History Of Brazil

Fossil records found in Minas Gerais show evidence that the area now called Brazil has been inhabited for at least 8,000 years by indigenous people.^[1] The dating of the origins of the first inhabitants, who were called "Indians" (índios) by the Portuguese, are still a matter of dispute among archaeologists. The current most widely accepted view of anthropologists, lingus and geneticists is that they were part of the first wave of migrant hunters who came into the Americas from Asia, either by land, across the Bering Strait, or by coastal sea routes along the Pacific, or both.

The Andes and the mountain ranges of northern South America created a rather sharp cultural boundary between the settled agrarian civilizations of the west coast and the semi-nomadic tribes of the east, who never developed written records or permanent monumental architecture. For this reason, very little is known about the history of Brazil before 1500. Archaeological remains (mainly pottery) indicate a complex pattern of regional cultural developments, internal migrations, and occasional large state-like federations.

At the time of European discovery, the territory of current day Brazil had as many as 2,000 tribes. The indigenous peoples were traditionally mostly semi-nomadic tribes who subsisted on hunting, fishing, gathering, and migrant agriculture. When the Portuguese arrived in 1500, the Natives were living mainly on the coast and along the banks of major rivers. Initially, the Europeans saw the natives as noble savages, and miscegenation of the population began right away.

Tribal warfare, cannibalism and the pursuit of Amazonian brazilwood (see List of meanings of countries' names) for its treasured red dye convinced the Portuguese that they should civilize the Natives. But the Portuguese, like the Spanish in their South American possessions, had unknowingly brought diseases with them, against which many Natives were helpless due to lack of immunity. Measles, smallpox, tuberculosis, gonorrhea, and influenza killed tens of thousands. The diseases spread quickly along the indigenous trade routes, and whole tribes were likely annihilated without ever coming in direct contact with Europeans.

History Of New York

Written documentation of the history of New York City began with the first European visit to the area by Estevão Gomes, in command of a Spanish ship, when he visited the region in 1524. He sailed for the King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. It is believed he sailed in Upper New York Bay where he encountered native Lenape, returned through The Narrows where he anchored the night of April 17, and then left to continue his voyage.

European settlement began on September 3, 1609 when Englishman Henry Hudson in the employ of the Dutch East India Company sailed the Half Moon through The Narrows into Upper New York Bay. Like Christopher Columbus, Hudson was looking for a westerly passage to Asia. He never found one, but he did make note of the abundant beaver population. Beaver pelts were in fashion in Europe, fueling a lucrative business. Hudson's report on the regional beaver population served as the impetus for the founding of Dutch trading colonies in the New World, among themNew Amsterdam, which would become New York City. The beaver's importance in New York City history is reflected by its use on the city's official seal.

The Dutch West Indies Company transported Africa slaves to the post as trading laborers. By the late 17th century, 40 percent of the settlement were African slaves. They helped build the fort and stockade, and some gained freedom under the Dutch. After the English took over the colony and city they called New York in 1664, they continued to import slaves from Africa and the Caribbean. In 1703, 42 percent of the New York households had slaves; they served as domestic servants and laborers, but also became involved in skilled artisan trades, shipping and other fields. They were integral to the development of colonial and federal New York. By the time of the Revolution, slaves comprised nearly a quarter of the city's population; second only to Charleston, South Carolina, New York had the largest number of slaves of any city in the nation.

The area around New York City was the location for multiple battles of the American Revolutionary War, including the largest battle of the war: the Battle of Brooklyn. With victory, the British occupied the city from September 1776 to late 1783. In response to the Crown's offer of freedom for slaves who left rebel masters, by 1780 the city became crowded with 10,000 blacks, most of whom had escaped slave masters. The British evacuated 3,000 freedmen with their troops in 1783; the Black Loyalists had chosen resettlement in Nova Scotia and other colonies. George Washington was inaugurated as the first President of the United States on April 30, 1789 in front of Federal Hall and the city served as the capital of the United States until 1790. The New York legislature passed a program of gradual emancipation in 1799; finally abolishing all slavery in the state in 1827.

Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, waves of new immigrants arrived from Europe, dramatically changing the composition of the city and serving as workers in the expanding industries. Modern New York City traces its development to the consolidation of the five boroughs in 1898 and an economic and building boom following the Great Depression and World War II. Throughout its history, New York City has served as a main port of entry for many immigrants, and its cultural and economic influences have made it one of the most important urban areas in the United States, and the world.

History Of Netherlands

The history of the Netherlands is the history of a seafaring people thriving on a watery lowland river delta on the North Sea in northwestern Europe. When the Romans and written history arrived in 57 BC, the country was sparsely populated by various tribal groups at the periphery of the empire. Over four centuries of Roman rule had profound demographic effects, resulting eventually in the establishment of three primary Germanic peoples in the area: Frisians,Low Saxons and the Franks. Hiberno-Scottish and Anglo-Saxon missionaries led them to adopt Christianity by the 8th century. The descendants of theSalian Franks eventually came to dominate the area, and from their speech the Dutch language arose.

Carolingian rule, loose integration into the Holy Roman Empire and Viking depredation followed, the local noblemen being left relatively free to carve out highly independent duchies and counties. For several centuries, Brabant, Holland, Zeeland, Friesland, Gelre and the others fought intermittently amongst themselves, but at the same time trade continued and grew, land was reclaimed, and cities prospered. Forced by nature to work together, over the centuries they built and maintained a network of polders and dikes that kept out the sea and the floods, in the process transforming their desolate landscape, mastering the North Sea and the high seas beyond, and emerging out of the struggle as one of the most urban and enterprising nations in Europe.

By 1433, as a result of the defeat of the last countess of Holland in the Hook and Cod Wars, theDuke of Burgundy had assumed control over most of the Dutch-speaking territories and the concept of a nation of Dutch-speaking people was conceived. Eventually, however, under Charles V and thenPhilip II, the Burgundian Netherlands became part of the Habsburg empire ruled from Spain.

The Reformation inflamed religious passions. In 1566 William of Orange, a convert to Calvinism and the father of his people, started the Eighty Years' War to liberate the Dutch from the Catholic Spaniards and the brutality of the Duke of Alba. There followed an epic struggle against the Spanish that did not end until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.

The Dutch Republic was born, a nation with Protestants, Catholics and Jews—and an unusual policy of tolerance. However, the southern provinces (present day Belgium) remained under Habsburg rule, Holland benefiting greatly from the resulting eclipse of Flemish cities and massive influx of refugees.

During this struggle, commerce continued and the United Provinces prospered. Amsterdam became the most important trading centre in northern Europe. In the Dutch Golden Age, which had its zenith in 1667, there was a remarkable flowering of trade, industry (especially shipbuilding), the arts (especially painting) and the sciences. The Dutch Republic, particularly Holland and Zeeland, became a veritableDutch empire, a maritime power with a commercial, imperial and colonial reach that extended to Asia, Africa and the Americas – but not without slavery and colonial oppression.

By the mid-18th century decline had set in because of several economic factors. There was a series of wars with the English and the French. The country's political system was dominated by wealthy regents and (sometimes) by stadtholders drawn from the House of Orange. Eventually, Amsterdam lost its leading position to London. In 1784 a war with Great Britain ended particularly disastrously. There was growing unrest and conflict between the Orangists and the Patriots inspired by the French Revolution, and finally conflict with France itself. A pro-French Batavian Republicwas established (1795–1806), and with the consolidation of French power under Napoleon gradually turned into a French satellite state, culminating in the Kingdom of Holland (1806–1810) and later simply an imperial province.

After the Battle of Leipzig and subsequent collapse of the French Empire in 1813, the Netherlands was restored as a "sovereign principality" with the House of Orange providing a monarch. TheVienna Conference in 1815 confirmed this authority by creating the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. King William I was also given rule over Belgium, but this lasted only until the conclusion of the Belgian Revolution in 1831. After an initially conservative period, strong liberal sentiments arose, so that in the 1848 constitution the country was made a parliamentary democracy with aconstitutional monarch.

