw Pact.
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NATO
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In 1949, the United States formed an anti-Soviet military alliance of Western governments: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The United States also supplied strong and creative leadership, providing western Europe with both massive economic aid and ongoing military protection through the Marshall Plan, and military security through NATO, which featured American troops stationed permanently in Europe and the American nuclear umbrella.
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De-Stalinization
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It was Khrushchev's attempt to change Russia. Resources shifted from heavy industry to consumer goods and agriculture. He stated peaceful coexistence with capitalism was possible. It stimulated rebelliousness in the Eastern European satellites. It ended in 1964 when Khrushchev's rule fell.
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Truman Doctrine
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It aimed at containing communism to areas already occupied by the Red Army
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European Steel and Coal Community
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its purpose was to bind the six member nations together economically so that war among them would be virtually impossible. The Treaty of Rome's goals were gradual reduction of tariffs, free movement of capital and labor, and common economic policie
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Decolonization
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It was the rising demand of Asian and African people for national self-determination, racial equality, and personal dignity. The Indian independence played a big role in decolonization. Decolonization is much of Africa proceeded smoothly. Colonies were given a choice of a total break or immediate independence within a commonwealth. This resulted in increase of western European countries' economic and cultural ties with former African colonies.
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Kald krig
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The most powerful allies in the wartime coalition-the Soviet Union and the United States-began to quarrel almost as soon as the unifying threat of Nazi Germany disappeared. A tragic disappointment for millions of people, the hostility between the Eastern and Western superpowers was the sad but logical outgrowth of military developments, wartime agreements, and longstanding political ad ideological differences.
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Grand Alliance
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Was the alliance of United States, Great Britain, and Soviet Union. The military resources of the Grand Alliance were awesome. The strengths of the United States were its mighty industry, its large population, and its national unity.
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Stalin's five-year plans
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The first five-year plan to increase industrial and agricultural production was extremely ambitious, but Stalin wanted to erase the NEP, spur the economy, and catch up with the West.
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Munich Conference (1938)
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Returning to London from the Munich Conference, Chamberlain told cheering crowds that he had secured "peace with honor..peace for our time."
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Kulaks
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They were the better off peasants. Stalin instructed party workers to liquidate them as a class. Stripped of land and livestock, the kulaks were generally not even permitted to join the collective farms. Many starved or were deported to forced labor camps for "re-education
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anti-Semitism
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Hitler eagerly absorbed virulent anti-Semitism, racism and hatred of Slavs. He developed an unshakable belief in the crudest, most exaggerated distortions of the Darwinian theory of survival. It became Hitler's most passionate convictions.
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fascism
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Nazism had fascist origins, but German fascism in power ultimately presented only superficial similarities with fascism in Italy. Nazi fascism, racism and unlimited aggression made war inevitable
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modern totalitarianism
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Totalitarian leaders believed in will power, conflict, the worship of violence and the idea that the individual was less valuable than the state. Conservative authoritarianism were more concerned with maintaining the status quo than with forcing society into rapid change
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Blitzkrig
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Using planes, tanks, and trucks in the first example of a blitzkrieg, or "lightning war," Hitler's armies crushed Poland in four weeks. It happened again when German motorized columns broke through southern Belgium. (
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Adolf Hitler
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In 1923 communists momentarily entered provincial governments; an in November an obscure nobody named Adolf Hitler leaped onto a table in a beer hall in Munich and proclaimed a "national socialist revolution." But Hitler's plot to seize control of the government was poorly organized and easily crushed, and Hitler was sentenced to prison, where he outlined his theories and program on his book Mein Kampf (My Struggle). Throughout the 1920's, Hitler's Nationalist Socialist party attracted support only from a fanatical anti-Semites, ultra nationalists, and disgruntled ex-servicemen. In 1928 his party had an insignificant twelve seats in the Reichstag. Indeed. After 1923 democracy seemed to take root in Weimar Germany.
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National Recovery Administration
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The most ambitious attempt to control and plan the economy was the National Recovery Administration (NRA), established by Congress right after Roosevelt took office. The key idea behind the NRA was to reduce competition and fix prices and wages for everyone's benefit, along with sponsoring enough public works projects to ensure recovery. The NRA's goal required government, business, and labor to hammer out detailed regulations for each industry. Because NRA broke with the cherished American tradition of free competition and aroused conflicts among business people, consumers, and bureaucrats, it did not work well.
