Portal:Modern history
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The Modern History Portal
The term modern period or modern era (sometimes also called modern history or modern times) is the period of history that succeeds the Middle Ages (which ended approximately 1500 AD). This terminology is a historical periodization that is applied primarily to European and Western history.
The modern era can be further divided as follows:
- The early modern period lasted from c. AD 1500 to 1800 and resulted in wide-ranging intellectual, political and economic change. It brought with it the Age of Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and an Age of Revolutions, beginning with those in America and France and later spreading in other countries, partly as a result of upheavals of the Napoleonic Wars.
- The late modern period began around 1800 with the end of the political revolutions in the late 18th century and involved the transition from a world dominated by imperial and colonial powers into one of nations and nationhood following the two great world wars, World War I and World War II, and the Cold War. The period following the end of World War II in 1945 and continuing to the present is called contemporary history, which is alternatively considered either a subperiod of the late modern period or a separate period beginning after the late modern period.
The modern period has been a period of significant development in the fields of science, politics, warfare, and technology. It has also been an age of discovery and globalization. During this time, the European powers and later their colonies, began a political, economic, and cultural colonization of the rest of the world. (Full article...)
Selected articles -
Ireland was part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 1801 to 1922. For almost all of this period, the island was governed by the UK Parliament in London through its Dublin Castle administration in Ireland. Ireland underwent considerable difficulties in the 19th century, especially the Great Famine of the 1840s which started a population decline that continued for almost a century. The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw a vigorous campaign for Irish Home Rule. While legislation enabling Irish Home Rule was eventually passed, militant and armed opposition from Irish unionists, particularly in Ulster, opposed it. Proclamation was shelved for the duration following the outbreak of World War I. By 1918, however, moderate Irish nationalism had been eclipsed by militant republican separatism. In 1919, war broke out between republican separatists and British Government forces. Subsequent negotiations between Sinn Féin, the major Irish party, and the UK government led to the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which resulted in five-sixths of Ireland seceding from the United Kingdom. (Full article...)
The Italian colonization of Libya began in 1911 and it lasted until 1943. The country, which was previously an Ottoman possession, was occupied by Italy in 1911 after the Italo-Turkish War, which resulted in the establishment of two colonies: Italian Tripolitania and Italian Cyrenaica. In 1934, the two colonies were merged into one colony which was named the colony of Italian Libya. In 1937, this colony was divided into four provinces, and in 1939, the coastal provinces became a part of metropolitan Italy. The colonization lasted until Libya's occupation by Allied forces in 1943, but it was not until the 1947 Paris Peace Treaty that Italy officially renounced all of its claims to Libya's territory. (Full article...)
The Italian colonial empire (Italian: Impero coloniale italiano), whose East African territories were known between 1936 and 1941 as The Empire (L'Impero), began in Africa in the 19th century and comprised the colonies, protectorates, concessions and dependencies of the Kingdom of Italy. In Africa, the colonial empire included the territories of present-day Libya, Eritrea, Somalia and Ethiopia (the last three being officially named "Africa Orientale Italiana", AOI); outside Africa, Italy possessed the Dodecanese Islands (following the Italo-Turkish War), Albania (a protectorate from 1917 to 1920 and from 1939, when it was invaded and forced into a personal union with Italy, to 1943), and had a concession in China.
The Fascist government that came to power with dictator Benito Mussolini after 1922 sought to increase the size of the Italian empire and to satisfy the claims of Italian irredentists. Systematic "demographic colonization" was encouraged by the government, and by 1939, Italian settlers numbered 120,000—150,000 in Italian Libya and 165,000 in Italian East Africa.
During World War II, Italy allied with Germany in 1940 and occupied British Somaliland, western Egypt, much of Yugoslavia, Tunisia, parts of south-western France and most of Greece; however, it then lost those conquests and its African colonies to the invading allied forces by 1943. In 1947, Italy officially relinquished claims on its former colonies. Only the territory of Somalia was eventually turned into a UN trust territory under Italian administration until 1960. Following the independence of Somalia in 1960, Italy's 65-year period of imperialism concluded. (Full article...)
The 19th (nineteenth) century began on 1 January 1801 (MDCCCI), and ended on 31 December 1900 (MCM). The 19th century was the ninth century of the 2nd millennium.