The Netherlands was neutral during the First World War, but it was unable to stay out of the Second. On 10 May 1940 Nazi Germany invaded the country and, after destroying Rotterdam, occupied it. Around 100,000 Dutch Jews died in the Holocaust and many others died as well. On 5 May 1945, the war ended after liberation by mainly Canadian forces. The post-war years were a time of hardship, natural disaster and mass emigration, followed by rebuilding, large-scale public works programmes (especially the Delta Works), economic recovery, European integration and the gradual introduction of a welfare state. There was also a conflict with Indonesia, which ended with the Dutch withdrawing completely from their former colonies there in 1961. Suriname declared independence in 1975. Many people from Indonesia and Suriname, and later from other countries as well, moved to the Netherlands, which resulted in the transformation of the country into a multicultural society.

The second half of the 20th century was marked by relative peace and prosperity. By the 21st century, the Netherlands had become a modern, dynamic country with a successful, internationally oriented economy (the 16th largest in the world in 2010) and a high standard of living.

History Of Germany

The concept of Germany as a distinct region in central Europe can be traced to Roman commander Julius Caesar, who referred to the unconquered area east of the Rhine as Germania, thus distinguishing it from Gaul (France), which he had conquered. The victory of the Germanic tribes in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest (AD 9) prevented annexation by the Roman Empire. Following the fall of the Roman Empire, the Franks conquered the other West Germanic tribes. When the Frankish Empire was divided among Charlemagne's heirs in 843, the eastern part became East Francia. In 962, Otto I became the first emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, the medieval German state.

In the High Middle Ages, the dukes and princes of the empire gained power at the expense of the emperors. Martin Luther led the Protestant Reformationagainst the Catholic Church after 1517, as the northern states became Protestant, while the southern states remained Catholic. The two parts of the Holy Roman Empire clashed in the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), which was ruinous to the twenty million civilians. 1648 marked the effective end of the Holy Roman Empire and the beginning of the modern nation-state system, with Germany divided into numerous independent states, such as Prussia, Bavariaand Saxony.

After the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815), feudalism fell away and liberalism and nationalism clashed with reaction. The 1848 March Revolution failed. The Industrial Revolution modernized the German economy, led to the rapid growth of cities and to the emergence of the Socialist movement in Germany. Prussia, with its capital Berlin, grew in power. German universities became world-class centers for science and the humanities, while music and the arts flourished. Unification was achieved with the formation of the German Empire in 1871 under the leadership of Prussian ChancellorOtto von Bismarck. The Reichstag, an elected parliament, had only a limited role in the imperial government.

By 1900, Germany's economy matched Britain's, allowing colonial expansion and a naval race. Germany led the Central Powers in the First World War(1914–1918) against France, Great Britain, Russia and (by 1917) the United States. Defeated and partly occupied, Germany was forced to pay war reparations by the Treaty of Versailles and was stripped of its colonies as well as Polish areas and Alsace-Lorraine. The German Revolution of 1918–19deposed the emperor and the kings, leading to the establishment of the Weimar Republic, an unstable parliamentary democracy.

In the early 1930s, the worldwide Great Depression hit Germany hard, as unemployment soared and people lost confidence in the government. In 1933, theNazis under Adolf Hitler came to power and established a totalitarian regime. Political opponents were killed or imprisoned. Nazi Germany's aggressive foreign policy took control of Austria and parts of Czechoslovakia, and its invasion of Poland initiated the Second World War. After forming a pact with the Soviet Union in 1939, Hitler's blitzkrieg swept nearly all of Western Europe. The systematic genocide program known as The Holocaust killed six million Jews in Germany and German-occupied areas, as well as five million Poles, Romanies, Slavs, Soviets, and others. In 1941, however, the German invasion of the Soviet Union failed, and after the United States entered the war, Britain became the base for massive Anglo-American bombings of German cities. Germany fought the war on multiple fronts through 1942–1943. Following the Allied invasion of Normandy (June 1944), the German army was pushed back on all fronts until the final collapse in May 1945.

