Fidel Castro Biography

The link to the biography: https://docs.google.com/a/bps121.org/document/d/1Xk8lkXy-S_mJNBfcQbtUdNubd5j1hOVRMltrzY8Ybj4/edit

Fidel Castro Explain Everything

The link to the youtube video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwR1A-Y2Z-o

World War II: resolved and unresolved

Yes, the conclusion of war did address the causes of the war

Causes:
-Japan left the League of Nations and invaded China
-Mussolini leads Italy to invade Ethiopia
-Hitler leaves League of Nations after Germany recieves harsh terms with Treaty of Versailles

Resolved or not?
Resolved :
Japanese emperor Hirohito surrendered after the atomic bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and after Russia declared war on Japan. Therefore, the Japanese expansion becomes halted and Japan becomes subject to the terms of the allies.

Germany's surrender after British and US forces bombed German cities and Hitler's suicide brings an end to Hitler's regime. The Allies divide up Germany into east and west Germany and take possessions. However, the split of the Soviet Union in the east and other allies in the west brings rise to problems.

Unresolved:
Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia is not discussed later in the chapter and the book leaves you hanging on what happened. The brutal overkill of Ethiopians brought anger to non-revisionist states, but apparently they did nothing about it.

The division of Germany into east and west creates the "iron curtain", an ideological separation between communist Soviet Union in the east and the other European powers in the west. This could lead to future conflicts between the two sides.

The two new leading powers of the world, the United States and the Soviet Union both develop seperate ideologies. The United States turns to democracy while the Soviet Union turns to communism. This separation of ideas and the competitive nature that would develop from being the leading powers would eventually lead to the division of the former allies and to the start of the Cold War.

World War I before and after pics

World War I: change and continuity

A change in the world between pre-World War I and post-World War 1 is that Europe developed new boundaries and thus, new countries. A continuity between these two time periods is that Africa remained predominantly British colonies.

Change:
- Austria-Hungary empire before; Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia after
- Romania's boundary expands northern border after WWI into previous Austria-Hungary region
- Russia's western border turns into Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland and Poland

Continuity:
- colony of Sudan before and after World War I belongs to Britain
- colony of Egypt stays with Britain before and after war

Islamic and East Asian empires

The Islamic empires are similar to Tokugawa Japan and Ming/Qing China in that both discouraged innovation. They were both similar in these aspects, because both lands had rulers who feared that innovation would lead to change and destablization of the empire. In China and Japan, this fear was more politically oriented than the Islamic empires, who feared more about the weakening of Islam, which was the base of the empires they founded. They were different in that the Columbian exchange affected the Islamic empires much less than they did the Japanese and Chinese empires. This was because the Islamic empires were already capable of cultivating all their land, while the Chinese and the Japanese were only able to cultivate a very little portion of their land, as little as 11% before the arrival of American food crops. The American food crops would give the Chinese and the Japanese much more land to cultivate, while it really would not make that much of a diffence in the Islamic empires, where all the land was already cultivatable, so China and Japan would see a much more steady increase in population.

Why different empires are placed together

The Ottomans, the Safavids, and the Mughals are placed together, because of their location. The three empires were located geographically near each other, so putting them together can show the various interactions that the three empires have with each other, which would be ineffective if they were placed into three separate chapters. This is a shift in the text organization, because usually different empires are given their own chapters, or at least one of the three or four main sections in a chapter. For the future, this indicates that chapters will try to cramp more information together, because as we enter the modern world, it will get increasingly complex and there will be much more detail to cover in each chapter.