The 19th century was characterized by vast social upheaval. Slavery was abolished in much of Europe and the Americas. The First Industrial Revolution, though it began in the late 18th century, expanding beyond its British homeland for the first time during this century, particularly remaking the economies and societies of the Low Countries, the Rhineland, Northern Italy, and the Northeastern United States. A few decades later, the Second Industrial Revolution led to ever more massive urbanization and much higher levels of productivity, profit, and prosperity, a pattern that continued into the 20th century.
The Islamic gunpowder empires fell into decline and European imperialism brought much of South Asia, Southeast Asia, and almost all of Africa under colonial rule. It was also marked by the collapse of the large Spanish and Mughal Empires. This paved the way for the growing influence of the British, French, German, Russian, Italian, and Japanese Empires along with the United States. The British boasted unchallenged global dominance after 1815. (Full article...)- The history of modern Greece covers the history of Greece from the recognition by the Great Powers — Britain, France and Russia — of its independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1828 to the present day. (Full article...)
Grand Royal Coat of Arms of France
The House of Bourbon (English: /ˈbʊərbən/, also UK: /ˈbɔːrbɒn/; French: [buʁbɔ̃]) is a European dynasty of French origin, a branch of the Capetian dynasty, the royal House of France. Bourbon kings first ruled France and Navarre in the 16th century. By the 18th century, members of the Spanish Bourbon dynasty held thrones in Spain, Naples, Sicily, and Parma. Spain and Luxembourg have monarchs of the House of Bourbon.
The royal Bourbons originated in 1272, when Robert, the youngest son of King Louis IX of France, married the heiress of the lordship of Bourbon. The house continued for three centuries as a cadet branch, serving as nobles under the direct Capetian and Valois kings.
The senior line of the House of Bourbon became extinct in the male line in 1527 with the death of Duke Charles III of Bourbon. This made the junior Bourbon-Vendôme branch the genealogically senior branch of the House of Bourbon. In 1589, at the death of Henry III of France, the House of Valois became extinct in the male line. Under the Salic law, the head of the house of Bourbon, as the senior representative of the senior-surviving branch of the Capetian dynasty, became King of France as Henry IV. Bourbon monarchs then united to France the part of the kingdom of Navarre north of the Pyrenees, which Henry's father had acquired by marriage in 1555, ruling both until the 1792 overthrow of the monarchy during the French Revolution. Restored briefly in 1814 and definitively in 1815 after the fall of the First French Empire, the senior line of the Bourbons was finally overthrown in the July Revolution of 1830. A cadet Bourbon branch, the House of Orléans, then ruled for 18 years (1830–1848), until it too was overthrown. (Full article...)- The war on terror, officially the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), is a global counterterrorism military campaign initiated by the United States following the September 11 attacks and is also the most recent global conflict spanning multiple wars. The main targets of the campaign were militant Islamist and Salafi jihadist armed organisations such as Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and their international affiliates, which were waging military insurgencies to overthrow governments of various Muslim-majority countries. Other major targets included the Ba'athist regime in Iraq, which was toppled during an invasion in 2003, and various militant factions that fought during the ensuing Iraqi insurgency. The "war on terror" was officially declared over in May 2010 and again in May 2013. Other American military campaigns during the 2010s have also been considered part of the "war on terror" by individuals and the media. With the major wars over and only low-level fighting in some places, the end of the war in Afghanistan in August 2021 marks for most people the end of the war on terror, or at least its main phase. The United States Military ceased awarding the National Defense Service Medal for the Global War on Terror on December 31, 2022. Some consider the campaign to be ongoing.
The "war on terror" uses war as a metaphor to describe a variety of actions which fall outside the traditional definition of war. 43rd President of the United States George W. Bush first used the term "war on terrorism" on 16 September 2001, and then "war on terror" a few days later in a formal speech to Congress. Bush indicated the enemy of the war on terror as "a radical network of terrorists and every government that supports them." The initial conflict was aimed at al-Qaeda, with the main theater in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a region that would later be referred to as "AfPak".
The term "war on terror" was immediately criticized by individuals including Richard Myers, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and eventually more nuanced terms came to be used by the Bush administration to define the campaign. While "war on terror" was never used as a formal designation of U.S. operations, a Global War on Terrorism Service Medal was issued by the U.S. Armed Forces. (Full article...) - According to most scholars the history of modern Egypt dates from the start of Muhammad Ali's rule in 1805 and his launching of Egypt's modernization project that involved building a new army and suggesting a new map for the country, though the definition of Egypt's modern history has varied in accordance with different definitions of modernity. Some scholars date it as far back as 1516 with the Ottomans' defeat of the Mamlūks in 1516–17.
