PolledHistory

 Hello! Sorry that last week I forgot to provide the poll. I thought that WW1 is a very common history topic and that I should cover it today.  World War One, or the Great War was a conflict that was waged between 1914 and 1918, and there are two main alliances/factions that fought: the Central Powers and the Allied Powers, or the Allies. Let's see the teams first. Allied Powers France, United Kingdom, Russia, Italy, United States, Japan, etc Central Powers Germany, Austria Hungary, Ottoman Empire, Bulgaria, etc Let's begin. Before WW1, Prussia, one of the states in the old Holy Roman Empire, strengthened and under Otto von Bismarck, united Germany under one Prussian banner, forming the German Empire, a strong empire that rivaled Britain's huge colonial empire. Before 1914, the Balkan states were embroiled in several crises and wars, causing the Balkan Wars, both against the Ottoman Empire, a Turkish state, and each other (the other Balkan nations). There was certainly an i...

Hello! Today's friday special does not cover a certain event like we usually do. We usually cover events that span for years, decades, or a century. But we are covering an empire's history this time and the empire is quite an interesting one - the Sassanid Persian Empire. We'll divide this episode to several parts. Part 1 - Prelude 331 BC, Gaugamela. In modern day Iraq. Alexander the Great, who we have covered before, leads his army to victory against the once mighty and prestigious Achaenemid Persian Empire. Several years later, he fully defeats the Persian army and dies at a young age by 323 BC, leaving behind a vast empire that has no clear succession. By 306 BC, his empire, after a brutal and quite uneccesary war between his generals, three main dynasties emerge succeeding Alexander: the Antigonids, Ptolemies, and Seleucids. The Antigonids were shorter lived and ruled mostly the old lands of Macedon: Greece. The Ptolemies inherited Egypt, and the Seleucids most of the e...

 Hello! After seven days of polling and eight results, we've found a winner, with 50% of all the votes voting it: in the category of mysterious civilizations, the Mycenaeans have won. Mycenae has been briefly introduced last time in our Bronze Age collapse episode, but it has further depth. It is situated in Greece and was the last major Bronze Age kingdom in Ancient Greece, and was the first truly Greek civilization. The Bronze Age period in Greece is dubbed the Helladic period. ("Hellas" in Greek means Greece.). The period is split into three parts: the Early, Middle, and Late Helladic period. The Late Helladic period timeline coincide with Mycenaean Greece.  Mycenae's foundings are mysterious. One theory says Indo-Europeans, from the Eurasian steppe migrated into Greece, becoming the Mycenaeans. The Eurasian Steppe, for your information, is in modern day Ukrraine, Southern Russia, Kazakhstan, extending all the way to Mongolia. However, during the Bronze Age the rel...

Hello! For today's special blog bonus on Friday we'll cover a period of Roman history between about 100 BC and 25 AD - a period in the 1st century BC. This period, was a period of political instabillity, civil war, and constant shifts in leadership.  Our story begins with the rise of two major stars in Roman politics and military: Gaius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla. Let's study both big players first before we see their eventual clash in civil war. Gaius Marius was a skilled Roman general and statesman, born in 157 BC and was a major player in Roman military and politics up until his death in 86 BC. He was born with connections to the nobillity and was born wealthy. He joined the army under the popular general Scipio Aemilianus, a relative of Scipio Africanus, the victor of the Second Punic War. Scipio Aemilianus was the one who would actually finally destroy Carthage in 146 BC. Back to Marius, though. He continued to rise the ranks in politics and military. In 112 BC,...

 Hello! After a week of polling we got some really strange results: there were just 3 views on the last blog but 5 votes on the poll.... but whatever it is, 3/5 votes voted on this topic on the "Terrible Leaders" for the Ancient/Classical era. And the candidate I chose for the Ancient era and Antiquity was Honorius. Let's begin. Honorius was born Flavius Honorius on September 9, 384 AD in Constantinople. He was the son of the current emperor at the time in the Eastern half of the divided Roman Empire - Theodosius I, or Theodosius the Great. He would have a elder brother, Arcadius. In January 395 AD, his father Theodosius I died and left the empire to be divided once again (as Theodosius had united it once again). But this time, the division was going to be permenant. And from then on, there would no be sole ruler of Rome. The division would be an East/West division. The East would be inherited by Arcadius and the west by Honorius. Honorius was not yet eleven years old whe...

Today's historical bonus episode is about the bronze age collapse (c. 1200 BC). The Bronze Age Collapse was a short period of sudden destruction of order and prosperity and the loss of large civilizations, many technologies, trade, and literacy. But what was the Bronze Age, the era that ended with it? The Bronze Age was a time of formidable empires in the Near East - such as Egypt, in the form of New Kingdom Egypt, the Hittites in Anatolia, the Babylonians in Mesopotamia, and in Greece Mycenaea, among others. It was a very long period of prosperity and growth. Let's introduce the world before the collapse first, specifically the civilizations there. There was Egypt in North Africa. It was wealthy, powerful andd sophisticated. Egypt at the time was less of a dry desert and more of a fertile and green place because of the Nile River - an extremely advantageous river. This allowed them to grow in wealth from commerce. The Nile was also a good waterway for transportation, as most E...

 Hello! Nobody voted in the last week's poll vote, so I did a random wheel, and the subregion topic of Southeast Asia is the winner.   History is more mysterious than other subregional histories, especially in the BC years. By 200 BC, small somewhat unorganized civilizations formed south of China, such as  Vietnam, which is a very old civilisation. By 200 AD, Southeast Asia was still a collection of lots of islands and Indochina (modern day Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, etc) without much large civilizations yet. To the north, the Han Chinese were already dominant.  By the first few centuries AD, a Cambodian civiliztion called Funan grew in power, but declined soon by the 500s and 600s. The Malay Archipelago and the Philippines were still not as colonized. Again, we don't have much information on these earlier times. Funan fell by the 600s and was succeeded by Chenla, another Cambodian civilization. The Malay Archipelago and Malaya (modern day Indonesia and M...

 Hello! Today's Friday shifts its focus from some Roman state, which we have been studying since the first Friday special to other themes. And for this Friday, it is about the Fall of an empire - the Aztec Empire. The Aztec Empire was a dominant kingdom in Southern Mexico that started by around 1428 AD. It was an alliance of three main city states that enlarged its influence and engulfed the nearby civilizations, becoming among the most impressive Pre-Columbian American civilization.  The capital, Tenochtitlan, had great construction projects. However, the Aztec Empire, and typically all Pre-Columbian American civilizations were small, especially compared to those in the Old World (Asia, Europe, Africa).  In 1492, a navigator from Genoa, Columbus, set off, finding the Americas (the Carribbean only by that time), and though other people had previously found the Americas, he was the first one to really make it important. In 1519, the Aztecs were still dominant in Mesoameric...

 Hello! After a week of polling and a high vote rate, we have got a conclusion for this week's theme "Historical Leaders": About Alexander. So let's begin! 338 BC, Ancient Greece. Greece at this time was a mountainous peninsula with a collection of several small states and city states. Athens had lost its original power after the Peloponnesian War against Sparta, but from the north, a new terrifying Greek power came - Macedon. The Southern Greeks never really saw the Macedonians as truly Greek and saw them as barbarians. Nevertheless, when King Philip II of Macedon organized a new alliance called the League of Corinth, a military alliance. Only Sparta did not join. This consolidated Macedonian power in Greece, which is already doninant. Sparta at the time wasn't much of a military superpower like it used to be, and though Macedonia never truly destroyed Sparta, it was mostly because Sparta was quite a worthless area that was weak. Philip II was assasinated by 336 ...