World History MCQs

Notes:
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, set by France’s National Constituent Assembly in 1789, is a human civil rights document from and inspired by the French Revolution. The Declaration was drafted by the Abbe Sieyes and the Marquis de Lafayette, in consultation with Thomas Jefferson. Influenced by the doctrine of “natural right”, the rights of man are to be held to be universal: valid at all times and in every place.

Notes:

The War of the Second Coalition, which was fought from 1798 to 1802 was the second war on revolutionary France by most of the European monarchies, led by Britain, Austria, and Russia and including the Ottoman Empire, Portugal, Naples, various German monarchies, and Sweden, though Prussia did not join this coalition and Spain supported France. Their goal was to contain the expansion of the French Republic and to restore the monarchy in France. They failed to overthrow the revolutionary regime and French territorial gains since 1793 were confirmed. 

Notes:
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.

Notes:
Texel, a municipality of the Netherlands, was the location of the “Georgian Uprising on Texel”. The Georgian uprising on Texel (5 April 1945 – 20 May 1945), happened as part of the Western Front of 1944-45 in the European theatre of World War II, was an insurrection by the 882nd Infantry Battalion Konigin Tamara (Queen Tamar or Tamara) of the Georgian Legion of the German Army stationed on the German-occupied Dutch island of Texel. The battalion was made up of 800 Georgians and 400 Germans, with mainly German officers. It was one of the last battles in the European theatre.

Notes:
Germany’s private army was “Freikorps”. Freikorps were irregular German and other European military volunteer units, or paramilitary, that existed from the 18th to the early 20th centuries. They effectively fought as mercenary or private armies, regardless of their own nationality. In German-speaking countries, the first so-called Freikorps were formed in the 18th century from native volunteers, enemy renegades, and deserters. In the aftermath of World War I and during the German Revolution of 1918–19, Freikorps consisting largely of World War I veterans were raised as right-wing paramilitary militias. They were ostensibly mustered to fight on behalf of the government against the Soviet-backed German Communists attempting to overthrow the Weimar Republic. But, the Freikorps largely despised the Republic and were involved in assassinations of its supporters.

Notes:
The United Kingdom, the United States, France and the Soviet Union were the four countries that occupied Germany, upon the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II. Allied-occupied Germany was the state of Germany upon the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II when the victorious Allies asserted joint authority and sovereignty over Germany as a whole, defined as all territories of the former German Reich west of the Oder–Neisse line, having declared the destruction of Nazi Germany at the death of Adolf Hitler. The four powers divided “Germany as a whole” into four occupation zones for administrative purposes under the United States, United Kingdom, France and the Soviet Union, respectively. This division was ratified at the Potsdam Conference (17 July to 2 August 1945). The four zones were as agreed in February 1945 by the United States, United Kingdom and the Soviet Union meeting at the Yalta Conference; setting aside an earlier division into three zones (excluding France) proposed by the London Protocol.

Notes:
The Potsdam Conference was held in Potsdam, Germany, from July 17 to August 2, 1945. The participants were the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States, represented respectively by Premier Joseph Stalin, Prime Ministers Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee, and President Harry S. Truman. They gathered to decide how to administer Germany, which had agreed to unconditional surrender nine weeks earlier on the 8th of May (Victory in Europe Day). The goals of the conference also included the establishment of the postwar order, peace treaty issues, and countering the effects of the war.

Notes:
Germany’s political history is connected to “Schicksalstag” events. November 9 has been the date of several important events in German history. The term Schicksalstag or the Day of Fate has been occasionally used by historians and journalists since shortly after World War II, but its current widespread use started with the events of 1989 when virtually all German media picked up the term. There are six notable events in German history that are connected to 9 November: the execution of Robert Blum, the leader of the Vienna Revolts, in 1848; the end of the monarchies through the November Revolution in 1918; the naming of Albert Einstein as the winner of the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics “for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect”; Hitler putsch attempt in 1923 which marked an early emergence and provisional downfall of the Nazi Party as an important player on Germany’s political landscape; the Nazi antisemitic pogroms in 1938 known in Germany as the Reichspogromnacht (Kristallnacht) and the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 which ended German separation and started a series of events that ultimately led to German reunification.

Notes:
Filiki Eteria or Society of Friends was a secret organization founded in 1814 in Odessa, whose purpose was to overthrow the Ottoman rule of Greece and establish an independent Greek state. Society members were mainly young Phanariot Greeks from Constantinople and the Russian Empire, local political and military leaders from the Greek mainland and islands, as well as several Orthodox Christian leaders from other nations that were under the Hellenic influence, such as Kara?or?e from Serbia Tudor Vladimirescu from Romania, and Arvanite military commanders. One of its leaders was the prominent Phanariote Prince Alexander Ypsilantis. The Society initiated the Greek War of Independence in the spring of 1821.

Notes:
The “Ostrogozhsk–Rossosh Offensive, 1943” was a joint effort of Hungary and Italy, as part of World War II, against the Soviet Union. The Ostrogozhsk–Rossosh Offensive was an offensive of the Voronezh Front on the Eastern Front of World War II against the Hungarian 2nd Army and partially Italian 8th Army as part of the Voronezh–Kharkov Offensive. The offensive is better known as part of Operation Little Saturn.