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551 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 10 of 10.

  1. Centuries of conflict as settlement pushed westFor almost three centuries, from the first 17th-century colonies to the end of the 1800s, European empires and then the United States fought Native American nations over land. Tri…
  2. A war London did not want, launched by one official’s ultimatumThe Anglo-Zulu War lasted barely six months in 1879, yet it shook the British Empire. Started on the initiative of one colonial official against his own government’s wishes, it op…
  3. Twenty-seven years of civil war as a Cold War proxyAngola won independence from Portugal in November 1975 and fell into civil war almost immediately. The fighting, broken by fragile truces, lasted until 2002, killing an estimated …
  4. Separateness as law: South Africa’s grand and petty apartheidApartheid, an Afrikaans word for “separateness” first recorded in 1929, governed South Africa and South West Africa from 1948 to 1994. It sorted every citizen by race, then used t…
  5. A Sarajevo pistol shot that opened the Great War’s fuseOn 28 June 1914 in Sarajevo, Bosnian Serb student Gavrilo Princip killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to Austria-Hungary, and his wife Sophie. Six young assassins, coordinated b…
  6. Two August mornings that ended a world war’s Pacific chapterIn early August 1945, U.S. forces released nuclear weapons over Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, with estimated deaths between 150,000 and 246,000 people, mostly civilians, in World W…
  7. A New Army mutiny in Wuchang ended two millennia of empireThe 1911 Revolution—also called Xinhai after the year’s sexagenary label—toppled China’s Qing dynasty and opened the Republic. The flashpoint was the 10 October Wuchang Uprising b…
  8. 1931 Yangtze floods drowned cities the size of kingdomsFrom June to August 1931, Yangtze–Huai floods smashed Chinese cities after years of drought flipped into melt and rain. Water covered about 180,000 square kilometres—an area liken…
  9. Bhola 1970 remains the deadliest tropical cyclone recordedThe Bhola cyclone of November 1970 is the deadliest tropical cyclone on record and among history’s worst natural disasters. Formed over the Bay of Bengal on 8 November, it peaked …
  10. An Arab oil embargo nearly tripled the world priceIn October 1973, Arab OPEC producers (OAPEC) embargoed nations backing Israel in the Yom Kippur War—initially Canada, Japan, the Netherlands, the UK, and the United States under S…
  11. A fault under Tangshan city broke at 3:42 in the morningA magnitude 7.6 quake struck Tangshan, Hebei, at 03:42 local time on 28 July 1976 (27 July UTC). Intensity reached XI, and the Tangshan fault—one of three in the Changdong zone—ra…

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