Download Document

Periodization Key (Number of names in each period)
KEY HISTORICAL FIGURES
1 and 2 = 8000 BCE-600 CE (13)
3 = 600-1450 (12)
4 = 1450-1750 (12)
5 = 1750-1914 (11)
6 = 1914-Present (14)
Name
Period
Description
Mohenjo-Daro
1
The was not the name of a person, but rather was one of the two great cities on the
Indus River established by the Harappan civilization which demonstrated the first
city planning in world history. .
Aristotle
1
The rediscovery in western Europe of the ideas of this Greek philosopher kept alive
through Arab translations and Byzantine Greek texts, allowed for Latin translations
that contributed to the development of universities and the rise of Christian
scholastic thinkers.
Ashoka
1
As the last great ruler of India’s Mauryan Dynasty, he experienced a change of heart
after his bloody campaign against the kingdom of Kalinga which led him to
embrace nonviolence and convert to Buddhism of which he encourage the spread
both in and out of India.
Siddhartha Gautama 1
His search for the cause of human suffering led him to Enlightenment when he
discovered what he called the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, which
became the cornerstones of Buddhism spread by his followers.
Akhenaton
1
This Egyptian pharaoh championed Aten as the one and only god, leading to one of
the first cases of monotheistic worship in world history, though it did not survive
since priests restored the old ways after his death to avoid the wrath of the gods.
Justinian
1
One of the first rulers of the Byzantine Empire, he tried to reconquer the western
Roman Empire and codified Roman law both demonstrating the influence of Rome
on the Byzantine Empire and helping to maintain Rome’s influence throughout
European law in the future.
Zarathustra
1
Though little is known about his life, he is credited with founding Zoroastrianism, a
religion based on a great battle between the forces of good and evil that was
embraced by the Persian Empire and that historians consider to have been very
influential on future developments in Judaism and Christianity.
Chandragupta
1
He established the first centralized empire in India which though shortlived, brought
Maurya
about an era of economic prosperity and long-distance trade that helped contribute
to the evolution of popular Hinduism and rise of new religions such as Jainism and
Buddhism.
Confucius
1
This philosopher developed principles to address the political and social disorder of
the late Zhou dynasty and believed that individuals that were well educated and
moral should fill governmental positions, an idea that survived in Chinese
government for thousands of years.
Constantine
1
This emperor of the late Roman Empire issued the Edict of Milan allowing for
religious freedom, most notably for Christians, and he moved the capital from Rome
to the east after reuniting a divided empire.
Cyrus
1
He became the king of the Persian tribes before liberating Persia and building the
Achaemenid Empire which would stretch from the Nile in Egypt to the Indus River
in northwestern India to become the largest empire the world had ever seen at that
time.
Octavian
1
The Roman Senate bestowed on him the name “Augustus,” marking the end of the
Roman Republic and the beginning of the Roman Empire as well as the Pax
Romana, an era of peace and prosperity resulting from his reforms which expanded
the loyalty of Roman citizens and subjects alike.
Mani
1
At a time of unprecedented cross-cultural exchange along the Silk Roads, this man
from Mesopotamia responded to what he saw as a need for a prophet for all of
humanity by creating a new religion to connect all peoples by drawing from
Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and Christianity.
St. Thomas Aquinas
2
Ibn Battuta
2
Mansa Musa
2
Urban II
2
Osman Bey
2
Hongwu
2
Zheng He
2
Tamerlane
2
Abu al-Abbas
2
Otto I of Saxony
2
Chinggis Khan
2
Muhammad
2
Henry the Navigator
3
Akbar
3
James Cook
3
Mehmed II
3
Simon Bolivar
3
He is the most famous scholastic theologian trying to reconcile the teaching of
Christianity with the scientific and philosophical ideas of Aristotle, which had
recently been reintroduced to western Europe through contacts with Byzantines and
Muslims.
He was a Muslim jurist from Morocco, but is known for his writings of his
extensive travels across the Dar-al-Islam.
