World History MCQs

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Battle of Waterloo was fought on 18 June 1815, near Waterloo in Belgium, part of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands at the time. A French army under the command of Napoleon Bonaparte was defeated by two of the armies of the Seventh Coalition: A British-led coalition consisting of units from the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Hanover, Brunswick, and Nassau, under the command of the Duke of Wellington; and a Prussian army under the command of Field Marshal von Blucher. This battle marked the final defeat of Napoleon and the end of the Napoleonic Wars. The defeat at Waterloo ended Napoleon’s rule as Emperor of France and ended his First French Empire.

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Rousseau is regarded as the source of inspiration of the great French Revolution that took place in 1789 as his ideas not only inspired poets and men of letters but included the revolutionary upsurge that shook the French polity to its foundation.

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Germany passed the “Enabling Act of 1933” that gave formal legal sanction to dictatorship. The Enabling Act of 1933, was a law that gave the German Cabinet—in effect, the Chancellor—the power to enact laws without the involvement of the Reichstag and to override fundamental aspects of the Weimar Constitution. The Enabling Act gave Hitler plenary powers and followed on the heels of the Reichstag Fire Decree, which had abolished most civil liberties and transferred state powers to the Reich government. The combined effect of the two laws was to transform Hitler’s government into a legal dictatorship.

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Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the mechanical movable type printing press, is a German printer. Johannes Gutenberg (1400–1468) was a German goldsmith, inventor, printer, and publisher who introduced printing to Europe with the introduction of the mechanical movable type printing press. His work started the Printing Revolution and is regarded as a milestone of the second millennium, ushering in the modern period of human history. It played a key role in the development of the Renaissance, Reformation, Age of Enlightenment, and Scientific Revolution, as well as laying the material basis for the modern knowledge-based economy and the spread of learning to the masses.

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Kwame Nkrumah was a Ghanaian politician and revolutionary. He was the first Prime Minister and President of Ghana, having led the Gold Coast to independence from Britain in 1957. An influential advocate of Pan-Africanism, Nkrumah was a founding member of the Organization of African Unity and winner of the Lenin Peace Prize from the Soviet Union in 1962.

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The Battle of Sakarya, also known as the Battle of the Sangarios, was an important engagement in the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922), the western front of the Turkish War of Independence. The battle went on for 21 days from August 23 to September 13, 1921, close to the banks of the Sakarya River, which is today in a district of the Ankara Province. It is also known as the Officers’ Battle in Turkey because of the unusually high casualty rate (70–80%) among the officers. The Battle of Sakarya is considered as the turning point of the Turkish War of Independence. This battle leads to the Turkish victory.

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Jean-Pierre Boyer was one of the leaders of the Haitian Revolution and President of Haiti from 1818 to 1843. He reunited the north and south of the country into the Republic of Haiti in 1820 and also annexed the newly independent Spanish Haiti (Santo Domingo), which brought all of Hispaniola under one Haitian government by 1822. Boyer managed to rule for the longest period of time of any of the revolutionary leaders of his generation.

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Hungary’s variant of communism policy followed was “Goulash Communism”. Goulash Communism, also commonly called Kadarism or the Hungarian Thaw, refers to the variety of communism in Hungary following the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Janos Kadar and the Hungarian People’s Republic imposed policies with the goal to create high-quality living standards for the people of Hungary coupled with economic reforms. These reforms fostered a sense of well-being and relative cultural freedom in Hungary with the reputation of being “the happiest barracks” of the Eastern Bloc during the 1960s to the 1970s. With elements of regulated market economics as well as an improved human rights record, it represented a quiet reform and deviation from the Stalinist principles applied to Hungary in the previous decade.

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Indonesia was the location of the event “30 September Movement”. The Thirtieth of September Movement was a self-proclaimed organization of Indonesian National Armed Forces members who, in the early hours of 1 October 1965, assassinated six Indonesian Army generals in an abortive coup d’etat. Later that morning, the organisation declared that it was in control of media and communication outlets and had taken President Sukarno under its protection. By the end of the day, the coup attempt had failed in Jakarta. Meanwhile, in central Java, there was an attempt to take control of an army division and several cities. By the time this rebellion was put down, two more senior officers were dead.

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Iran was the supply route in the “Persian Corridor” by which British aid and American Lend-Lease supplies were transferred to the Soviet Union during World War II. The Persian Corridor was a supply route through Iran into Soviet Azerbaijan by which British aid and American Lend-Lease supplies were transferred to the Soviet Union during World War II. Of the 17.5 million long tons of U.S. Lend-Lease aid provided to Russia, 7.9 million long tons (45%) were sent through Iran.