Throughout the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century Humanity was facing times of great new ideas that will significantly influence history. The social conflict between the "haves" and the "have nots" escalated into a sharp collision in the 18th century and resulted in the ...

Life changed dramatically for 17th and 18th century Europeans, as a result of major social, political, and philosophical transformations. Following the Reformation, the authority and dominance of the Catholic Church were already being questioned and severely criticized. This in turn contributed ...

Industrial revolution marked a momentous turning point in human history. The Industrial Revolution created, first in Great Britain and then in continental Europe and North America, a growing and tremendously dynamic economic system. In the course of the 19th century, that system was extended across...

After WWII, there was an iron curtain dividing eastern and western Europe. And there were also two superpowers left standing, the United States and the Soviet Union. The United States dominated in western Europe while the Soviet Union dominated in eastern Europe. Tensions grew between the two superp...

Dear friend,This semester I am taking a history class called "History of East Europe". Even though, as you know, I am from Greece, and I have lived there most of my life, I see that I know very little about my neighbor countries and their recent history. It is interesting and at the same time sad ...

The Communist World and the Free World were two kinds of economic and political camps existing in 1985. At the center of these camps were two nations, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics who followed the principals of communism, and the United States of America with the belief in Capitalism and...

There are three main schools of thought that trace the origins of the Cold War. The Orthodox view is that "the intransigence of Leninist ideology, the sinister dynamics of a totalitarian society, and the madness of Stalin" (Doc 1) cause the Cold War. The Revisionists claim that "Ameri...

The Warsaw Pact of 1955 The Warsaw Pact of 1955 was an alliance of countries similar to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization of 1949. These countries which were subjugated by the communist regime of the Soviet Union which included: People's Republic of Albania, the People's Republic of Bulgaria...

The Cold War lasted for over half a century, and many different factors fuelled the battle. All three major nations that were involved helped to escalate the Cold War farther. The Soviet's actions in Eastern Europe, American, perhaps too aggressive actions against Soviet expansion, and Churchill and...

Challenging Traditional European Beliefs There were many people who came along in Europe who tried to change the way people thought about different beliefs. Some ideas were quiet successful in getting across to peoples' minds and some were rejected for being too ridiculous. But there wer...

The Reign of Terror " War is necessary to men, and is more natural to them than peace." In this quote by Anatole France, we realize why we as people want war. It is necessary and is more common then peace. How many countries in the present world have not used war, terror, or means other ...

War: Why wars occur Most wars result from a combination of causes. Three of the most common causes are conflicts over resources, clashing ideologies, and struggles over power. Conflicts over resources are the most basic and enduring causes of war. Resources include land, minerals, energy sou...

The Cold War The Cold War was an extended conflict between the western states, which were led by the United States, and the communist states that were led by the Soviet Union. The Cold War lasted forty-five years from 1945 to 1990. The Cold war had economical, political, and ideological ...

In 1938, a summit with Hitler, called the Munich Conference, took place. This meeting was in concerns with Germany's occupation in Czechoslovakia. The Western leaders agreed to divide Czechoslovakia with the promise that Hitler would take no more land. France and England were in hopes to co...

Communist Manifesto By Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Proletarians-the working class intended to "haunt" Europe and seize control of it. For these people as well as all the other European socialist and communist parties in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Th...

NIXON, KISSINGER, AND THE WORLDThe war in Vietnam was a dismal backdrop for Nixon and his plans for world affairs, and a new international order. Nixon believed that it was of utmost importance to adapt to the new "multipolar" world(international structure, in which China, Japan, and Western Europe ...

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION. The Industrial Revolution is the name given to the movement in which machines changed people's way of life as well as their methods of manufacture. About the time of the American Revolution, English People began to use machines to make cloth and steam engines to run the ma...

Capitalism can be simply defined as an economic system, marked by open competition in a free market, in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned, and development is proportionate to increasing accumulation and reinvestment of profits. However, capitalism tend...

U.S. - Soviet Relations The beginning of the Cold War between U.S. and Russia caused a major polarization across the World. Countries like Korea, Vietnam and Germany were split in half-one half would be democratic and the other communist. The fight for the sphere of influence became mmore of a ...

Communism Communism is a term that has several meanings. According to Frederick Engels, communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat(Engels). It can be a form of government, an economic system, a revolutionary movement, or a way of life. Communism is also a ...

Before the 1940s most countries in the world were capitalist or had a mixed economy including the USA and most countries in Europe, but it ended in the 1940s when the war was over. People see capitalism as giving people the freedom to do well and make money. Some people disagree with this because th...

Barrington Moore, Jr. in Chapter seven of his Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, explores among other things, the reason for England and other countries (such as the US and France) taking the democratic route to the modern world; a route which he refers to as the bourgeois revolut...

Bush's Cold War For fifty years, the total purpose of American foreign interaction was to stop the spread of Communism. Only the threat of annihilation could prevent the citizens from rolling back into their traditional isolationism. George Washington himself preached that the United States ...

Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, more popularly known as Lenin, is arguably the greatest leader in Russian and Soviet Union History. Lenin inspired and led the Bolshevik (Communist) Revolution of 1917, and was the architect and first head of the recently dismantled United Soviet Socialist Republi...

Communism has failed in Europe because of its lack of care for the individual, its corrupt leaders and also because it went against human nature. Two novels that demonstrate this statement are the semi-autobiographical We the Living by Ayn Rand, and Julian Barnes' The Porcupine. According to Ayn...