History 6
Revolutions, world wars and myths worth debunking: the events that shaped the world, told with the right dates and the sources at the bottom of the page.
- The Cold War: What It Was, Why It Started and How It Ended The Cold War was the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union that ran from the end of the Second World War to 1991. It is called "cold" because the two superpowers never fought each other directly: both had nuclear weapons, and an open clash would have been too destructive for either side to survive intact. Instead they competed through rival military alliances, economic aid used as political leverage, espionage, propaganda and wars fought elsewhere — in Korea and in Vietnam. Europe was split along a line Churchill called an "iron curtain" in 1946, and Berlin became the sharpest point of contact. The confrontation ended between 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, and 25 December 1991, when Gorbachev resigned and the Soviet Union ceased to exist.
- The History of Carbonara: True Origins and False Myths Carbonara passes for one of the oldest dishes in the Roman tradition, but it is a twentieth-century dish: classic Roman cookbooks never mention it, and as late as 1949 Ada Boni's famous collection does not record it. The oldest known written trace of the name dates from 23 August 1939, in a Dutch-language newspaper of the Dutch East Indies that mentions a trattoria in Trastevere. The most famous hypothesis has the dish born in September 1944 from the meeting between an Italian cook and Allied army rations, but it remains a hypothesis, and historians still argue about it. The first written recipes, from the 1950s, were very different from today's: the first Italian version, from 1954, called for pancetta, gruyère and garlic. The modern canon — guanciale, pecorino, egg and pepper — only settled in the 1990s.
- French Revolution Summary: Causes, Phases and Consequences The French Revolution is the sequence of events that between 1789 and 1799 swept away absolute monarchy in France and rewrote the rules of political life. It grew out of a public finance crisis and a society divided by birth into three estates, in which the nobility was exempt from the main taxes. Within months the Third Estate turned itself into a National Assembly, the Bastille fell and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was adopted. Then came the Republic, the king's execution, the Terror and finally the coup that brought Napoleon Bonaparte to power.
- Industrial Revolution: What Changed and Why The Industrial Revolution is the shift from an economy of fields, workshops and muscle power to one of machines, factories and coal. It begins in Britain in the last decades of the eighteenth century and runs its course through the first thirty years of the nineteenth, starting with spinning and reaching almost every sector. It is not one invention but a chain of them: spinning machines, the steam engine made economical by James Watt, coal, iron, the railway. The result is an unprecedented rise in wealth alongside cities that grow within a few decades and working conditions that are brutal. A second wave, between the 1860s and the early 1900s, brings electricity and the internal combustion engine and shifts the centre of industry towards Germany and the United States.
- World War 1: Causes, Fronts and Consequences World War 1 was the conflict that between 1914 and 1918 drew in the major European powers and their empires, mobilising roughly 65 million men. The trigger was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914; in a little over five weeks, a system of opposing alliances turned a quarrel between Austria-Hungary and Serbia into a continental war. The German plan for a quick victory stalled on the Marne, and the western front settled for years into a line of trenches running from Belgium to Switzerland. The balance shifted in 1917: the United States came in, Russia pulled out. It ended with the armistice of 11 November 1918 and with peace treaties that redrew the map of Europe while leaving plenty of questions unanswered.
- World War 2: Causes, Turning Points and Consequences World War 2 was the conflict that between 1939 and 1945 set the Allies — Britain, France, the United States and the Soviet Union — against the Axis powers of Germany, Italy and Japan. It opened on 1 September 1939 with the German invasion of Poland, but its roots lie in the previous two decades: the terms imposed on Germany after World War 1, the economic collapse of the early 1930s, the Nazi seizure of power and a run of territorial expansions the other powers accepted without resisting. In 1941 the war became truly global, with the German attack on the Soviet Union and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It ended with the German surrender in May 1945 and the Japanese surrender signed on 2 September 1945. Estimates of the dead run past 50 million, most of them civilians.