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Ferdinand of Aragon marries Isabella of Castile in Valladolid, thus beginning a cooperative reign that would unite all the dominions of Spain and elevate the nation to a dominant world power.
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Henry VIII sent two of his wives, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, to their deaths on the executioner's block at the Tower of London.
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Her 45-year reign is generally considered one of the most glorious in English history. During it, a secure Church of England was established.
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The Edict of Nantes, issued under Henry of Navarre after he ascended to the French throne as Henry IV, effectively ended the French Wars of Religion by granting official tolerance to Protestantism. -
Don Quixote is a classic novel from 1605 that portrays the life and insightful journey of Don Quixote de la Mancha, a Spanish man who seems to be losing his mind on his quest to become a knight and restore chivalry alongside a farmer named Sancho Panza -
The Thirty Years' War was one of the longest and most destructive conflicts in European history, lasting from 1618 to 1648.
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The Petition of Right asked for a settlement of Parliament's complaints against the King's non-parliamentary taxation and imprisonments without trial, plus the unlawfulness of martial law and forced billets. -
The Long Parliament was an English Parliament that lasted from 1640 until 1660.
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Louis XIV oversaw the administrative and financial reorganization of his realm, and also set up manufactures and worked to boost trade.
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The Peace of Westphalia concluded in 1648 in Münster, Germany, ending the Thirty Years' War. -
Leviathan concerns the structure of society and legitimate government and is regarded as one of the earliest and most influential examples of social contract theory. -
Charles's reign saw the rise of colonization and trade in India, the East Indies, and America and the Passage of Navigation Acts that secured Britain's future as a sea power. He founded the Royal Society in 1660.
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Peter the Great founded St. Petersburg in 1703, the victory against Sweden at the Battle of Poltava in 1709, and the birth of the Russian navy, Peter's lifelong passion.
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The Glorious Revolution is the term first used in 1689 to summarise events leading to the deposition of James II and VII of England, Ireland, and Scotland in November 1688. -
Locke proposed that government emerges from the consent of the government to protect their natural rights, which is the thesis of what is now called social contract theory. -
The English Bill of Rights clearly established that the monarchy could not rule without the consent of Parliament. The English Bill put in place a constitutional form of government in which the rights and liberties of the individual were protected under English law. -
Sabastian Bach advanced our knowledge throughout time as we know it. Possibly one of the most famous pieces of classical music, Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor has made an appearance in some interesting formats, including car alarms and Walt Disney's Fantasia. -
Robinson Crusoe is about Crosoe leaving the safety of his comfortable middle-class home in England and going to sea. He is shipwrecked and becomes a castaway who spends years on a remote tropical island near Trinidad. He meets cannibals, captives, and mutineers, and is eventually rescued. -
Gulliver's Travels is a four-part prose travelogue, narrated by the fictitious persona of Lemuel Gulliver, who tells the story of his extensive global voyages, the places he has been, and the people he met. -
Frederick II was a brilliant military campaigner who greatly enlarged Prussia's territories and made Prussia the foremost military power in Europe.
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This is Montesquieu’s most-known work, where he talks about political institutions and compares three types of government: republic, monarchy, and despotism. -
The Encyclopédie, often referred to simply as Encyclopédie or Diderot's Encyclopedia, is a twenty-eight-volume reference book published between 1751 and 1772 by André Le Breton and edited by translator and philosopher Denis Diderot.
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The Seven Years' War was a global conflict that involved most of the European great powers and was fought primarily in Europe, the Americas, and the Asia-Pacific.
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Candide is the illegitimate nephew of a German baron. He grows up in the baron's castle under the tutelage of the scholar Pangloss, who teaches him that this world is “the best of all possible worlds.” Candide falls in love with the baron's young daughter, Cunégonde. -
George III was the third Hanoverian monarch and the first one to be born in England and to use English as his first language, he is widely remembered for two things: losing the American colonies and going mad.