Muhammad Ali's dynasty became practically independent from Ottoman rule, following his military campaigns against the Empire and his ability to enlist large-scale armies, allowing him to control both Egypt and parts of North Africa and the Middle East. In 1882, the Khedivate of Egypt became part of the British sphere of influence in the region, a situation that conflicted with its position as an autonomous vassal state of the Ottoman Empire.
The country became a British protectorate in 1915 and achieved full independence in 1922, becoming a kingdom under the rule of Muhammad Ali's dynasty, which lasted until 1952.
Gamal Abdel Nasser ended monarchical rule and established a republic in Egypt, known as the Republic of Egypt, following the 1952 Egyptian revolution. Egypt was ruled autocratically by three presidents over the following six decades: by Nasser from 1954 until his death in 1970, by Anwar Sadat from 1971 until his assassination in 1981, and by Hosni Mubarak from 1981 until his resignation in the face of the 2011 Egyptian revolution. (Full article...) - * Louis XII, the Father of the People 1498–1515, great-grandson of Charles V of France (Full article...)
The New-York Tribune printed this map on 9 November 1919, of the armed conflicts in Central and Eastern Europe in 1919, one year after World War I had ended:
In the history of the 20th century, the interwar period (or interbellum) lasted from 11 November 1918 to 1 September 1939 (20 years, 9 months, 21 days), the end of the First World War to the beginning of the Second World War. The interwar period was relatively short, yet featured many significant social, political, and economic changes throughout the world. Petroleum-based energy production and associated mechanisation led to the prosperous Roaring Twenties, a time of both social mobility and economic mobility for the middle class. Automobiles, electric lighting, radio, and more became common among populations in the developed world. The indulgences of the era subsequently were followed by the Great Depression, an unprecedented worldwide economic downturn that severely damaged many of the world's largest economies.
Politically, the era coincided with the rise of communism, starting in Russia with the October Revolution and Russian Civil War, at the end of World War I, and ended with the rise of fascism, particularly in Germany and in Italy. China was in the midst of half-a-century of instability and the Chinese Civil War between the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party. The empires of Britain, France and others faced challenges as imperialism was increasingly viewed negatively in Europe, and independence movements emerged in many colonies; for example most of Ireland became independent after much fighting.
The Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and German Empires were dismantled, with the Ottoman territories and German colonies redistributed among the Allies, chiefly Britain and France. The western parts of the Russian Empire, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland became independent nations in their own right, and Bessarabia (now Moldova and parts of Ukraine) chose to reunify with Romania. (Full article...)- In its modern history, Tunisia is a sovereign republic, officially called the Republic of Tunisia. Tunisia has over ten million citizens, almost all of Arab-Berber descent. The Mediterranean Sea is to the north and east, Libya to the southeast, and Algeria to the west. Tunis is the capital and the largest city (over 800,000); it is located near the ancient site of the city of Carthage.
Its first modern leader, President Habib Bourguiba brought to the office hard-won political experience, after many decades of service in the leadership of the independence movement. As the major figure of the Neo-Destour Party, he was instrumental in obtaining full independence for Tunisia in 1956. He dominated the government until his removal in 1987. During his years in office, his accomplishments included: a law reform, economic policies which detoured briefly in a socialist direction, a moderate but steady improvement in standard of living, and a foreign policy which retained an independent approach while maintaining trade and economic connections to the west.
Ben Ali became President of the Republic in 1987, and kept power until he was forced to leave in 2011. His economic policies emphasized a market orientation. His attempt at reapproachment with Islamist groups did not meet expectations. The ruling party was reorganized. Under his leadership Tunisia's economy continued to perform at a pace which yielded a moderate but overall steady rate of growth. (Full article...)
The Spanish Republic (Spanish: República Española), commonly known as the Second Spanish Republic (Spanish: Segunda República Española), was the form of government in Spain from 1931 to 1939. The Republic was proclaimed on 14 April 1931, after the deposition of King Alfonso XIII, and was dissolved on 1 April 1939 after surrendering in the Spanish Civil War to the Nationalists led by General Francisco Franco.