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Battles of the Somme and Verdun
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In the Battle of Somme in the summer of 1916, the British and French lost 600,000 soldiers for 125 square miles while the Germans lost 500,000 men. That same year, the unsuccessful German campaign against Verdun cost 700,000 lives on both sides.
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First Battle of the Marne
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Under the leadership of steel-nerved General Joseph Joffre, the French attacked a gap in the German line at the Battle of the Marne on September 6. For three days, France threw everything into the attack. At one point, the French government desperately requisitioned all the taxis to Paris to rush reserved to the troops at the front. Finally, the Germans fell back. Paris and France had been miraculously saved. It turned the war into a long stalemate
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Lenin
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Lenin believed that revolution was necessary to destroy capitalism. He also believed that Marxist revolution could occur in Russia despite its absence of advanced capitalism if led by an intellectual elite. From, his youth his whole life had been dedicated to revolution. As a law student, Lenin began searching for a revolutionary faith. He found it in Marxian socialism, which bean to win, converts among radical intellectuals as industrialization surged forward in Russia.
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Lenon Trotsky
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He was the second most important person in the Russian revolution. A radical Marxist and supporter of Lenin, Trotsky centered his power in the Petrograd Soviet. Trotsky engineered a Soviet overthrow of the provisional government. He reestablished the draft and the most drastic discipline for the newly formed Red Army. Soldiers deserting or disobeying an order were shot at.
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Tsar Nicolas 2
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Tsar Nicholas II ordered a partial mobilization against Austria-Hungary. Almost immediately he found that this was impossible. Russia ordered full mobilization and in effect declared general war. Repeated the oath Alexander I had sworn in 1813 and vowed never to make peace as long as the enemy stood in Russian soil. He wished to maintain the sacred inheritance of supreme loyal power, which, with the Orthodox Church was for him the key to Russia's greatness. Nicholas failed to form a close partnership with his citizens in order to fight the war more effectively.
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Duma
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Russia's lower house. They voted war credits, and they took the lead of the full mobilization. They set up special committees to coordinate defense, industry, transportation, and agriculture. These efforts improved the military situation.
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Lusitania
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In May 1915, after sinking about ninety ships in the British war zone, a German submarine sank the British passenger liner Lusitania, which was also carrying arms and munitions. More than 1,000 live, among them 139 Americans, were lost. President Woodrow Wilson protested vigorously. Germany was forced to relax its submarine warfare for almost two years; the alternative was almost certain war with the United States.
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Anglo-French Entente of 1904
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Britain improved its often-strained relations with the United States and in 1902 concluded a formal alliance with Japan. Britain then responded favorably to the advances of France's skillful foreign minister, Theophile Déclassé, who wanted better relations with Britain and was willing to accept British rule in Egypt in return for British support of French plans to dominate Morocco. The resulting Anglo-French Entente of 1904 settled all outstanding colonial disputes between Britain and France.
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War reparations
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n the Treaty of Versailles, Germany's colonies were govern away to British, French, and Japanese delegates. Germany's army could not exceed 100,000 men and they could build no military fortifications in the Rhineland. They also had to pay for all civilian damages caused by the war.
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Bolsjevikene
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The Russian party of Marxian socialism promptly split into two rival factions. Lenin's camp was to be called Bolshevik or "majority group." Lenin's party. It stood for the majority group. An attempt to seize power collapsed, and Lenin went into hiding. They appealed effectively to the workers and Soldiers, and their membership soared. They seized government buildings and the provisional government, and they came into power for three reasons: power was there for those who would take it, the Bolsheviks had a determined and superior leadership, and they succeeded in appealing to many soldiers and urban workers
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Vestfronten
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The front between Germany and France. Most of the causalities were on this front and there was really harsh fighting here.