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The Social Contract is a political piece of writing that serves as a pylon for the democracies of today, as it theorizes the elements of a free state where people agree to coexist with each other under the rules of a common body that represents the general will. -
Catherine's greatest accomplishments include establishing educational reform, championing the arts, and extending Russia's borders in the largest territorial gain since Ivan the Terrible.
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Three men were killed and eight civilians were injured, two of them fatally, when British sentries guarding the Boston Customs House opened fire on the crowd. -
American colonists were upset because the British government was imposing taxes without including the colonists which are where the phrase ‘taxation without representation’ came from. The colonists decided that they had had enough so they decided to dump the tea into the sea. -
The four acts were the Boston Port Act, the Massachusetts Government Act, the Administration of Justice Act, and the Quartering Act -
The famous ‘shot heard ‘round the world’ also marks the beginning of the American Revolution. -
This is Adam Smith’s most famous work. The book “Wealth of Nations”, examines how countries become wealthy and give suggestions or ideas on how to become a wealthy country. -
The United States Declaration of Independence is the pronouncement and founding document adopted by the Second Continental Congress meeting at the Pennsylvania State House. -
Joseph II ordered the abolition of serfdom; by the Edict of Toleration he established religious equality before the law, and he granted freedom of the press.
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This was the last major battle of the American Revolution where the British troops surrendered to the Continental Army and their French Allies. This battle led to the signing of the Treaty of Paris.
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The Treaty of Paris was signed by U.S. and British Representatives on September 3, 1783, ending the War of the American Revolution. -
To ratify amendments, three-fourths of the state legislatures must approve them, or ratifying conventions in three-fourths of the states must approve them. -
The Tennis Court Oath was an oath the French Third Estate took in the tennis court which had been built in 1686 for the use of the Versailles Palace. -
The Storming of the Bastille occurred when revolutionary insurgents stormed and seized control of the medieval armory, fortress, and political prison known as the Bastille. -
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen is a human civil rights document from the French Revolution. -
The Women's March on Versailles was a riot that took place during this first stage of the French Revolution and was spontaneously organized by women in the marketplaces of Paris who complained over the high price and scant availability of bread. -
The Declaration of Rights of Women stated that women, like their male counterparts, have natural, inalienable, and sacred rights. Those rights, as well as the related duties and responsibilities to society, are outlined in the remainder of the document. -
Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was a ground-breaking work of literature that still resonates in the feminist and human rights movements of today. -
The National Convention was the constituent assembly of the Kingdom of France for one day and the French First Republic for the rest of its existence during the French Revolution, following the two-year National Constituent Assembly and the one-year Legislative Assembly. -
During the radical phase of the French Revolution, France was made a republic, abolishing the monarchy and executing the king.
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The Reign of Terror was a period of the French Revolution when, following the creation of the First Republic, a series of massacres and numerous public executions took place in response to revolutionary fervor, anticlerical sentiment, and accusations of treason by the Committee of Public Safety.
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It was charged with protecting the new republic against its foreign and domestic enemies, fighting the First Coalition and the Vendée revolt. -
The Directory was the governing five-member committee in the French First Republic from 2 November 1795 until 10 November 1799. -
Napoleon centralized the government, reorganized the banking and educational systems, supported the arts, and improved relations between France and the pope. -
This was a battle fought between the British fleets and the combined Spanish & French fleets ending in victory for the British but not without a cost. British General Nelson ended up getting shot and died during the battle. -
The first battle of the War of the Third Coalition and was one of Napoleon's greatest battles. Napoleon’s army of 68,000 defeated 90,000 Russians and Austrians. -
The victory of the Allied forces (Austria, Prussia, Russia, & Sweden) over Napoleon. This was one of the biggest and bloodiest battles in European history with over 500,000 fighting and 90,000 dead or wounded.
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The Congress of Vienna and subsequent Congresses constituted a major turning point – the first genuine attempt to forge an 'international order', to bring long-term peace to a troubled Europe, and to control the pace of political change through international supervision and intervention.
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Napoleon's broken forces gave up and Napoleon offered to step down in favor of his son. -
Napoleon had been exiled to St. Helena after he was defeated by the British at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.