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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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Elizabeth succeeded to the throne on her half-sister's death in November 1558. She was very well-educated (fluent in five languages) and had inherited intelligence, determination, and shrewdness from both parents. -
The Edict of Nantes granted religious tolerance and equality to the Huguenots (French Protestants) and ended the French Wars of Religion. -
Miguel de Cervantes' El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, better known as Don Quixote, is published. The book is considered by many to be the first modern novel and one of the greatest novels of all time. -
A series of wars fought by various nations for various reasons, including religious, dynastic, territorial, and commercial rivalries. -
An English constitutional document setting out specific individual protections against the state, reportedly of equal value to the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights 1689.
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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 -
Louis XIV, also known as Louis the Great or the Sun King, was King of France from 1643 until his death in 1715. His verified reign of 72 years and 110 days is the longest of any sovereign. -
The Peace of Westphalia is the collective name for two peace treaties signed in October 1648 in the Westphalian cities of Osnabrück and Münster. -
Written during the English Civil War, Hobbes' book is a call for a strong, undivided government. -
Charles II (29 May 1630 – 6 February 1685) was King of Scotland from 1649 until 1651 and King of England, Scotland, and Ireland from the 1660 Restoration of the monarchy until he died in 1685. -
Peter the Great (1672-1725), born Petr Alekseevich Romanov, was Tsar, later Emperor, of Russia from 1682 until he died in 1725. -
The series of events in 1688-89 culminated in the exile of King James II and the accession to the throne of William and Mary. -
- The Bill firmly established the principles of frequent parliaments, free elections, and freedom of speech within Parliament – known today as Parliamentary Privilege.
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John Locke's Two Treatises of Government were published anonymously in 1689. In it, Locke proposed that government emerges from the government's consent to protect their natural rights, which is the thesis of what is now called social contract theory. -
Robinson Crusoe: A novel by Daniel Defoe published in 1719. -
Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read. Gulliver's Travels describes the four voyages of Lemuel Gulliver, a ship's surgeon. -
Frederick II (1712-1786) ruled Prussia from 1740 until his death, leading his nation through multiple wars with Austria and its allies. -
Montesquieu's greatest work, De l'esprit des lois (The Spirit of Laws), was published in 1748. It is a comparative study of three types of government: republic, monarchy, and despotism -
The Encyclopédie, Ou Dictionnaire Raisonné Des Sciences, Des Arts Et Des Métiers, 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. -
The Seven Years' War was a far-reaching conflict between European powers that lasted from 1756 to 1763. -
Candide, a satirical novel published in 1759 is the best-known work by Voltaire. It is a savage denunciation of metaphysical optimism—as espoused by the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz—that reveals a world of horrors and folly. -
George III, who ruled between 1760 and 1820, was the first truly British monarch of the Hanoverian kings. Ruling Britain was his first priority and he never visited his family's home in Hanover. He was a well-intentioned and cultured family man. -
The Social Contract, originally published as On the Social Contract; or, Principles of Political Right (French: Du contrat social; ou, Principes du droit politique), is a 1762 French-language book by the Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. -
Catherine II (1729–96), known as Catherine the Great, was the empress, or czarina, of Russia from 1762 until her death. -
Holy Roman Emperor (1765–90). He was co‐regent of Austria with his mother Maria Theresa from 1765 and sole ruler from 1780 to 1790. -
Late in the afternoon of March 5, 1770, British sentries guarding the Boston Customs House shot into a crowd of civilians, killing three men and injuring eight, two of them mortally. -
The Boston Tea Party was a political protest that occurred on December 16, 1773, at Griffin's Wharf in Boston, Massachusetts.
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The Coercive Acts of 1774, known as the Intolerable Acts in the American colonies, were a series of four laws passed by the British Parliament to punish the colony of Massachusetts Bay for the Boston Tea Party. -
The Battles of Lexington and Concord on 19 April 1775, the famous 'shot heard 'round the world', marked the start of the American War of Independence (1775-83). -
The Wealth of Nations was published on 9 March 1776, during the Scottish Enlightenment and the Scottish Agricultural Revolution. It influenced several authors and economists, as well as governments and organizations. -
Outnumbered and outfought during a three-week siege in which they sustained great losses, British troops surrendered to the Continental Army and their French allies. -
The Treaty of Paris was signed by U.S. and British Representatives, ending the War of the American Revolution -
In operation since 1789, the United States Constitution is the world's longest-surviving written charter of government -
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, set by France's National Constituent Assembly in 1789, 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 attempted to storm and seize control of the medieval armory, fortress, and political prison known as the Bastille -
The Tennis Court Oath was a key moment that set off the French Revolution -
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 -
The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, also known as the Declaration of the Rights of Woman, was written on 14 September 1791 by French activist, feminist, and playwright Olympe de Gouges in response to the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. -
Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) made a pioneering and durably influential argument for women's equality. -
The National Convention was established in 1792 during the French Revolution to replace the previous legislative bodies after the end of the monarchy. -
France was made a republic, abolishing the monarchy and executing the king. -
The Committee of Public Safety was a committee of the National Convention that formed the provisional government and war cabinet during the Reign of Terror, a violent phase of the French Revolution. -
The Reign of Terror (French: la Terreur) 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. -
The Directory was the governing five-member committee in the French First Republic -
Napoleon and Joséphine were crowned Emperor and Empress of the French on Sunday, December 2, 1804 -
The first engagement of the War of the Third Coalition and one of Napoleon's greatest victories. -
The Battle of Trafalgar was a naval engagement that took place on 21 October 1805 between the British Royal Navy and the combined fleets of the French and Spanish Navies during the War of the Third Coalition of the Napoleonic Wars. -
The Battle of Leipzig, also known as the Battle of the Nations, was fought from 16 to 19 October 1813 at Leipzig, Saxony. -
He was exiled to the island of Elba, between Corsica and Italy. In France, the Bourbons were restored to power. -
What was the Congress of Vienna and what did it do?
The Congress of Vienna | History of Western Civilization II
The Congress of Vienna was the first of a series of international meetings that came to be known as the Concert of Europe, an attempt to forge a peaceful balance of power in Europe. -
Napoleon had been exiled to St. Helena after he was defeated by the British at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. -
Sebastian Philip Bierk (born April 3, 1968), known professionally as Sebastian Bach, is a Canadian-American singer who achieved mainstream success