dairaquinterosblog

. The end of empire:   "Nelson Mandela, south Africas nationalist leader, first uttered these words in 1964 at his trial for treason, sabotage, and conspiracy to overthrow the apartheid government of his country. convicted of those charges, he spent the next twenty- seven years in prison, some times working at hard labor in a stone quarry. often the floor was his bed and a bucket was his toilet. for many years, he was allowed one visitor a year for thirty minutes and permitted to write and receive one letter every six months. when he was finally realized from prison in 1990 under growing domestic and international pressure, he concluded his first speech as a free person with the words originally spoken at his trial. four years later, in 1994, South Africa held its first election in which black and whites alike were able to vote. the outcome of that election made Mandela the county first black African come of that election made Mandela the country first black Africa an president, a...

"An upstanding soviet citizen entered a medical clinic one day and asked to see an ear and eye doctor. asked about his problem the man replied well I keep hearing one thing and seeing another. a frenchman an Englishman and a soviet Russian are admiring a panting of Adam and eve in the garden of eden. the frenchman sys they must be French there naked and. they're eating fruit. the Englishman says clearly there English observe how politely the woman is offering fruit to the man. the Russian replies, no they are Russian communists of course. they have no house, nothing to wear little to eat and they think they are in paradise. these are two of an endless array of jokes that had long circulated in the Soviet Union as a means of expression in private what could not be said in public". "communism was a phenomenon of enormous significance in the world of the twentieth century. communist regimes came to power almost every where in the tumultuous wake of war, revoultion or ...

"dividing up time into coherent segments periods, eras, ages is the way historians mark amor changes in the lives of individuals, local communities, social groups, nations, and civilizations and also in the larger story of human kind as a whole. because all such divisions are artificial, imposed by scholars in a continuously flowing stream of events, they are endlessly controversial and never more so than in the case of the twentieth century. to many historians that century and a new era in the human journey began in 1914 with the out break of the world war one. that terrible conflict, after all represented a fratricidal civil war within western civilization, triggered the Russian revolution and the beginning of work communism, and stimulated many in the colonial world to work for their own independence. and the way it ended set the stage for an even more terrible struggle in world war 2. but does the century since 1914 represent a separate phase of world history, granting it that...

strayer chapter 18 ."In mid 1967, I ( robes strayer) was on summer break from a teaching assignment with the peace corps in Ethiopia and was traveling with some friends in neighboring Kenya, just four years after that country had gained its independence from British colonial rule. the bus we were riding on broke down, and I found myself hitchhiking across kenya, heading for Uganda. soon I was picked up by a friendly Englishman, one of Kenyas famous Rift Valley, and we were approached by a group of boys selling baskets and other tourist items. they spoke to us in good English, but my British companion replied to them in Swahili. he lated explained that europeans generally did not speak English with the natives. I was puzzled, but reluctant to inquire further". "For many millions of africans, asians, and Pacific Islanders, colonial rule by the British, French, germans, Italians, Belgians, Portuguese, Russians, or Americans was the major new element in their historical ...

 February 26, strayer chapter 17 . "The global context for this epochal economic transformation lies in a very substantial increase in human numbers from about 375 million people in 1400 to about 1 billion in the early nineteenth century. accompanying this growth in population was an emerging energy crisis, most pronounced in Western Europe, china and Japan as wood and charcoal the major industrial fuels, became scarcer and their prices rose. in short global energy demands began to push against the existing local and regional ecological limits. in broad terms, the industrial revolution marks a human response to that dilemma as nonrenewable fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas replaced the endlessly renewable energy sources of wind water wood and the muscle power of people and animals. It was a breakthrough of unprecedented proportions that made available for human use, at least temporarily, immensely greater quantities  of enerfy. sustaining the industrial revoluti...

."china was among  the countries that confronted an aggressive and industrializing west while maintaining its formal independence unlike the colonized areas discussed in chapter 18. so too did Japan, the Ottoman Empire, Persia(not siren), Ethiopia and siam( new Thailand). Latin America also falls in this category. these states avoided outright incorporation into European colonial empires, retaining some ability to resist European aggression and to reform or transform their own societies. but they shared with their colonized counterparts the need to deal with four dimensions of the European moment in the world  history.first, they faced the immense military might and  political ambitions of rival European states. sec migration that arose from an industrializing and capitalist Europe to generate a new world economy. Third, they were touched by various  aspects of traditional European culture, as some  among them learned the French, English, or German language conv...