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Totalitarian
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Under a totalitarian regime, the state controls nearly every aspect of the individual's life. Totalitarian governments do not tolerate activities by individuals or groups such as labor unions that are not directed by the state's goals. Totalitarian regimes maintain themselves in power through secret police, propaganda disseminated through the media, the elimination of open criticism of the regime, and use of terror tactics. Internal and external threats are created to foster unity through fear. Totalitarian derived from the concept of total war.
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Total krig
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In each country, a government of national unity began to plan and control economic and social life in order to wage "total war." Free market capitalism was abandoned, at least "for the duration." Instead, government-planning boards established priorities and decided what was to be produced and consumed. The government imposed rationing, price and wage controls, and eve restrictions on worker's freedom of movement. Only through such regimentation could a country make the greatest possible military effort.
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Berlinkonferansen 1884-85
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Jules Ferry of France and Otto von Bismarck of Germany arranged an international conference on Africa in Berlin in 1884 and 1885. The conference established the principle that European claims to African territory had to rest on "effective occupation" in order to be recognized by other states. It established the principle that European claims to African territory had to rest on "effective occupation", which made it so that no single power could claim all of Africa. It also agreed to work to stop slavery and the slave trade in Africa
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Britisk opiumshandel
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In the opium trade, Britain found something the Chinese really wanted. By means of fast ships and bribed officials, it was smuggled into China. The Chinese government tried to stop it with no success, and it led to a war with Britain. The Manchu government forced the foreign merchants to obey China's laws when they refused war broke out. The Chinese lost and had to open four large cities for foreign trade, had to cede Hong Kong and pay an indemnity of $100 million.
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International Association for the Exploration and Civilization of Central Africa
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In 1876 Leopold formed the African International Association and financed an expedition by explorer Henry Morton Stanley to the Congo (1879-84). At a European conference in 1885 Leopold was named sovereign over the Congo Free State (later renamed Zaire and now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo). He then used slave labor and torture to extract raw materials (mostly rubber) and build his personal fortune. By 1908 criticism of his rule forced his withdrawal as sovereign and the region was annexed to Belgium.
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Social Darwinism
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Many criticized theories of brutal competition among races. It can be best summed up by the quote "The strongest nation has always been conquering the weaker...and the strongest tend to be best". It fostered imperialist expansion. Many rebelled against the thought of Social Darwinism. European nations, which were seen as racially distinct parts of the dominant white race, had to seize colonies to show they were strong and virile. Since racial struggle was nature's inescapable law, the conquest of inferior peoples was just. Social Darwinism and harsh racial doctrines fostered dominant imperialistic expansion.
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Modernist response to imperialism
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The modernizers believed themselves as superior, and that it was necessary to reform the societies and copy European achievements.
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Traditionalist response to imperialism
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The initial response of African and Asian rulers was to try driving the unwelcome foreigners away. This was the case in China, Japan, and the upper Sudan. Violent and anti-foreign reactions exploded elsewhere again and again, but the superior military technology of the industrialized West almost invariably prevailed. Beaten in battle, many Africans and Asians concentrated on preserving their cultural traditions at all costs
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"New imperialism"
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The political annexation of territory in the 1880's-the "new imperialism," as often called by historians-was the capstone of a profound underlying economic and technological process. It was the political annexation of territory in the 1880s. It was the capstone of economic and technological progress. Many factors contributed to it including economic motives
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The great migration
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It was a great movement that was the central experience in the saga of Western expansion, one reason why the West's impact on the world in the nineteenth century was so powerful and many-sided.
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Paris Commune of 1871
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When national elections then sent a large majority of conservatives and monarchists to the National Assembly and France's new leaders decided they had no choice but to surrender Alsace and Lorraine to Germany, the traumatized Parisians exploded in patriotic frustration and proclaimed the Paris Commune in March 871. Vaguely radical, the leaders of the Commune wanted to govern Paris without interference from the conservative French countryside. The National Assembly, led by aging politician Adolphe Thiers, would hear none of it. The Assembly ordered the French army into Paris and brutally crushed the commune. Twenty thousand people died in the fighting.
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British Third Reform Bill of 1884
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The Third Reform Bill of 1884 gave the vote to almost every adult male. It made a giant leap for democracy in Britain.
