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By their marriage in October 1469, Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella of Castile initiated a confederation of the two kingdoms that became the basis for the unification of Spain.
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Henry VIII was King of England from 22 April 1509 until his death in 1547.
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Elizabeth I was very well-educated, and had inherited intelligence, determination and shrewdness from both parents.
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The Edict of Nantes was signed on 13 April 1598 by King Henry IV and granted the Calvinist Protestants of France, also known as Huguenots, substantial rights in the nation, which was predominantly Catholic. -
Don Quixote is a Spanish epic novel by Miguel de Cervantes. -
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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In 1628 the English Parliament sent this statement of civil liberties to King Charles I. The next recorded milestone in the development of human rights was the Petition of Right, produced in 1628 by the English Parliament and sent to Charles I as a statement of civil liberties.
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The Long Parliament was an English Parliament which lasted from 1640 until 1660. It followed the fiasco of the Short Parliament, which had convened for only three weeks during the spring of 1640 after an 11-year parliamentary absence.
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Louis XIV, also known as Louis the Great or the Sun King, was King of France from 1643 until his death in 1715.
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The Peace of Westphalia is the collective name for two peace treaties signed in October 1648 in the Westphalian cities of Osnabrück and Münster. -
Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil, commonly referred to as Leviathan, is a book written by Thomas Hobbes and published in 1651. -
His political adaptability enabled him to guide his country through the religious unrest between Anglicans, Catholics, and dissenters that came to signify much of his reign.
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Peter the Great, born Petr Alekseevich Romanov, was Tsar, later Emperor, of Russia from 1682 until his death in 1725.
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The Glorious Revolution is the term first used in 1689 to summarizes events leading to the deposition of James II and VII of England, Ireland and Scotland in November 1688.
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An Act declaring the Rights and Liberties of the Subject, and settling the Succession of the Crown. -
Two Treatises of Government, major statement of the political philosophy of the English philosopher John Locke, published in 1689 but substantially composed some years before then.
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The first edition credited the work's protagonist Robinson Crusoe as its author, leading many readers to believe he was a real person and the book a travelogue of true incidents.
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Gulliver's Travels, or Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships is a 1726 prose satire by the Anglo-Irish writer and clergyman Jonathan Swift, satirising both human nature and the "travellers' tales" literary subgenre. -
On June 11, 1724, the first Sunday after Trinity, Bach began a fresh annual cycle of cantatas, and within the year he wrote 52 of the so-called chorale cantatas, formerly supposed to have been composed over the nine-year period 1735–44. The “Sanctus” of the Mass in B Minor was produced at Christmas.
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Frederick II was King in Prussia from 1740 until 1772, and King of Prussia from 1772 until his death in 1786.
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The Spirit of the Laws is a treatise on political theory, as well as a pioneering work in comparative law. -
His Encyclopedia was published somewhere in between these dates.
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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 Asia-Pacific.
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Candide, ou l'Optimisme is a French satire written by Voltaire, a philosopher of the Age of Enlightenment, first published in 1759.
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George III, who ruled between 1760 and 1820, was the first truly British monarch of the Hanoverian kings.
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The Social Contract, originally published as On the Social Contract; or, Principles of Political Right is a 1762 French-language book by the Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. -
Catherine the Great, reigned over Russia for 34 years, longer than any other female in Russian history.
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He was the first ruler in the Austrian dominions of the union of the Houses of Habsburg and Lorraine, styled Habsburg-Lorraine.
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The Boston Massacre was a street fight that occurred on March 5, 1770, between a patriot mob, throwing snowballs, stones, and sticks, and a squad of British soldiers. -
The Boston Tea Party was an American political and mercantile protest by the Sons of Liberty in Boston, Massachusetts.
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The Intolerable Acts were a series of punitive laws passed by the British Parliament in 1774 after the Boston Tea Party.
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The Battles of Lexington and Concord were the first military engagements of the American Revolutionary War. The battles were fought in Middlesex County, Province of Massachusetts Bay. -
The Wealth of Nations is a profoundly influential work in the study of economics and examines exactly how nations become wealthy. Adam Smith advocates that by allowing individuals to freely pursue their own self-interest in a free market, without government regulation, nations will prosper.
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The United States Declaration of Independence is the pronouncement and founding document adopted by the Second Continental Congress meeting at Pennsylvania State House. -
British General Charles Cornwallis surrendered his army of some 8,000 men to General George Washington at Yorktown, giving up any chance of winning the Revolutionary War. -
The Treaty of Paris, signed in Paris by representatives of King George III of Great Britain and representatives of the United States on September 3, 1783, officially ended the American Revolutionary War and overall state of conflict between the two countries.
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The United States Constitution is the world's longest surviving written charter of government.
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The Declaration of the Rights of Man is a human civil rights document from the French Revolution. -
The Storming of the Bastille occurred in Paris, France, on 14 July 1789, when revolutionary insurgents stormed and seized control of the medieval armoury, fortress, and political prison known as the Bastille. -
On 20 June 1789, the members of the French Third Estate took the Tennis Court Oath in the tennis court which had been built in 1686 for the use of the Versailles palace.
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The Women's March on Versailles, also known as the October March, the October Days or simply the March on Versailles, was one of the earliest and most significant events of the French Revolution.
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Written in response to the Declaration of the Rights of Man. -
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects, written by British philosopher and women's rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft, is one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy.
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The National Convention was the first French assembly elected by universal male suffrage; it transitioned from being paralyzed by factional conflicts to becoming the legislative body overseeing the Reign of Terror and eventually accepting the Constitution of 1795. -
The monarchy was abolished and a republic was established. War continued throughout Europe. After the radicals gained control, those who were against the revolution were subject to arrest or execution.
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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.
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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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The Constitution established a unique kind of executive, a five-man Directory chosen by the legislature. It required the Council of Five Hundred to prepare, by secret ballot, a list of candidates for the Directory. -
He became Emperor of the French under the name of Napoleon I, and was the architect of France's recovery following the Revolution before setting out to conquer Europe, which led to his downfall.
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The Battle of Austerlitz, was the first engagement of the War of the Third Coalition and one of Napoleon's most significant victories.
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The Battle of Trafalgar was important because it established British naval supremacy for more than 100 years. The battle also shattered Napoleon's plans to invade England. -
The battle marked the climax of the campaigns in Germany that began in the wake of Napoleon's disaster in Russia in 1812. Early in 1813, Russian forces, soon joined by the revitalized Prussian army, pursued the defeated French into central Germany. -
Napoleon Bonaparte, emperor of France and one of the greatest military leaders in history, abdicates the throne, and, in the Treaty of Fontainebleau, is banished to the Mediterranean island of Elba.
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A series of international diplomatic meetings to discuss and agree upon a possible new layout of the European political and constitutional order after the downfall of the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte.
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On 7 August, Napoleon embarked onto a new ship, Northumberland, and left British waters on 9 August, having never set foot on British soil. After a journey of nine weeks at sea, he arrived at the island of St Helena on 15 October 1815.