You are looking at all articles with the topic "History". We found 48 matches.

Hint: To view all topics, click here. Too see the most popular topics, click here instead.

🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Russia 🔗 History 🔗 Russia/sports and games in Russia 🔗 Gymnastics

The Korbut flip is a gymnastics skill performed on either of two different apparatus. Both were first performed internationally by the Soviet gymnast Olga Korbut.

The more spectacular version of the skill used to be performed on the uneven bars, where the gymnast, from a stand on the high bar, performs a back flip and regrasps the bar. Korbut performed the move at the 1972 Summer Olympics, where it was the first backward release move performed on the uneven bars in international competition. In 1977, Soviet gymnast Elena Mukhina modified the flip by adding a full twist. The movement was later modified in the 1980s when it was performed towards the low bar; that is, the gymnast's flip takes place above the low bar. The Code of Points was later modified to ban standing on the high bar during routines.

The skill is also performed on the balance beam. The move is performed from a standing position and is landed in a straddled position on the beam. This movement has been modified to include twists and piked or tucked legs and is frequently performed in sequence with other movements. Unlike its counterpart on the uneven bars, the Korbut flip on beam is today considered a relatively simple skill, valued at only a "B" level in the 2017 Code of Points.

Other gymnasts who have performed the skill's uneven bars variation include Radka Zemanova (1980), Steffi Kraker (1977), Emily May (1981), Lyubov Bogdanova (1974) and Natalia Shaposhnikova (1976).

🔗 Human rights 🔗 History 🔗 China 🔗 Economics 🔗 Politics 🔗 Socialism 🔗 Anthropology 🔗 Culture

The Cultural Revolution, formally the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, was a sociopolitical movement in China from 1966 until 1976. Launched by Mao Zedong, Chairman of the Communist Party of China (CPC), its stated goal was to preserve Chinese Communism by purging remnants of capitalist and traditional elements from Chinese society, and to re-impose Mao Zedong Thought (known outside China as Maoism) as the dominant ideology in the CPC. The Revolution marked Mao's return to the central position of power in China after a period of less radical leadership to recover from the failures of the Great Leap Forward, which led to approximately 30 million deaths in the Great Chinese Famine only five years prior.

Launching the movement in May 1966 with the help of the Cultural Revolution Group, Mao soon called on young people to "bombard the headquarters", and proclaimed that "to rebel is justified". In order to eliminate his rivals within the CPC and in schools, factories, and government institutions, Mao charged that bourgeois elements had infiltrated the government and society with the aim of restoring capitalism. He insisted that revisionists be removed through violent class struggle, to which China's youth, as well as urban workers, responded by forming Red Guards and "rebel groups" around the country. They would begin to hold struggle sessions regularly, and grab power from local governments and CPC branches, eventually establishing the revolutionary committees in 1967. The groups often split into rival factions, however, becoming involved in 'violent struggles' (simplified Chinese: 武斗; traditional Chinese: 武鬥; pinyin: wǔdòu), to which the People's Liberation Army had to be sent to restore order.

Having compiled a selection of Mao's sayings into the Little Red Book, which became a sacred text for Mao's personality cult, Lin Biao, Vice Chairman of the CPC, was written into the constitution as Mao's successor. In 1969, Mao suggested the end of the Cultural Revolution. However, the Revolution's active phase would last until at least 1971, when Lin Biao, accused of a botched coup against Mao, fled and died in a plane crash. In 1972, the Gang of Four rose to power and the Cultural Revolution continued. After Mao's death and the arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976, the Cultural Revolution finally came to an end.

The Cultural Revolution damaged China's economy and traditional culture, with an estimated death toll ranging from hundreds of thousands to 20 million. Beginning with the Red August of Beijing, massacres took place across China, including the Guangxi Massacre, in which massive cannibalism also occurred; the Inner Mongolia incident; the Guangdong Massacre; the Yunnan Massacres; and the Hunan Massacres. Red Guards destroyed historical relics and artifacts, as well as ransacking cultural and religious sites. The 1975 Banqiao Dam failure, one of the world's greatest technological catastrophes, also occurred during the Cultural Revolution. Meanwhile, tens of millions of people were persecuted: senior officials, most notably Chinese president Liu Shaoqi, along with Deng Xiaoping, Peng Dehuai, and He Long, were purged or exiled; millions were accused of being members of the Five Black Categories, suffering public humiliation, imprisonment, torture, hard labor, seizure of property, and sometimes execution or harassment into suicide; intellectuals were considered the "Stinking Old Ninth" and were widely persecuted—notable scholars and scientists such as Lao She, Fu Lei, Yao Tongbin, and Zhao Jiuzhang were killed or committed suicide. Schools and universities were closed with the college entrance exams cancelled. Over 10 million urban intellectual youths were sent to the countryside in the Down to the Countryside Movement.