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Russisk revolusjon 1905
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Imperialist ambitions brought defeat at the hands of Japan in 1905 and political upheaval at home. The Bloody Sunday massacre, when the tsar's troops fired on a crowd of protesting workers, produced a wave of indignation. By the summer of 1905, strikes, uprisings, revolts, and mutinies were sweeping the country. A general strike in October forced Nicholas II to issue the October Manifesto, which granted full civil liberties and promised a popularly elected parliament (Duma). The Social Democrats rejected the manifesto and led a bloody workers' uprising in Moscow in December. Middle-class moderates helped the government repress the uprising and survive as a constitutional monarchy.
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Nasjonalisme
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Western society progressively found a new and effective organizing principle capable of coping with the many-sided challenge of the dual revolution and the emerging urban civilization. That principle was nationalism-dedication to identification with the nation-state. From the mid-nineteenth century on, Western society became nationalistic as well as urban and industrial. Nation-states and strong-minded national leaders gradually enlisted widespread support and gave men and women a greater sense of belonging. Even socialism became increasingly national in orientation, gathering strength as a champion of working-class interests in domestic politics. Yet even though nationalism served to unite peoples, it also drove them apart. Though most obvious in the United States before the Civil War and in Austria-Hungary and Ireland, this was in a real sense true for all of Western civilization. The universal national faith, which reduced social tensions within states promoted a bitter, brutal competition between states and thus threatened the progress and unity it had helped to build. (p
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The Thirteenth Amendment
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The Thirteenth Amendment of 1865 ended slavery in the U.S. after a Civil War.
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Kornloven
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Protected the English landowners by prohibiting the importation of foreign grain unless the domestic price rose above a certain level.
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Metternich
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During the Congress of Vienna, Castlereagh and Metternich grew fed up with Russia and Prussia's demands that they almost initiated a war against them. Under Metternich's leadership, Austria, Russia, and Prussia started on a crusade against the ideas and politics of the dual revolution. Metternich was horrified when Spain and kingdoms of Italy granted liberals constitutions against the will of the Holy Alliance. Metternich battled against liberal political change in the following years. Metternich's policies dominated Austria and also the entire German confederation. Metternich's ruthless imposition of repressive internal policies on the governments of central Europe contrasted sharply with the intelligent moderation he displayed during the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Klemens von Metternich was an internationally oriented aristocrat who made a brilliant diplomatic career in Austria. He was loyal to his class and unfalteringly defended its rights and privileges till the day he died. A conservative, Metternich firmly believed that liberalism was the cause of war generations before him. He supported and strongly advocated conservatism. He blamed liberal revolutionaries for stirring up the way things were meant to be and the lower classes, which he believed desired nothing more than peace and quiet. Liberalism threatened the existence of the aristocracy, the class which Metternich belonged to, and also threatened to destroy the Austrian empire and revolutionize central Europe.
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Liberalisme
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Liberalism, as embodied in America and France, demands for representative government and civil liberties. Liberals believed that people, each national group, has a right to establish its own independent government and seek to fulfill its own destiny, the idea of national self-determination was repellent to Metternich. The main principles of liberalism were liberty and equality. The idea of liberty means specific individual freedoms: freedom of press, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of arbitrary arrest. Liberal demands were a call for freedom and revolutionary change
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dual revolution
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In 1815, economic and political changes fused together in what was called the dual revolution. The dual revolution first altered Europe dramatically and then continued to alter the rest of the world. The interrelated economic and political transformation was built on complicated histories, strong traditions, and diverse cultures. The dual revolution also posed a great problem; economic, political, and social changes remained unclear.
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Konservatisme
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Conservatism stressed on tradition, a hereditary monarchy, and an official church. Conservatives such as Metternich exemplified these characteristics and theological ideas through the diplomatic qualities of an empire, more specifically the Austrian Empire. The wanted to keep old traditions, ideas, values, and customs intact.
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Congress of Vienna
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The conservative aristocratic monarchies such as Russia, Austria, Prussia, and Britain met at the congress of Vienna to make a general peace settlement after they defeated Napoleon France. The political leader had to construct a settlement that would last and not sow the seeds of another war. Their efforts were successful and resulted in a century unmarred by war.
