The Nanking Massacre or Nanjing Massacre, also known as the Rape of Nanking, was a mass murder, and war rape that occurred during the six-week period following the Japanese capture of the city of Nanjing (Nanking), the former capital of the Republic of China, on December 13, 1937 during the Second Sino-Japanese War. During this period hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians and disarmed soldiers were murdered by soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army. Widespread rape and looting also occurred. Historians and witnesses have estimated that 250,000 to 300,000 people were killed. Several of the key perpetrators of the atrocities, at the time labelled as war crimes, were later tried and found guilty at the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal, and were subsequently executed. Another key perpetrator, Prince Asaka, a member of the Imperial Family, escaped prosecution by having earlier been granted immunity by the Allies.

The event remains a contentious political issue, as various aspects of it have been disputed by some historical revisionists and Japanese nationalists, who have claimed that the massacre has been either exaggerated or wholly fabricated for propaganda purposes. As a result of the nationalist efforts to deny or rationalize the war crimes, the controversy surrounding the massacre remains a stumbling block in Sino-Japanese relations, as well as Japanese relations with other Asia-Pacific nations such as South Korea and the Philippines.

Iris Shun-Ru Chang (simplified Chinese: 张纯如; traditional Chinese: 張純如; pinyin: Zhāng Chúnrú; March 28, 1968 – November 9, 2004) was an American historian and journalist. She is best known for her best-selling 1997 account of the Nanking Massacre, The Rape of Nanking. She committed suicide on November 9, 2004. Chang is the subject of the 2007 biography, Finding Iris Chang, and the 2007 documentary film Iris Chang: The Rape of Nanking.

The daughter of two university professors who emigrated from China, Chang was born in Princeton, New Jersey and raised in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, where she attended University Laboratory High School of Urbana, Illinois and graduated in 1985. She earned a bachelor's degree in journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1989, during which time she also worked as a New York Times stringer from Urbana-Champaign, and wrote six front-page articles over the course of one year. After brief stints at the Associated Press and the Chicago Tribune she pursued a master's degree in Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. She then embarked on her career as an author, and lectured and wrote magazine articles. She married Bretton Lee Douglas, whom she had met in college, and had one son, Christopher, who was 2 years old at the time of her death. She lived in San Jose, California in the final years of her life.

English Canada is a term used to describe one of the following:

According to the 2006 Census of Canada, the population of English Canada is between 17,882,775 and 24,423,375 using the first meaning (depending on how non-official native speakers are attributed); 23,805,130 using the second; and a ballpark six million using the third. (A precise number of Canadians of English origin is difficult to estimate for several reasons. It is possibly much higher than the nearly 6 million who reported as much since another 6.7 million people reported their sole ethnicity as "Canadian", without further specification. Presumably, this would include an admixture of multiple ethnicities long present in Canada such as French, Irish, English, and Scottish. On the other hand, historically, there have also been numerous Canadians who have hidden their true ancestry for different political reasons to join the dominant English group; e.g. Overt discrimination against Irish or other immigrants, such as the reported German origin population, which dropped by nearly half after the First World War with a commensurate rise in reports of English origins.)