Preexisting strife between Austria-Hungry and Serbia was sparked to fire with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austria-Hungry throne. Ferdinand's assassin was a Slavic teenager, Gavrilo Princip, a nineteen-year-old member of the terrorist organization the Black Hand (Duffy 2007, "Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, 1914")
Furthermore, these problems were enhanced by economic failure due to international loans and the establishment of a new currency, the Reichsmark. Due to heavy government spending on the part of the democracy's first two presidents, Gustav Stressemann and Paul von Hindenburg as well as the weight of these loans, the Weimer Republic began to fail (Nicholis, a
Some of those losses included 750,000 dead British soldiers and 116,000 dead United States' soldiers. Totally, around 8.5 million were killed and 21 million injured (Trueman 2008)
According to legend, Homer was blind, and aside from several Ionian cities claiming to be his birthplace, there is nothing else known about him (Homer pp). Aristotle and Pindar believed that Homer was born in Smyrna, on the coast of modern-day Turkey, and enjoyed years of fame on the Aegean island of Chios (Tolson pp)
Therefore, these two epics by Homer are the focal point of Greek values and the Greek worldview, "despite all its evolution and permutations through the centuries following their composition" (Hooker pp). Even after the rise of Christianity, Homer's epics remained the very model of the heroic epic, outshining Christian classics (Boorstin pp)
Because the loyalty of these men could not be trusted on the battlefield, they were never killed in battles, but instead were entrusted with remembering the "area's stock of epic poetry, to remember past events, in the times before literacy came to the area (Homer pp). Except for a few ancient quotations, the Homeric papyri are the oldest surviving witnesses to the text of Homer (Due pp)
All of these documents, most of which were discovered in Egypt, are fragmentary and range in date from as early as the third century BCE to the seventh century CE, and today reside in collections all over the world (Due pp). There are no other texts from the Western imagination that occupy such an influential position concerning the self-definition of Western culture as Homer's two epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey (Hooker pp)
No other ancient empire -- not the Assyrian, not the Persian, not the Athenian -- had succeeded on such a scale at holding together in harmony so many peoples, faiths, and traditions. Historians commonly describe these two centuries as the period of the Pax Romana ("the Roman Peace"), an age when a strong central government engineered and maintained the social stability that allowed people to prosper" (Backman, 2003, 7)
This practice implied that "large landowners had to consolidate their hold over both their lands and the laborers who worked them. This was a necessity in the midst of the civil disorders, enfeebled governments, and barbarian invasions that wracked Europe" (Beckman and Cheran, 1998) at the same time it was a useful mechanism for controlling both the land and the people
The history of the Roman Republic must however start at the moment in which the first settlings of what would later be the Roman Republic. Therefore it is rather well-known the mythical creation of Rome with Romulus and Remus (Berstein and Milza, 1994)
After his appointment as dictator, a step which reduced the elements of the Republic dramatically and discontent for his rule mounted. His assassination however by the same men he had pardoned once Pompey was defeated represented the turning point for the Roman creation (Bonta, 2005)
The major problem concerning the inability of the ruling family to follow a correct line of inheritance however was largely due to two factors. On the one hand, it is suggested that the successors were evil in their nature and several fights for succession occurred, each of the parties involved being supported by a certain political group (Potter, 2004, 86)
In this sense "Caesar's father and uncle, with a minority of the nobles, belonged to the party of Marius. It was not actually, as it is sometimes called the 'popular party' for parties as Rome were shifting groups, formed on a personal, not an ideological, basis" (Taylor, 1957, 3)
Born in May 1672, Peter was the grandson of Tsar Michael Romanov, and he began his rule when he was only 10-years-old, through a series of missteps and coincidences. When he was born, Russia was still largely a peasant, agrarian state, with 90% of the population made up of peasants (Hughes 4)
Another historian notes, "He organized his own military units which were later transformed into the first imperial guards. In an action that predicted his future as ruler, he enlisted in his own unit as the drummer boy; he insisted that he could not command until he had proven himself as a soldier" (Mines)
In addition, Peter's reign changed Russia from a relatively minor power to a larger, world power, but it also changed the lives of the Russian people in numerous ways. The previous Muscovite era imposed few burdens on Russians other than taxes and their inability to simply change their community or tax burdens (Raeff 22)
Another historian notes, "When his time did come, conditions were less than auspicious for his success. The country was in disarray, riven by conflicts among the leading boyar clans and plagued by the deep social and religious divisions that had given rise to violent spasms of popular unrest throughout the seventeenth century" (Pozefsky)
He separated the Church from the state, something that had not been done in Russia before, and he took far greater control over the Church and spiritual matters. Another writer notes, "He ceased to be the Moscow Tsar, appointed by God Himself as the father of his people, and became the Emperor of Russia whose primary duty was to maintain the honour and glory of the new Empire" (Zernov 50)
The ancient Greek polis was a city-state; when historians talk about city-states, they are referring first and foremost to ancient Greece, and to the cities of north Italy in the Middle Ages. City-states, including those of ancient Greece, have exhibited a series of four common traits: (1) a degree of urbanization unexampled in major states before the Industrial Revolution, which began in the second half of the eighteenth century; (2) an economy based on trade and centered on the city's market; (3) a political decision-making process whereby laws and decrees were not always dictated by a monarch, but were often passed by majority votes after a debate in an assembly, which mostly was a selection from among the better-class citizens; (4) interaction between city-states, which resulted in the rise of leagues of states and federal states (Hansen: 3)
" What Hegel was suggesting was that the artist's immersion in motifs and materials and methods - all the physical characteristics of the work - became the vehicle for an expression so exalted that it defied the physicality of the work that had precipitated it. And if that was a paradox, it was the paradox at the heart of the School of New York (Perl 160)