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1,670 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 22 of 28.

  1. French Indochina lasted from union in 1887 to Dien Bien PhuFrench Indochina—officially the Indochinese Union, then after nineteen forty-one the Indochinese Federation—grouped French-dependent Southeast Asian territories from eighteen eigh…
  2. Napoleon’s 1812 march lost hundreds of thousands in six monthsNapoleon’s French invasion of Russia—also the Russian campaign, Second Polish War, or Russia’s Patriotic War of eighteen twelve—aimed to force the Tsar back into the continental b…
  3. Thirty-nine German states shared a diet that could not leaveThe German Confederation linked thirty-nine mostly German-speaking sovereign states in Central Europe from eighteen fifteen to eighteen sixty-six. The Congress of Vienna built it …
  4. Imperial Germany united twenty-five states under a Prussian emperorThe German Empire—Imperial Germany or the Second Reich—was the German Reich from unification in eighteen seventy-one until the November Revolution of nineteen eighteen turned Germ…
  5. East Germany vanished into an enlarged West on 3 October 1990German reunification—Deutsche Wiedervereinigung—rebuilt Germany as one sovereign state from nine November nineteen eighty-nine to three October nineteen ninety, when the German De…
  6. Bolívar’s Great Colombia lasted only twelve fractious yearsGran Colombia—Greater Colombia, officially the Republic of Colombia—spanned a vast northern South American expanse plus some Central American ground from eighteen nineteen to eigh…
  7. A 1929 crash became a decade-long global economic freefallThe Great Depression was a severe worldwide downturn from nineteen twenty-nine to nineteen thirty-nine, marked by mass unemployment and poverty, collapsing industry and trade, and…
  8. Potato blight plus landlordism emptied mid-century IrelandThe Great Famine—an Gorta Mór, the Great Hunger, or Irish Potato Famine—was mass starvation and disease in Ireland from eighteen forty-five to eighteen fifty-two. Western and sout…
  9. Britain and Russia shadowed each other across Central AsiaThe Great Game was a nineteenth-century rivalry between the British and Russian empires for influence in Central Asia—above all Afghanistan, Persia, and Tibet. Through interventio…
  10. Mao’s leap for steel communes helped cause a mega-famineThe Great Leap Forward was a Chinese Communist Party industrialization drive from nineteen fifty-eight to nineteen sixty-two under Chairman Mao Zedong, meant to yank China from ag…
  11. Stalin’s 1936–38 terror emptied the party with show trialsThe Great Purge—or Great Terror, Year of ’37, Yezhovshchina—was a Soviet political purge from nineteen thirty-six to nineteen thirty-eight. After Sergei Kirov’s nineteen thirty-fo…
  12. Greek rebels and three fleets carved a nation from the OttomansThe Greek War of Independence—Greek Revolution of eighteen twenty-one—pitted Greek revolutionaries against the Ottoman Empire from eighteen twenty-one to eighteen twenty-nine. Fro…
  13. Railways and telegraphs met their first great-power warFrom October 1853 to February 1856, Russia fought the Ottoman Empire, France, Britain, and Sardinia in the Crimean War. A quarrel over protecting Ottoman Orthodox subjects became …
  14. Thirteen days when nuclear missiles faced each other at seaThe Cuban Missile Crisis, lasting 16–28 October 1962, was a thirteen-day standoff after Soviet nuclear deployments in Cuba matched earlier U.S. missiles in Britain, Italy, and Tur…
  15. Batista fell on New Year's Eve to Sierra Maestra rebelsThe Cuban Revolution toppled Fulgencio Batista's 1952–1959 dictatorship after legal challenges failed and armed struggle began. Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement regrouped in t…
  16. A paper democracy carved from Austria-Hungary twice remadeCzechoslovakia sat in Central Europe between Austria, Hungary, Germany, Poland, and Ukraine. Nationalists Tomáš Masaryk and Edvard Beneš steered 1918 independence as Habsburg rule…
  17. Ending empire became the twentieth century's largest remappingDecolonization means closing colonialism—the domination of foreign territories by imperial metropoles. As independence politics it is often dated from the 1775 American Revolution…
  18. The USSR vanished as a legal person on Boxing Day 1991On 26 December 1991 the Soviet Union formally ceased to exist as a sovereign state. Economic stagnation, arms-race costs, reform chaos, and republic revolts culminated when a fail…
