10. World History since 1550. The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition. 2002

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The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition. 2002.

World History since 1550

Historians often call the period from the middle of the sixteenth century to the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 the early modern era. This era includes the Renaissance and the Reformation, both of which extended from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries, and the Enlightenment, which extended through the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The American and French Revolutions mark the beginning of modern history. The French Revolution introduced a period of political upheaval in Europe that included the wars fought between the 1790s and 1815 by Napoleon Bonaparte, the Napoleonic wars. The Congress of Vienna in 1815 brought peace to Europe but did not extinguish the flames of democracy and nationalism that had flared up during the French Revolution. The twin forces of democracy and nationalism exploded again in the so-called Revolutions of 1848. Between 1850 and 1870, both Italy and Germany emerged as modern nation-states.

The period between 1870 and 1914 witnessed intensifying nationalistic and imperial rivalries in Europe, culminating with the assassination of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand and the outbreak of World War I in 1914. During the war, Great Britain, France, Italy, and Russia opposed Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire. The United States entered the war in 1917 and contributed to the victory of Great Britain and France in 1918. Before the conclusion of the war, the Russian monarchy collapsed, and the Bolsheviks came to power in the Russian Revolution.

During the 1920s and 1930s, Joseph Stalin consolidated the power of communism in the Soviet Union, while nationalistic and militaristic governments arose in Germany (the Nazis under Adolf Hitler), Italy (the fascists under Mussolini), and Japan. World War II commenced with Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939. In 1941, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, and Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor. By 1945, the Axis powers had surrendered; Japan capitulated after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

New tensions developed after World War II between the United States and the Soviet Union. This conflict, which embraced political and economic competition but not direct military confrontation, is known as the cold war. During the late 1940s and 1950s, Europe divided into armed camps: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), led by the United States, and the Warsaw Pact, led by the Soviet Union. Inevitably, the cold war affected Asia as well as Europe. Communists backed by the Soviet Union gained power in China in 1949 but soon broke with the Soviet Union in a great power rivalry. Communist and anticommunist forces clashed in the Korean War (1950–1953) and again in the Vietnam War (1950s–1975). Despite these conflicts, the shared fear of nuclear war led the United States and Soviet Union to seek compromise and mutual understanding, called détente, during the 1970s and 1980s.

At the end of the 1980s, communism began to disintegrate, first in eastern Europe and then in the Soviet Union. Although ending the cold war, the collapse of communism created new sources of international instability by bringing long-suppressed nationalism to the surface in the former countries of the Soviet Union and in Yugoslavia. The 1990s also saw the intensification of militant Islamic fundamentalism throughout the Middle East and in parts of Asia. To a degree, conflicting religious ideals and the antagonism between religious fervor and secular values began to replace the older political ideologies as the basis of international strife.

—J.F.K.

