The Russian Avant-Garde began in Russia in about 1915. It was the year that Malevich revealed his Suprematist compositions that reduced painting to total abstraction and rid the pictures of any reference to the visual world. He is credited with being the first artist to do this; that is, forsake the...

The European states encountered significant shifts of power in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Those that succeeded were the ones that created potent central political supremacy. Among them were France and England. However, after the war of Spanish succession, there was a need for...

The French Revolution sought to destroy entirely the institutions of the ancien régime. Whilst its success in doing so is debatable, there is little doubt that this was the aim of the revolutionaries. The reasons for this goal are numerous, but certainly their ambition for destruction is ...

In the following paragraphs I will be discussing France after it's defeat in the Franco-Prussian war; the constitution, divisions in government, threats to the people's faith in their rulers, and the economy. France began this era at considerable disadvantage because of the war and Bismarck's po...

Exploring the importance of the Revolutions of 1917 in bringing about the rise of a single-party state in Russia. "No real social change has ever been brought about without a revolution.... Revolution is but thought carried into action (Emma Goldman, Anarchism 1917)." The people of Russ...

Q/ How important was Louis XVI in the collapse of the Ancien Regime? King Louis xvi was an important factor in the collapse of the ancien regime in France during the year of 1789. Although the king not fully responsible he still played a small role in the ancien regime's collapse, this is at...

In his introduction to The Lexus and the Olive Tree, published in 1999, Thomas Freidman states that "[t]he world is 10 years old. It was born when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. The Cold War system was replaced by a new, very greased, interconnected system called globalization." As a...

Throughout the history of the Western world various ideologies have proven so influential as to give rise to assorted "isms" that change society. Namely, the rise and support of socialism has been a major component to the make up of Western history in the 19th and 20th centuries. An inve...

The Tiananmen Square Massacre: The World's Response to One of China's Most Embarrassing Events In the spring of 1989 in Beijing, China tens of thousands of student protesters lined the streets surrounding Tiananmen Square and filled the square itself. The reasons for their pro-democracy...