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Parish "apprentices" in cotton mills
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Therefore, factory owners turned to young children who had been abandoned by their parents and put in the care of local parishes. Parish officers often "apprenticed" such unfortunate foundlings to factory owners. The parish thus saved money, and the factory owners gained workers over whom they exercised almost the authority of slave owners.
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Combination Acts
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In 1799 Parliament passed the Combination Acts, which outlawed unions and strikes. The Combinations Acts were widely disregarded by workers, yet the printers, papermakers, carpenters, tailors, and other such craftsmen continued to take collective action, and societies of skilled factory workers also organized unions. Unions sought to control the number of skilled workers, limit apprenticeship to members' own children, and bargain with owners over wages. They were afraid to strike; there was, for example, a general strike of adult cotton spinners in Manchester in 1810. In the face of widespread union activity, Parliament repealed the combinations Act in 1824, and unions were tolerated, though not fully accepted, after 1825.
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Factory Act of 1833
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It limited the Factory workday for children between nine and thirteen to eight hours and that of adolescents between fourteen and eighteen to twelve hours, although the act made no effort to regulate the hours of work for children at home of in small businesses. The law also prohibited the factory employment of children under nine; they were to be enrolled in the elementary schools that factory owners were required to establish. Due to this new act, the employment of children declined rapidly. Thus the Factory Act broke the pattern of whole families working together in the factory because efficiency required standardized shifts for all workers.
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Thommas Malthus
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He wrote Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) argued the population would always tend to grow faster than the food supply. He believed that the only hope of warding off such "positive checks" to population growth as war, famine, and disease was "prudential restraint." Young men and women had to limit the growth of population by marrying late in life. He did not think this was possible however. The powerful attraction of the sexes would cause most people to marry early and have many children. Malthus and Ricardo were both proven wrong in the long run.
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seperate sfærer.
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Studies show that married women in the working classes did not normally work full time outside the house after the first child. They still earned small amounts through putting-out handicrafts at home and taking in boarders. When married women did work for wages outside the house, they usually came from the poorest, most desperate families, where husbands were poorly paid, sick, unemployed, or missing. All women were generally confined to low-paying, dead-end jobs. Virtually no occupation open to women paid a wage sufficient for a person to live independently. The man emerged as the family's primary wage earner.
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Industrielle revolusjon
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Building on technical breakthroughs, power-driven equipment, and large-scale enterprise, the Industrial Revolution in England greatly increased output in certain radically altered industries, stimulated the large handicraft and commercial sectors, and speeded up overall economic growth. The industrial revolution is a term used to describe the burst of major inventions and technical changes they had witnessed in certain industries. Building on technical breakthroughs, power-driven equipment, and large-scale enterprise, the Industrial Revolution in England greatly increased output in certain radically altered industries, stimulated the large handicraft and commercial sectors, and speeded up overall economic growth
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Robespeirre
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When Louis XVI accepted the final version of the completed constitution in September 1791, a young and still obscure provincial lawyer and member of the National Assembly named Maximilien Robespierre (1758-1794) evaluated the work of two years and concluded, "The Revolution is over." Robespierre was both right and wrong. He was right in the sense that the most constructive and lasting reforms were in place. Nothing substantial in the way of liberty and useful reform would be gained in the next generation. He was wrong in the sense that a much more radical stage lay ahead. New heroes and new ideologies were to emerge in revolutionary wars and international conflict. The National Convention proclaimed France a republic in 1792. However, the convention was split between the Girondists and the Mountain, led by Robespierre and Danton. Robespierre established a planned economy to wage total war and aid the poor. The government fixed prices on key products and instituted rationing. Workshops were nationalized to produce goods for the war effort, and raw materials were requisitioned. Under Robespierre, the Reign of Terror was instituted to eliminate opposition to the Revolution, and some 40,000 people were jailed or executed. Robespierre cooperated with the san-culottes in bringing about a state-controlled economy--particularly fixing the price of bread. He was guillotined because Robespierre's Terror wiped out many of the angry men who had been criticizing Robespierre for being soft on the wealthy.