He was perhaps the wealthiest king in the world when he ruled the West African
kingdom of Mali at its height, embracing Islam in his empire and showering gifts
along the route as he made the hajj to Mecca with an entourage of thousands.
As Pope, he launched the crusades calling on Christian warriors to seize the holy
land which had fallen to the Muslims and promising salvation to all those who died
for cause.
As the chief of a nomadic band of Turks attempting to create an army of ghazi, or
religious warriors, he founded the dynasty that would later establish the Ottoman
Empire centered in Anatolia.
This Buddhism monk ironically led the military forces that expelled Mongol rule
from China and he became the first emperor of the Ming dynasty cleansing China of
all Mongol influences and reinstating traditional Confucian values.
This Chinese admiral led expeditions 100 times the size of Columbus’s voyage as
he extensively explored the Indian Ocean for the Ming Dynasty which mysteriously
ended the expeditions which were seen as a threat to Confucian values.
This Turkish nomadic conqueror built an empire across Central Asia after the fall of
the Mongols leaving a Muslim Turkish legacy that was reflected in the three
Muslim empires that replaced it—the Mughal, Ottoman, and Safavid empires.
He led a rebellion against the Umayyad dynasty in Persia and founded the Abbasid
Dynasty, which would oversee the spread of Islam across three continents before
being overthrown by the Mongols some five hundred years later.
As the Carolingian empire crumbled, this German lord imposed his authority on
much of Germany and began the Holy Roman Empire after being crowned emperor
by the pope.
He unified the Mongols replacing tribal loyalty with a centralized rule that spread
over the largest land empire the world has ever known though it split among his
sons and grandsons into four khanates after his death.
This Arabian merchant founded a new religion based on Judeo-Christian principles
and the belief in one god, Allah, who would bring a final judgment on the world
rewarding all the righteous, leading to his exile from Mecca to Medina from where
he gathered a following for his triumphant return.
In his efforts to spread Christianity and dominate the seas, this Portuguese prince
led his kingdom to an early lead in the race to explore the unknown world, to
explore Africa’s coasts, and be the first Europeans to successfully sail the sea-route
to India.
His leadership was key to the rise of the Mughal Empire in India due to both is
brutal military success and his religious toleration toward Hindus, which even went
as far as his encouragement of a syncretic religion known as the “divine faith.”
One of the most important of the British explorers, he extensively explored the
Pacific leading to the first contacts between Europeans and the indigenous peoples
of Australia, New Zealand, and many Pacific islands including Hawaii and
Polynesia.
His military conquests strengthened the Ottoman Empire and marked the end of the
Byzantine Empire when he captured the strategic city of Constantinople which has
been known as Istanbul ever since.
Inspired by both the ideas of the Enlightenment and the actions of the American
Revolution, this Venezuelan creole led a movement of independence from Spain in
which he hoped to create a federation in South America similar to the United States
in North America.
John Locke
3
Ignatius Loyola
3
Afonso I
3
Martin Luther
3
King Louis XIV
3
Vasco da Gama
3
Tokugawa Ieyasu
3
Napoleon Bonaparte
4
Sergei Witte
4
Emiliano Zapata
4
Olympe de Gouges
4
Otto von Bismarck
4
Toussaint
L’ouverture
4
Karl Marx
4
Cecil Rhodes
4
Queen Victoria
4
This English philosopher took the ideas of the Enlightenment into the political
realm attacking the theory of divine right and declaring that political sovereignty lay
in the people being governed, an idea that inspired countless revolutions.
Symbolic of the Catholic Reformation that swept through the Church as a response
to Martin Luther and the rise of Protestantism, this Basque soldier founded the
Society of Jesus which became one of the strongest forces of missionary activities in
the following centuries.
This king of Kongo furthered Portuguese success during the early years of the age
of exploration when his conversion to Christianity allowed for closer diplomatic,
economic, and religious ties though a rise in the slave trade would eventually lead to
the destruction of his kingdom.