After the proclamation of the Republic, a provisional government was established until December 1931, at which time the 1931 Constitution was approved. During this time and the subsequent two years of constitutional government, known as the Reformist Biennium, Manuel Azaña's executive initiated numerous reforms to what in their view would modernize the country. In 1932 religious orders were forbidden control of schools, while the government began a large scale school-building project. A moderate agrarian reform was carried out. Home rule was granted to Catalonia, with a local parliament and a president of its own.
Soon, Azaña lost parliamentary support and President Alcalá-Zamora forced his resignation in September 1933. The subsequent 1933 election was won by the Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right (CEDA). However the President declined to invite its leader, Gil Robles, to form a government, fearing CEDA's monarchist sympathies. Instead, he invited the Radical Republican Party's Alejandro Lerroux to do so. CEDA was denied cabinet positions for nearly a year. In October 1934, CEDA was finally successful in forcing the acceptance of three ministries. The Socialists triggered an insurrection that they had been preparing for nine months. A general strike was called by the Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT) and the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) in the name of the Alianza Obrera. The rebellion developed into a bloody revolutionary uprising, aiming to overthrow the republican government. Armed revolutionaries managed to take the whole province of Asturias, killing policemen, clerics, and businessmen and destroying religious buildings and part of the University of Oviedo. In the occupied areas, the rebels officially declared a proletarian revolution and abolished regular money. The rebellion was crushed by the Spanish Navy and the Spanish Republican Army, the latter using mainly Moorish colonial troops from Spanish Morocco. (Full article...)- In many periodizations of human history, the late modern period followed the early modern period. It began approximately around the year 1800 and depending on the author either ended with the beginning of contemporary history after World War II, or includes that period up to the present day. Notable historical events in the late 18th century that marked the transition from the early modern period to the late modern period include the American Revolution (1765–1791), the French Revolution (1789–1799), and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution around 1760. It took all of human history up to 1804 for the world's population to reach 1 billion; the next billion came just over a century later, in 1927. (Full article...)
An early nuclear power plant that used atomic energy to generate electricity
The Atomic Age, also known as the Atomic Era, is the period of history following the detonation of the first nuclear weapon, The Gadget at the Trinity test in New Mexico, on 16 July 1945, during World War II. Although nuclear chain reactions had been hypothesized in 1933 and the first artificial self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction (Chicago Pile-1) had taken place in December 1942, the Trinity test and the ensuing bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended World War II represented the first large-scale use of nuclear technology and ushered in profound changes in sociopolitical thinking and the course of technological development.
While atomic power was promoted for a time as the epitome of progress and modernity, entering into the nuclear power era also entailed frightful implications of nuclear warfare, the Cold War, mutual assured destruction, nuclear proliferation, the risk of nuclear disaster (potentially as extreme as anthropogenic global nuclear winter), as well as beneficial civilian applications in nuclear medicine. It is no easy matter to fully segregate peaceful uses of nuclear technology from military or terrorist uses (such as the fabrication of dirty bombs from radioactive waste), which complicated the development of a global nuclear-power export industry right from the outset.
In 1973, concerning a flourishing nuclear power industry, the United States Atomic Energy Commission predicted that, by the turn of the 21st century, one thousand reactors would be producing electricity for homes and businesses across the U.S. However, the "nuclear dream" fell far short of what was promised because nuclear technology produced a range of social problems, from the nuclear arms race to nuclear meltdowns, and the unresolved difficulties of bomb plant cleanup and civilian plant waste disposal and decommissioning. Since 1973, reactor orders declined sharply as electricity demand fell and construction costs rose. Many orders and partially completed plants were cancelled. (Full article...)- Ireland during the period of 1536–1691 saw the first full conquest of the island by England and its colonization with mostly Protestant settlers from Great Britain. This would eventually establish two central themes in future Irish history: subordination of the country to London-based governments and sectarian animosity between Catholics and Protestants. The period saw Irish society outside of the Pale transform from a locally driven, intertribal, clan-based Gaelic structure to a centralised, monarchical, state-governed society, similar to those found elsewhere in Europe. The period is bounded by the dates 1536, when King Henry VIII deposed the FitzGerald dynasty as Lords Deputies of Ireland (the new Kingdom of Ireland was declared by Henry VIII in 1541), and 1691, when the Catholic Jacobites surrendered at Limerick, thus confirming Protestant dominance in Ireland. This is sometimes called the early modern period.
