History is filled with bloody and grim movements, world-changing events and practices as well as long-lasting processes. Yet there aren’t many that combine all of those qualities. Among those usually infamous pieces of our past, the Atlantic slave trade holds a rather notorious place. It influenced the demography, economy, development, and society of at least three continents (four if we count the Americas as separate continents) for roughly 400 years. One of the reasons for such a vast impact is in the sheer volume of the Transatlantic slave trade.
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.
Introduction The Cold War is often depicted as an era marked by a struggle for global dominance between two blocs led by the USSR and the US. Such representation is quite reasonable, yet it clouds our view on the past by focusing it on only a fraction of the historical horizon. There were more nations and states than just the two giants, many of which gained independence in their struggle against colonialism and imperialism.
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.
Background In the early 20th century, the world found itself in a global conflict. World War I, or the Great War as it was known at the time, lasted from 1914 to 1918, pitching Central Powers (Germany, Austro-Hungary, Ottoman Empire) versus the Entente/Allied Powers (Russia, France, Britain, and later the US), with a myriad of smaller allies on both sides. Without going into the question of reasons and causes of the war, many fighting at the time thought of it as a “war to end all wars”, a notion which proved to be too idealistic.
As World War II came to an end, both Europe and the world slowly started to divide between two major powers – the US in the west and the USSR in the east. Though in the immediate post-war years these two blocs tried to at least present themselves as friends, by the late 1940s it was clear that the two ideological camps entered a confrontation that was quickly dubbed the Cold War. It was painted as an ongoing struggle for world supremacy of two ideas – capitalism in the west and communism in the east.
Introduction The history of Libya has been a long walk from one invader to another. For two and a half millennia, indigenous Berber tribes have seen many foreign invaders ruling this part of North Africa. From Carthaginians and Romans to Vandal tribes who arrived after the Western Roman Empire collapsed. In the second half of the 7th century, an Arab invasion swallowed Libya with the rest of North Africa. The arrival of Arab invaders changed the image of the region for good, establishing the domination of Islam and Arab ethnic population for good.