After his strong objections to the sale of indulgences and other corruption within the
Catholic Church, he was able to begin the Protestant Reformation with the help of
the recent introduction of the Gutenberg printing press to Europe.
This French monarch who epitomized the absolutism of Europe that would lead to
an era of political revolutions was known as the “sun king” and built the immense
palace at Versailles from where he ruled the French state.
He captained the first European sea voyage to reach India where he reportedly said
he had come for “Christians and spices” and where Portugal soon established a
trading post giving them a head start in the Indian Ocean trade.
This military leader ended an era of civil war to unify Japan under a shogunate that
would last until forced contact with the West in the 1800s.
A one-time supporter of the French Revolution, he overthrew the Directory and
installed himself as the emperor of France creating stability and order, healing the
wounded relationship with the Church, and undertaking a number of military
campaigns to extend his authority across Europe.
As the Russian minister of finance, he was the primary force behind Russia’s
industrialization typified by a huge railway construction program that stimulated
other areas of the economy.
Fighting for “land and liberty,” this mestizo peasant became one of the leaders of
the Mexican Revolution which ultimately failed though it pushed for the drafting of
a new Constitution that implemented land redistribution, universal suffrage, and an
extension of freedoms.
Pushing the barriers of revolutionary thought, she wrote one of the earliest
assertions of the equality of women in the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and
the Female Citizen for which she went to the guillotine.
Appointed prime minister of Prussia, his rhetoric of “blood and iron” led to a rise in
German nationalism and the establishment of the Second Reich, an important step in
the unification of Germany.
This former slave proved a shrewd military leader and politician, leading the French
Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue to independence though he died in a French
prison shortly before Haiti declared itself the second independent republic in the
Western Hemisphere.
The most important socialist of all time, he argued that the social and economic
problems plaguing Europe’s working class were the result of capitalism and the
partnership between the wealthy industrial class and political states, something that
would inevitably end in a worker revolution.
One of the most successful imperialists of all times, he dominated the diamond
industry and worked for British interests in Africa most notably pushing for a belt of
British control across the continent to enable for the construction of a Cape-to-Cairo
railroad.
This ruler of the British empire at its height of global imperial control led Great
Britain for more than sixty years during the Berlin conference and the peak of
British territorial control in both India and Africa.
Theodore Roosevelt
Louis XVI
(lived in
4/5, but fits
into to 4)
4
Woodrow Wilson
5
Patrice Lumumba
5
Mikhail Gorbachev
5
Ho Chi Minh
5
Mao Zedong
5
Gamel Abdel Nasser
5
Ayatollah Khomeini
5
Mustafa Kemal
5
Jawaharlal Nehru
5
Joseph Stalin
5
Muhammad Ali
Jinnah
5
Deng Xiaoping
5
Benito Mussolini
5
Kwame Nkrumah
5
A champion of U.S. imperialism, as president he exerted the right to intercede in
Latin American affairs to protect U.S. interests; supported a Panamanian revolt
against Colombia to guarantee U.S. control of the future Panama Canal.
His actions as king of France led the third estate to secede from the government and
establish the National Assembly which led the French Revolution and soon created
the Convention, a legislative body that ordered him executed.
As president of the United States during and after World War I, he called for the
creation of the League of Nations and for self-determination for all peoples in his
Fourteen Points, an idealistic vision for the post-war world.
The first prime minister of the newly independent Congo liberated from Belgian
colonialism, he was killed with the help of the CIA due to his Marxist leanings, a
sign of the reach of the Cold War in the post-colonial world.
More than any other individual, he was responsible for the breakup of the Soviet
Union after taking steps toward economic reform and privatization through his
perestroika program and toward political freedoms through his glasnost program.
This popular Vietnamese nationalist led the war for independence against the
French to become the communist leader of North Vietnam, and later fought the US
over control of South Vietnam.
After struggling for decades in China’s civil war, he led the Communists to victory
over the Nationalists and while initially popular for his programs of land
redistribution, he led his country on the economically disastrous Great Leap
Forward and the politically disastrous Cultural Revolution.
