FSOT Pq - World History And Geography

Britain has elected to retain the pound sterling as its currency and has, to date, not accepted Europe's common currency.

Originally part of Hungary, Transylvania became part of Romania as a result of the 1919 Treaty of Trianon.

Because diamonds tend to be found in some of the most troubled regions of Africa and are difficult to trace, they have been used regularly to fund revolutions and insurrections in Central Africa. Because they often buy guns and bullets, these diamonds are called blood diamonds.

After a Turkish nationalist movement came to power in the Ottoman Empire, the government moved to rid the empire of its Armenian Christian subjects.

Throughout the 1950s, residents of the Soviet sector of Berlin had been able to flee to the West by doing little more than crossing the street or catching a bus. In order to stem this embarrassing flow of defectors, the Berlin Wall, cutting off West Berlin from the rest of East Germany, was built in 1961.

The Tokugawa shoguns adopted a policy of cultural, economic, and political isolation and allowed minimal and very controlled, contacts between Japanese merchants and the outside world. Christian missions were forbidden altogether.

Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan in 1979 to prop up a failing socialist regime, leading to a debilitating, decade-long conflict from which the Soviets eventually had to withdraw in humiliating defeat.

MAD assumed that as long as neither the Soviet Union nor the United States could hope to survive a nuclear exchange, neither country would be tempted to launch a pre-emptive strike.

The Basque, with a language unrelated to any other, were indigenous to the Iberian Peninsula for a millennia before the Celts, Phoenicians, and Romans arrived.

Kennan was persuaded that, in time, the internal contradictions inherent in communism would lead to its collapse in the Soviet Union. His goal was to prevent the expansion of Soviet influence and communism beyond the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

The protesters in Tiananmen Square were careful not to call publicly for an end to Communist Party rule, but their demands for freedom and democracy, symbolized by a Chinese version of the Status of Liberty, appeared to be a fundamental challenge to the Chinese Communist Party's hold on power.

Unlike earlier Continental wars that spilled over into North America and the Caribbean, the Seven Years War was motivated by conflicting colonial aims. Thus, the Americans came to know it as the French and Indian Wars.

Qat is increasingly popular in West Africa, but appears to be most widely used in Yemen.

President Nixon, long an opponent of communism, became the first American president to visit China in 1972, when talks continued over the normalization of relations and an end to China's isolation.

So named for the variety of its plant life, but noteworthy mostly for its hostility to human habitation, Botany Bay served as a place for Britain to dispose of its criminal class from 1788 to 1868.

If the population perceives that an imperial dynasty has lost the mandate of heaven, the dynasty's legitimacy can be challenged and the mandate claimed by another.

Hong Kong first became a British colony as a result of the Opium Wars. China was forced to surrender the territory in 1859.

Sandino fought for Nicaraguan freedom and resisted American intervention in the 19th century.

Founded by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahab is Arabia in the 18th century, the Wahhabi interpretation of Islam regards all innovations in the faith after about 950 c.e. to be false. The Saudi royal family adheres to the Wahhabi interpretation of Islam.

The Baltic Sea touches Lithuania, Sweden, and Russia as well as Latvia and Estonia.

Kenya is farther south and west, and is also culturally different from, the countries in the horn of Africa, the region in West Africa vaguely resembling the horn of a rhinoceros.

The permanent members of the UN Security Council are the United States, Russia, France, China, and Britain.

The Mandate of Heaven can be lost if the population believes that the emperor no longer maintains right relations with heaven. Thus, a series of bad harvests, drought, flood, or other signs that Heaven is displeased can be enough to bring about the downfall of a dynasty that has, in the eyes of the people, lost the Mandate of Heaven.

Pancho Villa made several daring cross-border raids into the United States and was pursued fruitlessly for months by American troops.

The Concert of Europe aimed at maintaining a conservative order in Europe by suppressing nationalism and discouraging free market liberalism.

Although he received training at the U.S. Army's School of the Americas and was on the payroll of several U.S. government agencies, Noriega was accused and, after an invasion removed him from power, convicted of drug trafficking.

The British government had many motives for limiting Jewish immigration to Palestine, but the most compelling was the desire to not antagonize Arab leaders.

During the first decades of the 19th century, British merchants were profiting handsomely from exchanging opium grown in India for tea grown in China. When the Chinese government tried to crack down on this illegal trade, British merchants appealed to the British government, which responded by attacking China in support of the drug trade.

After French forces were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, the French started looking for a way out. Eventually, the French recognized the partitioning of Vietnam between north and south, and American advisors replaced French troops on the ground.

The policy of containment, first enunciated by George F. Kennan in 1947, was designed to keep communism within its current boundaries while avoiding armed confrontation with the Soviet Union -- a confrontation that could lead to nuclear war.

With substantial help and prodding from the United States, Panama separated from Colombia and immediately agreed to sign over the Panama Canal Zone to the United States.

Ataturk envisioned, and largely succeeded, in building a secular, Western-oriented, national state out of the heartland of the old multi-national Ottoman Empire.

Bolivar was an anti-colonial leader who was instrumental in ending Spanish power in Bolivia, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela but not Argentina.

ADmiral Perry's display of power convinced many Japanese that their isolation had rendered them vulnerable to the very forces of imperialism the Tokugawa Shogunate had hoped to protect them from.

Bohemia and Moravia make up the bulk of the modern Czech Republic.

Tet marks the lunar new year. It was the occasion of a major offensive in 1968 by Vietnamese communist forces against American and South Vietnamese troops.

The United Fruit Company so completely controlled the economies in several Central American countries that their governments came to be seen as serving the interests of the company and of American consumers.

Hawaii was of great strategic value, but was too well defended for the Japanese to have launched a successful invasion. Even the battleships that survived the attack on Pearl Harbor proved to be of limited value. It was the aircraft carrier force that eventually turned the tide of war in the Pacific.

A free city during the interwar period, Danzig's German population was expelled as the city was incorporated into Poland after the Second World War and given the Polish name, Gedansk.

Diversion of the Aral Sea's waters by upstream dams and channels has left much of its former basin a desert.

The first Olympiad of the modern Olympic movement was held in Athens in 1896.

The most outspoken of British imperialists, the South African magnate and politician advocated a line of British colonies, eventually linked by rail, connecting the Cape of Good Hope with the Mediterranean.

Having lost the support of his most important trading partner and military guarantor, Castro invited Pope John Paul II to visit Cuba while looking for other markets for Cuban sugar and cigars.

Chinese Communist forces invaded Tibet in 1949. The Dalai Lama slipped out of China in 1959 and from exile has continued to press his claim for Tibetan independence from China.

Both the American and French Revolutions were inspired and shaped by Enlightenment thinking. The American Revolution started in 1776; the French Revolution began 13 years later. Both were motivated and shaped in part by political and economic factors, as well as Enlightenment ideology.

American success in the Spanish American War gave the United States control of the Philippines and Cuba and, for the first time, gave the United States a minor, but quite real, stake in global imperialism.

Only two percent of the world's water is fresh. Approximately one-quarter of one percent is available for human use.

Belarus maintains far closer ties to Russia than any other former member republic of the Soviet Union.

Miguel Hidalgo issued the call for universal freedom on what became known as the Day of the Call.

The Maoist revolutionary force that has struggled against Peru's government is the Shining Path of Sendero Luminoso. The Tupac Amaru also seeks to overthrow Peru's government, but follows Castro's rather than Mao's example.