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1,670 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 21 of 28.

  1. Risorgimento stitched a kingdom from rival Italian statesThe nineteenth-century Risorgimento ended in 1861 with the Kingdom of Italy annexing most peninsula states under Victor Emmanuel II. Camillo Cavour's statecraft, Giuseppe Garibald…
  2. Tonkin to Saigon: a Cold War proxy that remade IndochinaFrom about 1955 to 30 April 1975, North Vietnam and its allies fought South Vietnam, the United States, and partners across Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Geneva's 1954 split at the…
  3. Europe grabbed nearly all of Africa in one generationAs late as the 1870s, European flags covered only about a tenth of Africa, mostly coastal footholds. By 1914 Ethiopia and Liberia alone still stood outside formal European rule. S…
  4. Gold, Uitlanders, and a war that invented campsFrom 1899 to 1902 the British Empire fought the South African Republic and Orange Free State over influence in Southern Africa. Witwatersrand gold had drawn British Uitlanders who…
  5. Steel, rails, and science remade industry after 1870After the first industrial boom cooled mid-century, another wave—telegraphs, railroads, gas and water networks, sewage systems—spread far beyond a few showcase cities. Historians …
  6. Mussolini's 1935 invasion crushed Ethiopia with poison gasOn 3 October 1935, without declaring war, roughly two hundred thousand Italian troops under Marshal Emilio De Bono crossed from Eritrea while a smaller column under Rodolfo Grazia…
  7. Annexation's aftermath: a war Congress later soft-named insurrectionThe Philippine–American War erupted in early 1899 after the United States annexed the former Spanish colony the Filipino republic claimed as independent. Denied an armistice, the …
  8. Katipunan's secret war ended 333 years of Spanish ruleThe Philippine Revolution from 1896 to 1898 was Katipunan's independence war against Spain, climaxing three centuries of colonial control in the archipelago. Andres Bonifacio foun…
  9. Pilsudski's Kiev thrust and the Peace of Riga redrew the eastThe Polish–Soviet War ran from 14 February 1919 to 18 March 1921 mainly between the Second Polish Republic and Soviet Russia after World War I and revolution. Lenin annulled Brest…
  10. Capitalism's golden age ran roughly from 1950 to 1973The postwar economic boom—also called the Golden Age of Capitalism—was worldwide expansion after World War II. Against early forecasts, wrecked economies such as Japan, West Germa…
  11. Dubcek's 1968 thaw met half a million Warsaw Pact troopsThe Prague Spring was a 1968 liberalisation inside the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. It began on 5 January when reformer Alexander Dubcek became First Secretary of the Communis…
  12. Deng's December 1978 turn launched China's growth miracleReform and opening-up names the People's Republic of China's market-leaning economic program often branded an economic miracle. Guided by Deng Xiaoping as 'General Architect,' the…
  13. Europe's springtime of peoples burned brightest then fracturedThe revolutions of 1848—springtime of the peoples—swept Europe from January 1848 into October 1849, still the continent's most widespread revolutionary wave. Aims varied yet gener…
  14. Autumn of Nations toppled Eastern Bloc one-party ruleThe revolutions of 1989—Fall of Communism or Autumn of Nations—were liberal democratic movements that collapsed most Marxist–Leninist governments in the Eastern Bloc and beyond. E…
  15. Reds, Whites, and collapsing fronts from 1917 to 1922The Russian Civil War tore through the former empire from 1917 to 1922 after Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government in October. Nicholas II's February abdication had alre…
  16. From 1721 to 1917 a Eurasian empire touched three oceansThe Russian Empire stretched across northern Eurasia from 1721 until the 1917 republic proclamation, closing tsarist monarchy's final chapter. By the early 1800s it ran from Arcti…
  17. Peace, land, and bread toppled a wartime empire in 1917The Russian Revolution names 1917's upheavals that abolished monarchy and installed socialist government through two successive revolutions plus civil war. February revolt, amid W…
  18. Bloody Sunday's year forced an October Manifesto DumaThe Russian Revolution of 1905—the First Russian Revolution—began on 22 January 1905 and pushed the empire toward a constitutional monarchy with a legislature. Peasant anger at la…
  19. Japan's surprise harbor strike humbled a European empireThe Russo-Japanese War lasted from 8 February 1904 to 5 September 1905 as Russia and Japan fought over Manchuria and Korea. After Shimonoseki in 1895 briefly gave Japan Liaodong a…
  20. A Balkan coalition pushed Ottomans back to Constantinople's gatesThe Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878 matched the Ottoman Empire against a Russian-led coalition with Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro. Russian aims of recovering losses and aiding Ba…