In 1978, Deng Xiaoping became the new paramount leader of China and started the "Boluan Fanzheng" program which gradually dismantled the Maoist policies associated with the Cultural Revolution, and brought the country back to order. Deng then began a new phase of China by initiating the historic Reforms and Opening-Up program. In 1981, the Communist Party of China declared that the Cultural Revolution was "responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the country, and the people since the founding of the People's Republic."

🔗 History 🔗 Lists 🔗 Geography 🔗 Israel 🔗 Palestine

The population of the region of Palestine, which approximately corresponds to modern Israel, the Palestinian territories and Jordan, has varied in both size and ethnic composition throughout its history.

The following table shows the total population and that of the main ethno-religious groups living in the area from the First Century CE up until the last full calendar year of the British Mandate, 1947.

Note: Figures prior to the 1500s are all only estimates by researchers. For some periods, there are multiple researchers who have made differing estimates. None should be taken as exact numbers, and further context and detail is available by following links to the full description on Wikipedia as well as links to the original information sources.

^†including what is today the Kingdom of Jordan

🔗 International relations 🔗 History 🔗 Europe 🔗 Politics 🔗 Poland 🔗 Lithuania 🔗 Eastern Europe

Intermarium (Polish: Międzymorze, Polish pronunciation: [mʲɛnd͡zɨˈmɔʐɛ]) was a geopolitical project conceived by politicians in successor states of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in several iterations, some of which anticipated the inclusion as well of other, neighboring states. The proposed multinational polity would have extended across territories lying between the Baltic, Black and Adriatic Seas, hence the name meaning "Between-Seas".

Prospectively a federation of Central and Eastern European countries, the post-World War I Intermarium plan pursued by Polish leader and former political prisoner of the Russian Empire, Józef Piłsudski (1867–1935), sought to recruit to the proposed federation the Baltic states (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia), Finland, Belarus, Ukraine, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. The Polish name Międzymorze (from między, "between"; and morze, "sea"), meaning "Between-Seas", was rendered into Latin as "Intermarium."

The proposed federation was meant to emulate the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, that, from the end of the 16th century to the end of the 18th, had united the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Intermarium complemented Piłsudski's other geopolitical vision, Prometheism, whose goal was the dismemberment of the Russian Empire and that Empire's divestment of its territorial acquisitions.

Intermarium was, however, perceived by some Lithuanians as a threat to their newly established independence, and by some Ukrainians as a threat to their aspirations for independence, and while France backed the proposal, it was opposed by Russia and by most other Western powers. Within two decades of the failure of Piłsudski's grand scheme, all the countries that he had viewed as candidates for membership in the Intermarium federation had fallen to the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, except for Finland (which suffered some territorial losses in the 1939–40 Winter War with the Soviet Union).

🔗 History 🔗 Books 🔗 Socialism 🔗 Anarchism

The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia is a book-length anthropological and historical study of the Zomia highlands of Southeast Asia written by James C. Scott published in 2009. Zomia, as defined by Scott, includes all the lands at elevations above 300 meters stretching from the Central Highlands of Vietnam to Northeastern India. That encompasses parts of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Myanmar, as well as four provinces of China. Zomia's 100 million residents are minority peoples "of truly bewildering ethnic and linguistic variety", he writes. Among them are the Akha, Hmong, Karen, Lahu, Mien, and Wa peoples.

🔗 International relations 🔗 Human rights 🔗 History 🔗 Islam 🔗 International relations/International law 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Discrimination 🔗 International relations/United Nations

The history of slavery in the Muslim world began with institutions inherited from pre-Islamic Arabia; and the practice of keeping slaves subsequently developed in radically different ways, depending on social-political factors such as the Arab slave trade. Any non-Muslim could be enslaved. Throughout Islamic history, slaves served in various social and economic roles, from powerful emirs to harshly treated manual laborers. Early on in Muslim history slaves provided plantation labor similar to that in the early-modern Americas, but this practice was abandoned after harsh treatment led to destructive slave revolts, the most notable being the Zanj Rebellion of 869–883. Slaves were widely employed in irrigation, mining, and animal husbandry, but most commonly as soldiers, guards, domestic workers, concubines and sex slaves. Many rulers relied on military slaves (often in huge standing armies) and on slaves in administration - to such a degree that the slaves could sometimes seize power. Among black slaves, there were roughly two females to every one male. Two rough estimates by scholars of the numbers of just one group - black slaves held over twelve centuries in the Muslim world - are 11.5 million and 14 million, while other estimates indicate a number between 12 and 15 million African slaves prior to the 20th century.

