Looking at the modern history of China, for most westerners, there was an image of a weak and chaotic empire in the Far East, one in which glory days were long gone. In their view, the Chinese were a second-rate nation ripe for plunder, a perfect target for 19th-century imperialism. Nevertheless, China managed to avoid being colonized, despite being beaten in two conflicts, today known as the Opium Wars. That brings the question of how did Beijing manage to preserve its independence and what was the importance of the Opium Wars?
The Serbian revolution was a long and complex historical process, undertaken by the oppressed Christian serfs (Raja) of the Ottoman Empire, intending to obtain rights of social dignity, national recognition and political autonomy at the beginning of the 19th century. As a rebellion of a disenfranchised group of society with a clear aim for acquiring national statehood, it inspired revolutions of other Christian peoples of the Turkish Empire, Greeks and Romanians before all.
Originally imagined as a small-scale agrarian rebellion against the oppressive, unlawful rule of Turkish provincial authorities in the Belgrade Pashalik, the First Serbian Uprising soon became an event of great prominence in European diplomacy. A small jacquerie on the northern borders of the once-powerful Ottoman Empire sparked a series of national revolutions among the Christian peoples of the Balkans. After ten years of severe fighting, magnificent victories and cruel defeats, Serbian insurgents finally succumbed in autumn of 1813, after the fall of Belgrade. Regardless of that, after the Uprising, the path to eventual success was traced and the revival of the Serbian national state was only a question of time.
Sonderbund War - Switzerland Forged in the Civil War When speaking of Switzerland, the first things that come to mind are banks, chocolate and neutrality. For over one and a half centuries, Switzerland has been an island of peace and prosperity, while the rest of the continent went through horrors of more than a few wars. The Switzerland everyone knows today was, however, forged in a war. More precisely, it was a civil war.
Introduction When talking about the United States history, an unavoidable topic is the Civil War. It is often represented as a struggle for the liberation of African American slaves between the heroic Union in the north and the vile Confederation in the south. Similar descriptions and perceptions can be found throughout mainstream media, school textbooks, various arts, and more. By now it has become a dominant narrative which, despite its appealing image, is somewhat misrepresentative from reality.
