World History MCQs

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25 January Revolution is also known as the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. This revolution involved protests and demonstrations using civil disobedience and civil resistance methods by various youth groups against the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak, the then President of Egypt; police brutality; emergency laws; political censorship; corruption; unemployment; low wages and food inflation etc. This revolution spanned from 25 January 2011 to 11 February 2011 which lead to the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak’s government.

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The coup of 18 Brumaire was happened on 9 November 1799 in France, which brought General Napoleon Bonaparte to power as First Consul of France and in view of most historians ended the French Revolution. This bloodless coup overthrew the Directory, replacing it with the French Consulate.

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The War of the First Coalition is the traditional name of wars that several European powers fought between 1792 and 1797 against initially the Kingdom of France and then the French Republic that succeeded it. They were only loosely allied and fought without much apparent coordination or agreement, each power had its eye on a deficient part of France it wanted to appropriate after a French defeat, which never occurred.

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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. 

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The War of 1870, also known as the Franco-Prussian War or Franco-German War, was a conflict between the Second French Empire (and later, the Third French Republic) and the German states of the North German Confederation led by the Kingdom of Prussia. Lasting from 19 July 1870 to 28 January 1871, the conflict was caused primarily by France’s determination to restore its dominant position in continental Europe, which it had lost following Prussia’s crushing victory over Austria in 1866.

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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.

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Germany’s strategic naval plan was the “Naval Order of 24 October 1918”. The naval order of 24 October 1918 was a plan made by the German Admiralty at the end of World War I to provoke a decisive battle between the German High Seas Fleet and the British Grand Fleet in the southern North Sea. When the order to prepare for the sortie was issued on 29 October, a mutiny broke out aboard the German ships. Despite the operation being cancelled, these, in turn, led to the more serious Kiel mutiny, which was the starting point of the November Revolution and the proclamation of the Weimar Republic.

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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.

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The Guinea-Bissau War of Independence was an armed Independence conflict that took place in Portuguese Guinea between 1963 and 1974. Fought between Portugal and the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde, an armed independence movement backed by Cuba and the Soviet Union, the war is commonly referred to as “Portugal’s Vietnam” due to the large numbers of men and amounts of material expended in a long, mostly guerrilla war and the internal political turmoil it created in Portugal. The war ended when Portugal, after the Carnation Revolution of 1974, granted independence to Guinea-Bissau, followed by Cape Verde a year later.

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Haiti gained independence in 1804 from France. In 1697 France and Spain settled their hostilities on the Hispaniola Island by way of the Treaty of Ryswick of 1697, which divided Hispaniola between them. France received the western third and subsequently named it Saint-Domingue, the French equivalent of Santo Domingo, the Spanish colony on Hispaniola. The French set about creating sugar and coffee plantations, worked by vast numbers of slaves imported from Africa, and Saint-Domingue grew to become their richest colonial possession. Inspired by the French Revolution of 1789 and principles of the rights of man, the French settlers and free people of colour pressed for greater political freedom and more civil rights. The slaves, along with free gens de couleur and allies, continued their fight for independence, led by generals Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Alexandre Petion and Henry Christophe. The rebels finally managed to decisively defeat the French troops at the Battle of Vertières on 18 November 1804, leading the first-ever nation to successfully gain independence through a slave revolt.