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Mary Wollstonecraft
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One passionate rebuttal came from a young writer in London, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1707). Born into the middle class, Wollstonecraft was schooled in adversity by a mean-spirited father who beat his wife and squandered his inherited fortune. Determined to be independent in society that generally expected women of her class to become homebodies and obedient wives, she struggled for years to earn her living as a governess and teacher-practically the only acceptable careers for a single, educated woman-before attaining success as a translator and author. Interested in politics and believing that a "desperate disease requires a powerful remedy" in Great Britain as well as France, Wollstonecraft was incensed by Burke's book. She immediately wrote a blistering, widely read attack, a Vindication of the Rights of Man (1790). Then, fired up on controversy and commitment, she made a daring leap. She developed for the first time the logical implications of natural law philosophy in her masterpiece, A Vindication of the Rights of a Woman (1792). To fulfill the still-unrealized potential of the French Revolution and to eliminate the sexual inequality she had felt so keenly, she demanded that the rights of a woman be respected and there be justice for them. She advocated rigorous coeducation, which would make women better wives and mothers, good citizens, and even economically independent people. Women could manage businesses and enter politics if only men would give them a chance. Men themselves would benefit from women's rights.
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Sans-culottes
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The petty traders and laboring poor were often known as the sans-culottes, "without breeches," because sans-culottes men wore trousers instead of knee breeches of the aristocracy and the solid middle class. The immediate interests of the sans-culottes were mainly economic, and in the spring of 1793 the economic situation was as bad as the military situation. Rapid inflation, unemployment, and food shortages were again weighing heavily on poor families. Moreover, by the spring of 1793, the sans-culottes had become keenly interested in politics. Encouraged by the so-called angry men, the sans-culottes men and women were demanding radical political action to guarantee them their daily bread. At first the Mountain joined the Girondists in violently rejecting these demands. But in the face of military defeat, peasant revolt, and hatred of the Girondists, the Mountain and especially became more sympathetic. The Mountain joined with sans-culottes activists in the city government to engineer a popular uprising which forced the convention to arrest thirty-one Girondists deputies for treason. All power passed to the Mountain. Robespierre and others from the Mountain joined the recently formed Committee of Public Safety, to which the Convention had given dictatorial power to deal with the national emergency. These developments in Paris triggered revolt in leading provincial cities, where moderates denounced Paris and demanded a decentralized government.
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Bastillen
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Against this background of dire poverty and excitement generated by the political crisis, the people of Paris entered decisively onto the revolutionary stage. They believed in a general, though ill-defined, way that the economic distress had human causes. They believed that they should have steady work and enough bread at fair prices to survive. Specifically, they feared that the dismissal of the king's moderate finance minister would put them at the mercy of aristocratic landowners. And grain speculators. Angry crowds formed. And passionate voices urged action. On July 13, the people began to seize arms for the defense of the city as the king's armies moved toward Paris, and on July 14 several hundred of the most determined people marched to the Bastille to search for weapons and gunpowder. A medieval fortress with walls ten feet thick and eight great towers each one hundred feet high, the Bastille had long been used as a prison. It was guarded by eighty retired soldiers and thirty Swiss mercenaries. The governor of the fortress-prison refused to hand over the powder, panicked, and ordered his men to fire, killing ninety-eight people attempting to enter.
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National Assembly
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In May 1789, the twelve hundred delegates of the three estates paraded in medieval peasantry through the streets of Versailles to an opening session resplendent with feudal magnificence. The estates were almost immediately deadlocked. Delegates of the third estate refused to transact any business until the king ordered the clergy and nobility to go over to sit with them in a single body. Finally, after a six-week war of nerves, a few parish priests began to go over the third estate, which on June 17 voted to call itself the "National Assembly."