Islam encouraged the manumission of Muslim slaves as a way of expiating sins. Many early converts to Islam, such as Bilal, were former slaves. In theory, slavery in Islamic law does not have a racial or color basis, although this has not always been the case in practice. In 1990 the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam declared that "no one has the right to enslave" another human being. Many slaves were imported from outside the Muslim world.

The Arab slave trade was most active in West Asia, North Africa, and Southeast Africa. The Ottoman slave trade exploited the human resources of eastern and central Europe and the Caucasus; the Barbary Coast slave traders raided the Mediterranean coasts of Europe and as far afield as the British Isles and Iceland. In the early 20th century (post-World War I), authorities gradually outlawed and suppressed slavery in Muslim lands, largely due to pressure exerted by Western nations such as Britain and France. Slavery in the Ottoman Empire was abolished in 1924 when the new Turkish Constitution disbanded the Imperial Harem and made the last concubines and eunuchs free citizens of the newly proclaimed republic. Slavery in Iran was abolished in 1929. Mauritania became the last state to abolish slavery - in 1905, 1981, and again in August 2007. Oman abolished slavery in 1970, and Saudi Arabia and Yemen abolished slavery in 1962 under pressure from Britain. However, slavery claiming the sanction of Islam is documented at present in the predominantly Islamic countries of the Sahel, and is also practiced by ISIS and Boko Haram. It is also practiced in countries like Libya and Mauritania - despite being outlawed.

🔗 History 🔗 Germany 🔗 Politics 🔗 Austria 🔗 European history 🔗 Animal rights 🔗 Former countries

There was widespread support for animal welfare in Nazi Germany (German: Tierschutz im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland) among the country's leadership. Adolf Hitler and his top officials took a variety of measures to ensure animals were protected.

Several Nazis were environmentalists, and species protection and animal welfare were significant issues in the Nazi regime. Heinrich Himmler made an effort to ban the hunting of animals. Hermann Göring was a professed animal lover and conservationist, who, on instructions from Hitler, committed Germans who violated Nazi animal welfare laws to concentration camps. In his private diaries, Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels described Hitler as a vegetarian whose hatred of the Jewish religion in large part stemmed from the ethical distinction this faith drew between the value of humans and the value of other animals; Goebbels also mentions that Hitler planned to ban slaughterhouses in the German Reich following the conclusion of World War II. Nevertheless, animal testing was common in Nazi Germany.

The current animal welfare laws in Germany were initially introduced by the Nazis.

🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Russia 🔗 History 🔗 Germany 🔗 Politics 🔗 Cold War 🔗 European history

The Stalin Note, also known as the March Note, was a document delivered to the representatives of the Western Allies (the United Kingdom, France, and the United States) from the Soviet Union in Germany on 10 March 1952. Soviet general secretary and premier Joseph Stalin put forth a proposal for a German reunification and neutralisation with no conditions on economic policies and with guarantees for "the rights of man and basic freedoms, including freedom of speech, press, religious persuasion, political conviction, and assembly" and free activity of democratic parties and organizations.

James Warburg, a member of the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, testified before the committee on 28 March 1952 and observed that the Soviet proposal might be a bluff, but he thought that it seemed "that our government is afraid to call the bluff for the fear that it may not be a bluff at all" and might lead to "a free, neutral, and demilitarised Germany", which might be "subverted into Soviet orbit". That led to an exchange of notes between the West and the Soviet Union, which eventually ended after the West had insistence for a unified Germany to be free to join the European Defence Community and to be rearmed, demands that Stalin rejected.

West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and the Western Allies characterised Stalin's move as an aggressive action that attempted to stall the reintegration of West Germany. However, there was later a debate on whether a chance for reunification had been missed. Six years after the exchange, two West German ministers, Thomas Dehler and Gustav Heinemann, blamed Adenauer for not having explored the chance of reunification.