As leader of Egypt, he took an internationalist position in which he refused to take
sides in the Cold War which he perceived as the source of new forms of imperialism
and generated a strong pan-Arab nationalism through his anti-Israel stance and his
strong actions that led to the seizure of the Suez Canal.
He led Iran on a fundamentalist path after the successful Islamic Revolution which
expelled Westerners from the country, sent the CIA-imposed shah fleeing into exile,
and led to an extended hostage crisis when Muslim students seized the U.S.
embassy in Tehran.
Known as the “Father of the Turks,” he modernized and secularized the new nation
the Republic of Turkey after the final dissolution of the Ottoman Empire saving his
people from much of the post-war chaos experienced throughout Europe after WWI.
Following independence from the British, he guided India to democracy as its first
prime minister and at the Bandung Conference in Indonesia, strongly promoted the
strategy of nonalignment which encouraged post-colonial nations to chart their own
course free of the Cold War influences of the U.S. and U.S.S.R.
He emerged as the leader of the Soviet Union out of the power struggle that
followed the death of Vladimir Lenin and pushed his nation through a series of Five
Year Plans to industrialize and imprisoned or executed many communists within the
government who dared to confront his power.
As head of the Muslim League, he played a major role in the struggle for Indian
independence from the British, though his fear of the Hindu domination over the
Muslim minority led him to break with Gandhi and fight for the creation of a
separate Pakistan as a Muslim nation.
Perhaps more responsible than any other individual for the changes in China since
the death of Mao Zedong, he opened up China to foreign and capitalist influences,
though his liberalization policies did not extend to political freedoms as seen in the
bloody response to the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square.
Disenchanted with socialism, he embraced a new political ideology of extreme
militarism and nationalism in Italy that would evolve into the first movment of the
political ideology known as fascism; later allied with Hitler.
After nonviolently leading Ghana to be the first African colony to win independence
and becoming its first prime minister, he became a symbol of black pride and a
champion of pan-African unity during the Cold War.
Afonso I
Ibn Battuta
Akbar
Akhenaton
Aristotle
Toussaint L’ouverture
Mustafa Kemal
Queen Victoria
Otto von Bismarck
Confucius
Ashoka
Olympe de Gouges
St. Thomas Aquinas
Mansa Musa
James Cook
Martin Luther
Zheng He
Cecil Rhodes
Siddhartha Gautama
Mehmed II
Mohenjo-Daro
Chandragupta Maurya
Ho Chi Minh
Otto I of Saxony
Kwame Nkrumah
Chinggis Khan
Gamel Abdel Nasser
Patrice Lumumba
Karl Marx
Napoleon Bonaparte
Muhammad
Jawaharlal Nehru
Constantine
Octavian
Mao Zedong
Osman Bey
Cyrus
Tokugawa Ieyasu
Deng Xiaoping
Louis XVI
Woodrow Wilson
Joseph Stalin
Tamerlane
Vasco da Gama
Sergei Witte
Mikhail Gorbachev
Simon Bolivar
Urban II
John Locke
Henry the Navigator
Mani
Emiliano Zapata
Zarathustra
Ignatius Loyola
Theodore Roosevelt
Benito Mussolini
Muhammad Ali Jinnah
Justinian
Ayatollah Khomeini
Hongwu
Abu al-Abbas
Louis XIV
This is not the name of a person, but
rather one of the two great cities on the
Indus River established by the Harappan
civilization which demonstrated the first
city planning in world history.
This military leader ended an era of civil
war to unify Japan under a shogunate that
would last until forced contact with the
West in the 1800s.
The rediscovery in western Europe of the
ideas of this Greek philosopher kept alive
through Arab translations and Byzantine
Greek texts, allowed for Latin
translations that contributed to the
development of universities and the rise
of Christian scholastic thinkers.
As the chief of a nomadic band of Turks
attempting to create an army of ghazi, or
religious warriors, he founded the
dynasty that would later establish the
Ottoman Empire centered in Anatolia.