Entries

Allende, Salvador	Allies	ancien régime
Arafat, Yasir	Armada, Spanish	Armenian massacres
Assad, Hafez al-	Ataturk, Kemal	Auschwitz
Axis powers	Bastille	Ben-Gurion, David
Berlin airlift	bin Laden, Osama	Bismarck, Otto von
Black Hole of Calcutta	blitzkrieg	Boer War
Boers	Bolívar, Simón	Bolsheviks
Bourbons	Brezhnev, Leonid	Britain, Battle of
British Empire	Bulge, Battle of the	Burke, Edmund
Castro, Fidel	Catherine the Great	Central Powers
Chamberlain, Neville	Chiang Kai-shek	Churchill, Winston
Clemenceau, Georges	collapse of communism	Commonwealth
The Communist Manifesto	concentration camp	Congress party
Cook, Captain James	Cossacks	Counter Reformation
Crimean War	Cromwell, Oliver	Cuban missile crisis
Cultural Revolution, Great Proletarian	czar	Dachau
Danton, Georges	D-Day	De Gaulle, Charles
Deng Xiaoping	de-Stalinization	Dienbienphu
Disraeli, Benjamin	divine right of kings	Doctor Livingstone, I presume?
Drake, Sir Francis	Dreyfus affair	Dunkirk
East Germany	Edwardian period	Eichmann, Adolf
Elizabeth I	Elizabeth II	Engels, Friedrich
Enlightenment	Falkland Islands	fascism
fifth column	fin de siècle	Final Solution
France, fall of	Francis Ferdinand, Archduke	Franco, Francisco
French Revolution	Führer, der	Gandhi, Indira
Gandhi, Mahatma	Gang of Four	Garibaldi, Giuseppe
George III	Gestapo	Gladstone, William Ewart
Glorious Revolution	Goebbels, Joseph	Goering (or Göring), Hermann
goose step	Gorbachev, Mikhail	Great War
Guevara, Ernesto “Che”	guillotine	Hammarskjöld, Dag
Hanover, House of	Hapsburgs	Himmler, Heinrich
Hirohito	Hiroshima	Hitler, Adolf
Ho Chi Minh	Holocaust	Huguenots
Hussein, Saddam	Industrial Revolution	International
Iron Curtain	Ivan the Terrible	Jack the Ripper
Jacobins	John XXIII, Pope	John Paul II, Pope
Kaiser	kamikaze	Khmer Rouge
Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah	Khrushchev, Nikita	Kidd, Captain William
Klondike gold rush	Kuomintang	Lawrence of Arabia
League of Nations	Lenin	Lloyd George, David
Long March	lost generation	Louis XIV
Louis XVI	Luddites	Luftwaffe
Lusitania	Maginot line	Manchu dynasty
Mandela, Nelson	Mao Zedong	Maoism
Marat, Jean-Paul	Marie Antoinette	Marshall Plan
Marx, Karl	master race	Mata Hari
Meiji Restoration	Mein Kampf	Meir, Golda
Metternich, Prince Clemens von	Milosevic, Slobodan	Moguls
Montessori, Maria	Montgomery, Bernard	Mother Teresa
Munich Pact	Mussolini, Benito	Napoleon Bonaparte
Nasser, Gamal Abdel	Nationalist China	Nazis
Nazism	Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact	Nehru, Jawaharlal
Nelson, Admiral Horatio	New World	Nightingale, Florence
1914 to 1918	1939 to 1945	Nkrumah, Kwame
Normandy, invasion of	nuclear testing	Nuremberg trials
October Revolution	Old World	Ottoman Empire
Perón, Eva	Perón, Juan	Persian Gulf War
Peter the Great	William Pitt, the Elder	Poland, invasion of
potato famine, Irish	Puritans	Putin, Vladimir
Qaddafi, Muammar	Quisling, Vidkun	Rabin, Yitzhak
RAF	Raleigh, Sir Walter	Rasputin, Grigori
Reason, Age of	Red Guards	Reign of Terror
Resistance, Free French	Restoration	Revolutions of 1848
Richelieu, Cardinal	Robespierre	Romanovs
Rommel, Erwin	Rothschilds	Royal Air Force
Royal Navy	Russian Revolution	Russo-Japanese War
Rwandan Genocide	Sadat, Anwar	Sakharov, Andrei
Sarajevo	Schweitzer, Albert	Seven Years’ War
shoguns	Six-Day War	Soviet Union
Spanish Civil War	SS	Stalin, Joseph
Stalingrad, Battle of	Stalinism	Stalin’s purge trials
Star Chamber	Stuarts	Suez Canal crisis
Suharto	Sukarno	Sun King
Thatcher, Margaret	Third Reich	Thirty Years’ War
Tiananmen Square	Titanic	Tito, Marshal
Trafalgar, Battle of	trench warfare	Trotsky, Leon
Trudeau, Pierre Elliott	Tudors	U-boats
Vatican II	V-E Day	Versailles, Treaty of
Vichy government	Victoria, Queen	Victorian period
Vienna, Congress of	Viet Cong	Villa, Pancho
V-J Day	Walesa, Lech	war crimes
Warsaw Pact	Waterloo, Battle of	Weimar Republic
Wellington, duke of	West Germany	white man’s burden
Wilhelm II	William and Mary	Windsor, duke of
World War I	World War II	Yalta agreement
Yeltsin, Boris	Zapata, Emiliano	Zhou En-lai

The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition. Edited by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Joseph F. Kett, and James Trefil. Copyright © 2002 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

CONTENTS · INDEX · GUIDE · BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

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