The English Reformation, by which Henry VIII broke with Papal authority in 1536, was to change Ireland totally. While Henry VIII broke English Catholicism from Rome, his son Edward VI of England moved further, breaking with Papal doctrine completely. While the English, the Welsh and, later, the Scots accepted Protestantism, the Irish remained Catholic. Queen Mary I then reverted the state to Catholicism in 1553–58, and Queen Elizabeth I broke again with Rome in 1559. These confusing changes determined their relationship with the British state for the next four hundred years, as the Reformation coincided with a determined effort on behalf of the English state to re-conquer and colonise Ireland thereafter. The religious schism meant that the native Irish and the (Roman Catholic) Old English were to be excluded from power in the new settlement unless they converted to Protestantism. (Full article...)
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The following are images from various modern history-related articles on Wikipedia.
Map of territorial changes in Europe after World War I (as of 1923). (from 20th century)
Photo of American astronaut Buzz Aldrin during the first moonwalk in 1969, taken by Neil Armstrong. The relatively young aerospace engineering industries rapidly grew in the 66 years after the Wright brothers' first flight. (from 20th century)
A stamp commemorating Alexander Fleming. His discovery of penicillin changed the world of medicine by introducing the age of antibiotics. (from 20th century)
Martin Luther King Jr., an African American civil rights leader (Washington, August 1963) (from 20th century)
Ralph Baer's Magnavox Odyssey, the first video game console, released in 1972. (from 20th century)
Decolonization of the British Empire in Africa. (from Contemporary history)
The Empire State Building is an iconic building of the 1930s. (from 20th century)
The Blue Marble, Earth as seen from Apollo 17 in December 1972. The photograph was taken by LMP Harrison Schmitt. The second half of the 20th century saw humanity's first space exploration. (from 20th century)
A visualization of the various routes through a portion of the Internet. Partial map of the Internet based in 2005. (from Contemporary history)
Anachronous world map showing member states of the League of Nations, the first global international body of governance created to prevent war after World War I, during its 26-year interwar period history. (from 20th century)
The division of Europe during the Cold War (from Contemporary history)
Elvis Presley in 1956, a leading figure of rock & roll and rockabilly. (from 20th century)
The mushroom cloud of the detonation of Little Boy, the first nuclear attack in history, on 6 August 1945 over Hiroshima, igniting the nuclear age with the international security dominating thread of mutual assured destruction in the latter half of the 20th century. (from 20th century)
I and the Village, 1911, by Marc Chagall, a modern painter. (from 20th century)
The international community grew in the second half of the century significantly due to a new wave of decolonization, particularly in Africa. Most of the newly independent states, were grouped together with many other so called developing countries. Developing countries gained attention, particularly due to rapid population growth, leading to a record world population of nearly 7 billion people by the end of the century. (from 20th century)
The World Trade Center on fire and the Statue of Liberty. (from Contemporary history)
Map of the British Empire (as of 1910). At its height, it was the largest empire in history. (from 20th century)
Countries by real GDP growth rate in 2014. (Countries in brown were in recession.) (from Contemporary history)
Hong Kong, under British administration from 1842 to 1997, is one of the original Four Asian Tigers. (from 20th century)
Wheat yields greatly increased from the Green Revolution in the world's least developed countries. (from 20th century)
Ukraine, early days of the 1941 Nazi invasion. The Soviet Union lost around 27 million people between 1941 and 1945, almost half of all World War II deaths. (from 20th century)
First flight of the Wright brothers' Wright Flyer on December 17, 1903, in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina; Orville piloting with Wilbur running at wingtip. (from 20th century)
The pioneer of computer science, Alan Turing (from 20th century)
Oil field in California, 1938.
The first modern oil well was drilled in 1848 by Russian engineer F.N. Semyonov, on the Apsheron Peninsula north-east of Baku. (from 20th century)
Charlie Chaplin in his 1921 film The Kid, with Jackie Coogan. (from 20th century)
U.S. Army troops in Kunar Province (from Contemporary history)
World powers and empires in 1914, just before the First World War.(from 20th century)
(The Austro-Hungarian flag should be shown instead of the Austrian Empire's one)
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