As the last great ruler of India’s Mauryan
Dynasty, he experienced a change of
heart after his bloody campaign against
the kingdom of Kalinga which led him to
embrace nonviolence and convert to
Buddhism of which he encourage the
spread both in and out of India.
One of the most important of the British
explorers, he extensively explored the
Pacific leading to the first contacts
between Europeans and the indigenous
peoples of Australia, New Zealand, and
many Pacific islands including Hawaii
and Polynesia.
His search for the cause of human
suffering led him to Enlightenment when
he discovered what he called the Four
Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path,
which became the cornerstones of
Buddhism spread by his followers.
One of the first rulers of the Byzantine
Empire, he tried to reconquer the western
Roman Empire and codified Roman law
both demonstrating the influence of
Rome on the Byzantine Empire and
helping to maintain Rome’s influence
throughout European law in the future.
This English philosopher took the ideas
of the Enlightenment into the political
realm attacking the theory of divine right
and declaring that political sovereignty
lay in the people being governed, an idea
that inspired countless revolutions.
He led a rebellion against the Umayyad
dynasty in Persia and founded the
Abbasid Dynasty, which would oversee
the spread of Islam across three
continents before being overthrown by
the Mongols some five hundred years
later.
He was a Muslim jurist from Morocco,
but is known for his writings of his
extensive travels across the Dar-al-Islam.
As the Carolingian empire crumbled, this
German lord imposed his authority on
much of Germany and began the Holy
Roman Empire after being crowned
emperor by the pope.
He became the king of the Persian tribes
before liberating Persia and building the
Achaemenid Empire which would stretch
from the Nile in Egypt to the Indus River
in northwestern India to become the
largest empire the world had ever seen at
that time.
He established the first centralized
empire in India which though shortlived,
brought about an era of economic
prosperity and long-distance trade that
helped contribute to the evolution of
popular Hinduism and rise of new
religions such as Jainism and Buddhism.
This philosopher developed principles to
address the political and social disorder
of the late Zhou dynasty and believed
that individuals that were well educated
and moral should fill governmental
positions, an idea that survived in
Chinese government for thousands of
years.
The Roman Senate bestowed on him the
name “Augustus,” marking the end of the
Roman Republic and the beginning of the
Roman Empire as well as the Pax
Romana, an era of peace and prosperity
resulting from his reforms which
expanded the loyalty of Roman citizens
and subjects alike.
In his efforts to spread Christianity and
dominate the seas, this Portuguese prince
led his kingdom to an early lead in the
race to explore the unknown world, to
explore Africa’s coasts, and be the first
Europeans to successfully sail the searoute to India.
Symbolic of the Catholic Reformation
that swept through the Church as a
response to Martin Luther and the rise of
Protestantism, this Basque soldier
founded the Society of Jesus which
became one of the strongest forces of
missionary activities in the following
centuries.
Though little is known about his life, he
is credited with founding Zoroastrianism,
a religion based on a great battle between
the forces of good and evil that was
embraced by the Persian Empire and that
historians consider to have been very
influential on future developments in
Judaism and Christianity.
Inspired by both the ideas of the
Enlightenment and the actions of the
American Revolution, this Venezuelan
creole led a movement of independence
from Spain in which he hoped to create a
federation in South America similar to
the United States in North America.
This emperor of the late Roman Empire
issued the Edict of Milan allowing for
religious freedom, most notably for
Christians, and he moved the capital from
Rome to the east after reuniting a divided
empire.
This Chinese admiral led expeditions 100
times the size of Columbus’s voyage as
he extensively explored the Indian Ocean
for the Ming Dynasty which mysteriously
ended the expeditions which were seen as
a threat to Confucian values.
This Buddhism monk ironically led the
military forces that expelled Mongol rule
from China and he became the first
emperor of the Ming dynasty cleansing
China of all Mongol influences and
reinstating traditional Confucian values.