  21. Coalitions versus Napoleon remade Europe from 1803 to 1815The Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815) pitted shifting European coalitions against France under the Consulate and then the Empire. Britain declared war on 18 May 1803, later aligning wit…
  22. A twelve-year dictatorship branded the German Reich anewNazi Germany names the German state from 1933 to 1945 under Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist party, officially the German Reich and later Greater German Reich. Appointment …
  23. Roosevelt's Depression bargain remade the American stateThe New Deal was Franklin D. Roosevelt's suite of economic and social reforms against the Great Depression across his first two terms. He coined the phrase accepting the 1932 Demo…
  24. A second imperial wave raced after older empires crackedNew Imperialism names the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century land grab by industrial great powers plus Japan, set apart from ancient conquests and Europe's first oceanic…
  25. Vietnam's last dynasty ruled from 1802 into French IndochinaThe Nguyen dynasty was Vietnam's final imperial house, ruling a unified realm independently from 1802 until French protectorate arrangements began in 1883. Nguyen Phuc lords had a…
  26. Bombers to ICBMs: a Cold War contest measured in megatonsThe nuclear arms race was the Cold War competition for nuclear supremacy between the United States, the Soviet Union, and their allies. It began with the Manhattan Project and Sov…
  27. The Second World War's largest theater stretched across oceans and continentsThe Pacific War pitted Japan against the Allies across East and Southeast Asia, two oceans and Oceania. It folded in the war in China and the brief Soviet–Japanese War, and it sta…
  28. Triple Alliance war that nearly erased ParaguayThe Paraguayan War, or War of the Triple Alliance from 1864 to 1870, matched Paraguay against Argentina, Brazil's Empire, and Uruguay. It remains the deadliest war between states …
  29. Seventy-two days that haunted Marx and French politicsThe Paris Commune seized the French capital on 18 March 1871 and held parts of the city until 28 May. For two months Communards chased progressive, often anti-clerical experiments…
  30. Iran's 1905–1911 uprising beat the Young Turks to a constitutionThe Persian Constitutional Revolution from 1905 to 1911 under the late Qajar dynasty produced Iran's first constitution—the earliest such upheaval in the Islamic world, preceding …
  31. Mexico's decade of regional wars wrote the 1917 constitutionThe Mexican Revolution, 20 November 1910 to 1 December 1920, is often called modern Mexico's defining event: it destroyed the Federal Army, raised revolutionary forces, and remade…
  32. Hidalgo's Dolores cry began eleven years to Mexican independenceMexico's War of Independence (16 September 1810 – 27 September 1821) was a patchwork of regional fights, not one coherent campaign, ending Spanish rule after Napoleon's invasion o…
  33. Ottoman fronts stretched from Caucasus oil dreams to Arab revoltThe Middle Eastern theatre of World War I ran 30 October 1914 to 30 October 1918, pitting the Ottoman Empire—with Kurdish, Circassian, and many Arab allies—plus other Central Powe…
  34. Modernity's year 1500 is a convenient European fiction that stuckThe modern era usually names history after medieval centuries, often from around 1500 in Europe—Reformation, print, and Atlantic expansion—though periodization resists clean edges…
  35. Monroe told Europe to stay out—then lacked a navy to insistThe Monroe Doctrine, voiced by President James Monroe on 2 December 1823, opposed foreign interference in the Western Hemisphere as potentially hostile to the United States. Aimed…
  36. Six flags of soft landers broke a decades-long lunar quietLuna 2 first touched the Moon in 1959; Apollo 11 made the first crewed landing in 1969. Six Apollo crews landed between 1969 and December 1972. After Luna 24 in 1976, soft landing…
  37. 1857's sepoy rising ended Company rule and remade the RajThe Indian Rebellion of 1857–58 began as a Meerut sepoy mutiny on 10 May 1857 against East India Company sovereignty exercised for the British Crown. Contested names—Sepoy Mutiny,…
  38. Indonesia's revolution mixed guerrilla war with two diplomatic crisesThe Indonesian National Revolution or War of Independence ran from the 1945 independence proclamation to Dutch recognition after four years of bloody skirmishes, communal upheaval…
  39. Britain's factories remade population, power, and the working dayThe Industrial Revolution, sometimes tagged the First against a later Second, began in Great Britain around 1760 and spread to Europe and the United States, swapping handcraft for…
  40. The transistor's 1947 spark still names our whole eraThe Information Age, dating from mid-twentieth-century shifts from Industrial Revolution industries toward information technology, is often tied to the 1947 transistor. UN public-…