  19. A forged letter split France for twelve bitter yearsThe Dreyfus affair convulsed France's Third Republic from 1894 to 1906 after Jewish captain Alfred Dreyfus was wrongly convicted of treason. Counter-espionage chief Georges Picqua…
  20. Plows and drought turned prairie topsoil into black blizzardsThe Dust Bowl of the 1930s blasted American and Canadian prairies with storms that wrecked farms and lungs. Homestead Acts had pushed settlement onto arid High Plains west of the …
  21. From VOC takeover to Sukarno's proclamation of IndonesiaThe Dutch East Indies became a formal colony in 1800 when the Batavian Republic assumed the Dutch East India Company's lands. Spices, then coal and oil, enriched the metropole und…
  22. Warsaw Pact neighbors were the narrow Eastern Bloc coreThe Eastern Bloc was an informal coalition of communist states tied to Soviet power in Central and Eastern Europe. Western usage usually meant the USSR plus Warsaw Pact members—Ea…
  23. Russia's war ended at Brest-Litovsk, not in BerlinWorld War I's Eastern Front stretched along the Russian and Romanian frontiers with Austria-Hungary and Germany. Early Russian lunges into East Prussia failed; the 1916 Brusilov o…
  24. Barbarossa opened history's largest military confrontationThe Eastern Front—Great Patriotic War to Soviets—pitted European Axis forces against the USSR and its allies after Germany launched Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941. Stalin ig…
  25. Portugal's colony became a tropical empire under Pedro IIThe Empire of Brazil spanned nineteenth-century lands of modern Brazil and, until 1828, Uruguay. Unlike many Spanish American republics, it kept relative stability, growth, and co…
  26. Three emperors steered Japan from Meiji rise to 1945 radio surrenderThe Empire of Japan lasted seventy-nine years under slogans to enrich the country, strengthen forces, and promote industry after the Boshin War restored imperial rule. Meiji, Tais…
  27. The Derg's Marxist junta fell when rebels took Addis AbabaEthiopia's civil war ran from 12 September 1974 to 28 May 1991, pitting the Derg military junta against Ethiopian and Eritrean rebels. After toppling Haile Selassie, the Marxist–L…
  28. Churchill's United States of Europe outlived the speechEuropean integration stitches political, legal, social, and economic ties among states in and near Europe. Rome offered an ancient template; after World War II, Winston Churchill'…
  29. France's Indochina war ran from Saigon 1945 to Dien Bien Phu's shadowThe First Indochina War matched the French Union against the Viet Minh from 19 December 1946 into 1954. Potsdam split the peninsula at 16°N; France seized Saigon in September 1945…
  30. Britain's most profitable drug trade blasted open Qing portsThe First Opium War, or Anglo-Chinese War, pitted Britain against Qing China after Canton crackdowns on opium. The Royal Navy's June 1840 expedition forced unequal treaties; natio…
  31. Crown rule replaced Company rule after the 1857 rebellionThe British Raj was Crown government on the Indian subcontinent from 1858 to 1947, begun when East India Company authority passed to Queen Victoria after the 1857 rebellion—she be…
  32. A safety test’s failure made Chernobyl a maximum-scale accidentOn 26 April 1986 reactor 4 at Chernobyl near Pripyat exploded—one of only two nuclear accidents rated level 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale. Two engineers died at once;…
  33. China’s civil war paused for Japan, then finished on Taiwan’s shoreFighting between the Nationalist Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party ran intermittently from 1 August 1927 until Communist victory sent the KMT to Taiwan on 7 December 1949…
  34. Brown’s school ruling lit a decade of nonviolent mass protestThe U.S. civil rights movement of 1954–1968 sought to end legal segregation, discrimination, and Black disenfranchisement, with roots in Reconstruction’s unfinished promises. Brow…
  35. Housing fights in Dungannon helped spark a wider rights waveCivil rights movements worldwide peaked in the 1960s as drives for equality before the law, often through nonviolent protest. In Northern Ireland, activists from Dungannon housing…
  36. Orwell named a “cold war” before the blocs fully hardenedThe Cold War pitted the United States and its capitalist Western Bloc against the Soviet Union and communist Eastern Bloc after World War II until Soviet dissolution. George Orwel…
  37. From Aztec calpulli to Russian mir, farms can be joint projectsCollective and communal farming let multiple cultivators run land together—member-owned cooperatives or state-run farms. Aztec calpulli, Mexican ejidos after 1917, Wendat and Haud…