This Egyptian pharaoh championed Aten
as the one and only god, leading to one of
the first cases of monotheistic worship in
world history, though it did not survive
since priests restored the old ways after
his death to avoid the wrath of the gods.
One of the most successful imperialists of
all times, he dominated the diamond
industry and worked for British interests
in Africa most notably pushing for a belt
of British control across the continent to
enable for the construction of a Cape-toCairo railroad.
This king of Kongo furthered Portuguese
success during the early years of the age
of exploration when his conversion to
Christianity allowed for closer
diplomatic, economic, and religious ties
though a rise in the slave trade would
eventually lead to the destruction of his
kingdom.
His military conquests strengthened the
Ottoman Empire and marked the end of
the Byzantine Empire when he captured
the strategic city of Constantinople which
has been known as Istanbul ever since.
This Turkish nomadic conqueror built an
empire across Central Asia after the fall
of the Mongols leaving a Muslim Turkish
legacy that was reflected in the three
Muslim empires that replaced it—the
Mughal, Ottoman, and Safavid empires.
After struggling for decades in China’s
civil war, he led the Communists to
victory over the Nationalists and while
initially popular for his programs of land
redistribution, he led his country on the
economically disastrous Great Leap
Forward and the politically disastrous
Cultural Revolution.
At a time of unprecedented cross-cultural
exchange along the Silk Roads, this man
from Mesopotamia responded to what he
saw as a need for a prophet for all of
humanity by creating a new religion to
connect all peoples by drawing from
Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and
Christianity.
He was perhaps the wealthiest king in the
world when he ruled the West African
kingdom of Mali at its height, embracing
Islam in his empire and showering gifts
along the route as he made the hajj to
Mecca with an entourage of thousands.
This ruler of the British empire at its
height of global imperial control led
Great Britain for more than sixty years
during the Berlin conference and the peak
of British territorial control in both India
and Africa.
Fighting for “land and liberty,” this
mestizo peasant became one of the
leaders of the Mexican Revolution which
ultimately failed though it pushed for the
drafting of a new Constitution that
implemented land redistribution,
universal suffrage, and an extension of
freedoms.
His leadership was key to the rise of the
Mughal Empire in India due to both is
brutal military success and his religious
toleration toward Hindus, which even
went as far as his encouragement of a
syncretic religion known as the “divine
faith.”
As leader of Egypt, he took an
internationalist position in which he
refused to take sides in the Cold War
which he perceived as the source of new
forms of imperialism and generated a
strong pan-Arab nationalism through his
anti-Israel stance and his strong actions
that led to the seizure of the Suez Canal
A champion of U.S. imperialism, as
president he exerted the right to intercede
in Latin American affairs to protect U.S.
interests including by supporting a
Panamanian revolt against Colombia to
guarantee U.S. control of the future
Panama Canal.
This Arabian merchant founded a new
religion based on Judeo-Christian
principles and the belief in one god,
Allah, who would bring a final judgment
on the world rewarding all the righteous,
leading to his exile from Mecca to
Medina from where he gathered a
following for his triumphant return.
He is the most famous scholastic
theologian trying to reconcile the
teaching of Christianity with the
scientific and philosophical ideas of
Aristotle, which had recently been
reintroduced to western Europe through
contacts with Byzantines and Muslims.
Pushing the barriers of revolutionary
thought, she wrote one of the earliest
assertions of the equality of women in the
Declaration of the Rights of Woman and
the Female Citizen for which she went to
the guillotine.
He unified the Mongols replacing tribal
loyalty with a centralized rule that spread
over the largest land empire the world has
ever known though it split among his
sons and grandsons into four khanates
after his death.
Appointed prime minister of Prussia, his
rhetoric of “blood and iron” led to a rise
in German nationalism and the
establishment of the Second Reich, an
important step in the unification of
Germany.
He captained the first European sea
voyage to reach India where he
reportedly said he had come for
“Christians and spices” and where
Portugal soon established a trading post
giving them a head start in the Indian
Ocean trade.