  41. An eight-year Gulf war killed hundreds of thousands for no border changeIraq invaded Iran in September 1980; a UN-brokered ceasefire took effect in August 1988 after roughly half a million deaths excluding wider tallies. Saddam Hussein sought to block…
  42. 1979 toppled a Shah and enthroned a jurist's republicThe Iranian or Islamic Revolution of 1979 replaced Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's Imperial State with Ruhollah Khomeini's Islamic Republic. A CIA–MI6 1953 coup had restored the Shah…
  43. Churchill made the iron curtain famous, but others said it firstThe Iron Curtain labeled Europe's Cold War split from 1945 until 1990–91, with Warsaw Pact states east of a line Churchill described at Fulton, Missouri, on 5 March 1946—from Stet…
  44. Italy climbed Alpine ridges to win Trento and TriesteThe Italian front of World War I ran along the Italy–Austria-Hungary border from 1915 to 1918 after Rome joined the Entente despite prior Triple Alliance ties. Victory and the cap…
  45. Three glorious days swapped Bourbon blood for Orléans popularityFrance's July Revolution of 1830—les Trois Glorieuses—overthrew Bourbon King Charles X and raised his cousin Louis-Philippe of Orléans, restoring a constitutional July Monarchy on…
  46. Burma's last dynasty built an empire then lost it to BritainThe Konbaung or Third Burmese Empire ruled from 1752 to 1885 as Burma's final dynasty, second-largest in Burmese history, continuing Toungoo administrative reforms that seeded the…
  47. Korea's hot war froze a DMZ that still has not thawedThe Korean War ran 25 June 1950 to 27 July 1953 between North and South Korea and their allies—China and the USSR behind the North, a U.S.-led UN coalition behind the South. A 194…
  48. Historians can't agree when 'late modern' even endsMany periodizations start the late modern period with the French Revolution in 1789 after the early modern age, then either close it in 1945 with World War II's end or let it swal…
  49. A Manhattan office name hid the factories that built the bombThe Manhattan Project, a U.S.-led World War II effort with Britain and Canada, built the first nuclear weapons, peaking near 130,000 workers and almost $2 billion (about $28 billi…
  50. The Mediterranean war lasted from Italy's 1940 leap to 1945World War II's Mediterranean and Middle East theatre linked land, sea, and air fights for the sea, North Africa, and approaches to Asia from Italy's 10 June 1940 declarations unti…
  51. Meiji's 1868 oath Westernized Japan after Perry forced the gatesThe Meiji Restoration of 1868 restored practical imperial rule under Emperor Meiji and drove rapid Westernizing reform after Tokugawa crises and Perry's American expedition shatte…
  52. Polk's Texas annexation war redrew the map to the PacificThe Mexican–American War (25 April 1846 – 2 February 1848)—called the Mexican War in the U.S. and an intervention in Mexico—followed 1845 Texas annexation that Mexico still claime…
  53. Dwarf wheat and hybrid rice rewrote the twentieth-century harvestThe Green Revolution—or Third Agricultural Revolution—was a wave of technology transfer that sharply raised crop yields, starting in rich countries early in the twentieth century …
  54. Gulag named a directorate and came to mean an archipelago of campsThe Gulag began as the Soviet secret-police division that ran forced-labor camps from the nineteen thirties into the early nineteen fifties under Stalin, yet English usage often s…
  55. A forty-two-nation coalition reversed Iraq’s grab of KuwaitThe Gulf War matched Iraq against a forty-two-country coalition led by the United States after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait on two August nineteen ninety. Desert Shield built for…
  56. Ukraine’s Holodomor was a man-made famine whose intent is debatedThe Holodomor—also called the Ukrainian famine—was a catastrophic engineered hunger across Soviet Ukraine from nineteen thirty-two to nineteen thirty-three that killed millions. I…
  57. Fifteen days in 1956, Hungary rose—and Soviet tanks answeredThe Hungarian Revolution of nineteen fifty-six lasted from twenty-three October to four November as a nationwide rising against the Hungarian People’s Republic and its subordinati…
  58. From Congress petitions to Partition, India exited the RajThe Indian independence movement was a multi-decade political struggle from the mid-eighteen eighties to nineteen forty-seven to end British colonial rule on the subcontinent. It …
  59. Japan’s 1894 victory shoved East Asia’s center of gravityThe First Sino-Japanese War ran from twenty-five July eighteen ninety-four to seventeen April eighteen ninety-five as Qing China and Meiji Japan fought mainly over Korea. After ro…
  60. A doctored telegram helped birth the German EmpireThe Franco-Prussian War—also called the Franco-German War or France’s War of eighteen seventy—pitted France against Prussia’s North German Confederation from nineteen July eightee…

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