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Reign of Terror
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While the radical economic measures supplied the poor with bread and the armies with weapons, the Reign of Terror (1793-1794) was solidifying the home front. Special revolutionary courts responsible only to Robespierre's Committee of Public Safety tried rebels and "enemies of the nation" for political crimes. Drawing on popular, sans-culottes support centered in the local Jacobin clubs, these local courts ignored normal legal procedures. Some 40,000 French men and women were executed of died in prison. Another 300,000 suspects crowded the prisons and often brushed close to death in a revolutionary court. Robespierre's Reign of Terror was one of the most controversial phases of the French revolution. It was not directed against any specific class, instead it was rather a political weapon directed impartially against all who might oppose the revolutionary government. For many Europeans of the time, however, the Reign of Terror represented a terrifying perversion of the generous ideals that had existed in 1789
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Jacobinerne
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When the National Assembly in France disbanded, it sought popular support by decreeing that none of its members would be eligible for election to the new Legislative Assembly. This meant that when the new representative body convened in October 1791, it had a different character.. The great majority of the legislators were still prosperous, well-educated, middle-class men, but they were younger and less cautious than their predecessors. Many of the deputies were loosely allied and called "Jacobins," after the name of their political club. All of the members of the National Convention were republicans, and at the beginning almost all belonged to the Jacobin club of Paris. The great majority also continued to come from the well-educated middle class. But control of the Convention was increasingly contested by two bitterly competitive groups-the Girondists, named after a department in southwestern France, and the Mountain, led by Robespierre and another young lawyer, Georges Jacques Danton. The uppermost left-hand benches of the assembly hall. A majority of the indecisive Convention members, seated in the "Plain" below, floated back and forth between the rival factions.
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Constitutional Convention of 1787
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The liberal program of the American Revolution was consolidated by the federal constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the creation of a national republic. Assembling in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were determined to end the period of economic depression, social uncertainty, and a very weak central government that had followed independence. The delegates thus decided to grant the federal, or central, government important powers: regulation of domestic and foreign trade, the right to tax, and the means to enforce its laws
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American Bill of Rights
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When the results of the secret deliberations of the Constitutional Convention were presented to the states for ratification, a great public debate arose. The opponents of the proposed constitution, the Antifederalists, charged that the framers of the new document had taken too much power from the individual states and made the federal government too strong. Moreover, many Antifederalists feared for the personal liberties and individual freedoms for which they had just fought. In order to overcome these objections, the Federalists solemnly promised to spell out these basic freedoms as soon as the new constitution was adopted. The result was the first ten amendments to the Constitution, which the first congress passes shortly after it met in New York in March 1789. These amendments formed an effective bill of rights to safeguard the individual. Most of them were trial by jury, due process of law, right to assemble, freedom from unreasonable search, had their origins in English law and the English Bill of Rights of 1689. Others, the freedoms of speech, the press, and religion, reflected the natural law theory and the American experience. The American constitution and the Bill of Rights exemplified the great strengths and the limits of what came to be called "classical liberalism." Liberty meant individual freedom and political safeguards. Liberty also meant representative government but did not necessarily mean democracy, with its principle of one person, one vote
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Slaget ved Traffalgar
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When Napoleon tried to bring his Mediterranean fleet around Gibraltar to northern France, a combined French and Spanish fleet was, after a series of mishaps, virtually annihilated by Lord Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar on October 21, 1805. invasion of England was henceforth impossible. Renewed fighting had its advantages, however, for the first consul used the wartime atmosphere to have himself proclaimed emperor in late 1804.
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Stamp Act
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The American Revolution had its immediate origin in a squabble over increased taxes. Although the colonists had furnished little aid in the Seven Years' War, the British won and doubled its debt. The British government wanted the American colonists for their fair share of imperial expenses. In 1765, the government pushed through parliament the Stamp Act, which levied taxes on a long list of commercial and legal documents, diplomas, pamphlets, newspapers, almanacs, dice, and playing cards. A stamp glued to each article indicated the tax had been paid. The colonists protested the Stamp Act vigorously and violently, however, after their rioting and boycotts against British goods, Parliament repealed the new tax.
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The bourgeoisie
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In discussing the long-term origins of the French Revolution, historians have long focused on growing tensions between the nobility and the comfortable members of the third estate, usually known as the bourgeoisie, or middle class. The bourgeoisie was basically united by economic position and the class interest. The French bourgeoisie eventually rose up to lead the entire third estate in a great social revolution, a revolution that destroyed feudal privileges and established a capitalist order basted on individualism and a market economy. Rather than standing as unified blocks against each other, nobility and bourgeoisie formed two parallel social ladders increasingly linked together at the top by wealth, marriage, and Enlightenment culture
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