As Pope, he launched the crusades
calling on Christian warriors to seize the
holy land which had fallen to the
Muslims and promising salvation to all
those who died for cause.
As the Russian minister of finance, he
was the primary force behind Russia’s
industrialization typified by a huge
railway construction program that
stimulated other areas of the economy.
After his strong objections to the sale of
indulgences and other corruption within
the Catholic Church, he was able to begin
the Protestant Reformation with the help
of the recent introduction of the
Gutenberg printing press to Europe.
His actions as king of France led the third
estate to secede from the government and
establish the National Assembly which
led the French Revolution and soon
created the Convention, a legislative
body that ordered him executed.
This French monarch who epitomized the
absolutism of Europe that would lead to
an era of political revolutions was known
as the “sun king” and built the immense
palace at Versailles from where he ruled
the French state.
The first prime minister of the newly
independent Congo liberated from
Belgian colonialism, he was killed with
the help of the CIA due to his Marxist
leanings, a sign of the reach of the Cold
War in the post-colonial world.
The most important socialist of all time,
he argued that the social and economic
problems plaguing Europe’s working
class were the result of capitalism and the
partnership between the wealthy
industrial class and political states,
something that would inevitably end in a
worker revolution.
Perhaps more responsible than any other
individual for the changes in China since
the death of Mao Zedong, he opened up
China to foreign and capitalist influences,
though his liberalization policies did not
extend to political freedoms as seen in
the bloody response to the prodemocracy protests in Tiananmen Square.
He emerged as the leader of the Soviet
Union out of the power struggle that
followed the death of Vladimir Lenin and
pushed his nation through a series of Five
Year Plans to industrialize and
imprisoned or executed many
communists within the government who
dared to confront his power.
Following independence from the British,
he guided India to democracy as its first
prime minister and at the Bandung
Conference in Indonesia, strongly
promoted the strategy of nonalignment
which encouraged post-colonial nations
to chart their own course free of the Cold
War influences of the U.S. and U.S.S.R.
More than any other individual, he was
responsible for the breakup of the Soviet
Union after taking steps toward economic
reform and privatization through his
perestroika program and toward political
freedoms through his glasnost program.
After nonviolently leading Ghana to be
the first African colony to win
independence and becoming its first
prime minister, he became a symbol of
black pride and a champion of panAfrican unity during the Cold War.
As president of the United States during
and after World War I, he called for the
creation of the League of Nations and for
self-determination for all peoples in his
Fourteen Points, an idealistic vision for
the post-war world.
He led Iran on a fundamentalist path after
the successful Islamic Revolution which
expelled Westerners from the country,
sent the CIA-imposed shah fleeing into
exile, and led to an extended hostage
crisis when Muslim students seized the
U.S. embassy in Tehran.
A one-time supporter of the French
Revolution, he overthrew the Directory
and installed himself as the emperor of
France creating stability and order,
healing the wounded relationship with
the Church, and undertaking a number of
military campaigns to extend his
authority across Europe.
This popular Vietnamese nationalist led
the war for independence against the
French to become the communist leader
of North Vietnam, and later the chief
enemy of the United States in the region
as he tried to reunited the country under
his leadership.
As head of the Muslim League, he played
a major role in the struggle for Indian
independence from the British, though
his fear of the Hindu domination over the
Muslim minority led him to break with
Gandhi and fight for the creation of a
separate Pakistan as a Muslim nation.
Disenchanted with socialism, he
embraced a new political ideology of
extreme militarism and nationalism in
Italy that would evolve into the first
movment of the political ideology known
as fascism, seizing power as he gained
popularity and later allying with Hitler.
Known as the “Father of the Turks,” he
modernized and secularized the new
nation the Republic of Turkey after the
final dissolution of the Ottoman Empire
saving his people from much of the postwar chaos experienced throughout
Europe after World War I.
This former slave proved a shrewd
military leader and politician, leading the
French Caribbean colony of SaintDomingue to independence though he
died in a French prison shortly before
Haiti declared itself the second
independent republic in the Western
Hemisphere.