  38. Bismarck’s Berlin congress trimmed Russia’s Balkan victoryFrom 13 June to 13 July 1878, Europe’s great powers rewrote the Treaty of San Stefano that had ended the Russo-Turkish War. Otto von Bismarck mediated toward British lines: no Gre…
  39. Vienna’s diplomats redrew Europe while Napoleon briefly returnedThe Congress of Vienna (1814–1815) gathered Europe’s powers—except the Ottomans—to redesign the post-Napoleonic order through negotiation, not merely restoring old lines but resiz…
  40. “Contemporary history” usually starts where 1945 left the worldIn English historiography, contemporary history covers roughly 1945 to now, overlapping social scientists’ talk of postmodernity. Its political spine is the Cold War (1947–1991), …
  41. Serbia’s mountain retreat kept an army alive to fight againWorld War I’s Balkan Front pitted Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, Germany, and the Ottomans against Serbia, Montenegro, and later Western Allies plus Greece. Three Austro-Hungarian inv…
  42. Uranus trapped a German army on the Volga’s ruined shoreStalingrad (now Volgograd) became the Eastern Front’s hinge in 1942–43: an industrial Volga hub Germany needed on the road to Caucasus oil. From July clashes to August bombing, th…
  43. Britain needed a million import tons a week to stay in the warThe Battle of the Atlantic ran from 1939 to Germany’s 1945 defeat—the longest continuous WWII campaign. Allied blockade met U-boat counterblockade as convoys from North America fe…
  44. The Wall rose after 3.5 million East Germans walked westEast Germany began the Berlin Wall on 13 August 1961, a guarded concrete ring around West Berlin meant to stop the bleed of citizens into the West. Propaganda called it an Anti-Fa…
  45. A martial society’s uprising drew eight foreign armies inlandFrom 1899 to 1901 the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists rose in North China against foreign spheres and missionary power as Qing rule faltered. After Boxers and imperial f…
  46. A Sunday raid that ended American neutrality overnightOn 7 December 1941 Japan’s carrier force under Chūichi Nagumo struck the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Oahu, while the United States was still neutral. Three hundred fifty-t…
  47. Europe’s dual monarchy that declared war and then dissolvedAustria-Hungary was a Central European dual monarchy from 1867 to 1918—Europe’s second-largest state by area after Russia and third-most populous after Russia and Germany. Cisleit…
  48. Francis II’s answer to Napoleon: one Habsburg empireThe Austrian Empire (1804–1867) unified Habsburg realms under Francis II after Napoleon proclaimed the French Empire. It was Europe’s third-most populous great power while it last…
  49. The 2004 Sumatra quake ruptured a record 1,300 km of fault for ten minutesOn 26 December 2004 a magnitude 9.2–9.3 megathrust earthquake struck off Aceh in northern Sumatra. Its fault tore for at least ten minutes along more than a thousand kilometres, a…
  50. How a US housing bubble erased $11 trillion of household wealthThe 2008 financial crisis began with speculation on American house prices and risky subprime lending, then spread through mortgage-linked securities to banks worldwide. Some 8.7 m…
  51. France banned slavery at home in 1315; Mauritania only in 1981Abolitionism, the campaign to end slavery and free the enslaved, surged in the West in the late 18th and 19th centuries, but its story is far longer and messier. France outlawed s…
  52. Four years that freed four million and remade the UnionThe American Civil War, fought from April 1861 to May 1865, set the Union against a Confederacy of slave states that seceded after Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election. Historian…
  53. When the census said the frontier line had dissolvedThe American frontier was the advancing edge of settlement that crept west from Jamestown in 1607 until the last contiguous territories became states in 1912, along with all the f…
  54. 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…
  55. 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…
  56. 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 …
  57. 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…
  58. 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…
  59. 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…
  60. 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…

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