Under occupation by the Allies, German territories were split off, denazification took place, and the Cold War resulted in the division of the country into democratic West Germany and communistEast Germany. Millions of ethnic Germans fled from Communist areas into West Germany, which experienced rapid economic expansion, and became the dominant economy in Western Europe. West Germany was rearmed in the 1950s under the auspices of NATO, but without access to nuclear weapons. The Franco-German friendship became the basis for the political integration of Western Europe in the European Union.

In 1989, the Eastern bloc collapsed and East Germany was reunited with West Germany in 1990.

In 1998–1999, Germany was one of the founding countries of the Eurozone. Germany remains one of the economic powerhouses of Europe, contributing about one quarter of the Eurozone's annual gross domestic product.

History Of Italy

The origins of the Italian history can be traced back to the 9th century BC, when earliest accounts date the presence of Italic tribes in present-day central Italy. Linguistically, they were divided into Oscans, Umbrians and Latins. Later the Latin culture became dominant, as Rome emerged as a powerful city-state around 350 BC. Other pre-Roman civilizations include Magna Graecia (or Greater Greece), when Greeks began settling in Southern Italy in the 8th century BC and lasted until the 3rd century BC and also the Etruscan civilization, which flourished between 900 and 150 BC in the central section of the peninsula.

The Roman Empire later dominated Western Europe and the Mediterranean for many centuries, giving the human kind immeasurable contributions. Some of these led to the development of Western philosophy, science and art, that remained central during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. After the fall of Rome in AD 476, Italy remained fragmented in numerous city-states for much of the following millennium, finally falling under different foreign dominations. Parts of Italy were annexed to the Spanish, the Austrian and Napoleon I's empire, while the Holy See maintained control over Rome, before the Italian Peninsula was eventually liberated and unified in the late 19th century.

The new Kingdom of Italy, established in 1861, quickly modernized and built a large colonial empire, colonizing parts of Africa, and countries along the Mediterranean. However, many regions of the young nation (notably, the South) remained rural and poor, originating the Italian diaspora. Italy suffered enormous losses in World War I but came out on the winning side. Soon afterwards, however, the fragile liberal state collapsed owing to poverty, violence and social unrest: the Fascists, led by Benito Mussolini, took over and set up an authoritarian dictatorship. Italy joined the Axis powers inWorld War II, falling into a bloody Civil War after a monarchist coup ousted Mussolini in 1943, surrendering to the Allies in 1943 and joining their side, so eventually winning the war againstFascists and Nazi Germany in 1945.

In 1946, due to a referendum, the monarchy was abolished, and 2 June 1946 saw the birth of the Italian Republic. In the 1950s and 1960s, Italy saw a period of rapid modernization and sustained economic growth, the so called Italian economic miracle. The country, coming back to international politics among Western democratic powers, joined the European Economic Community (which has later constituted the European Union), the United Nations, NATO, the G7 and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Italy is currently ranked as a major regional power.

History Of England

The history of England concerns the study of the human past in one of Europe's oldest and most influential national territories. What is now England, a country within the United Kingdom, was inhabited by early humans 800,000 years ago as the discovery of flint tools at Happisburgh in Norfolk have revealed.The earliest evidence for modern humans in North West Europe is a jawbone discovered in Devon at Kents Cavern in 1927, which was re-dated in 2011 to between 41,000 and 44,000 years old. Continuous human habitation dates to around 12,000 years ago, at the end of the last glacial period. The region has numerous remains from the Mesolithic, Neolithic, and Bronze Age, such as Stonehenge and Avebury. In the Iron Age, England, like all of Britain south of theFirth of Forth, was inhabited by the Celtic people known as the Britons, but also by some Belgae tribes (e.g. the Atrebates, the Catuvellauni, the Trinovantes, etc.) in the south east. In AD 43 the Roman conquest of Britain began; the Romans maintained control of their province of Britannia through to the 5th century.

The end of Roman rule in Britain enabled the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, which is often regarded as the origin of England and the English people. TheAnglo-Saxons, a collection of various Germanic peoples, established several kingdoms that became the primary powers in what is now England and parts of southern Scotland.^[3] They introduced the Old English language, which displaced the previous British language. The Anglo-Saxons warred with British successor states in Wales, Cornwall, and the Hen Ogledd (Old North; the Brythonic-speaking parts of northern England and southern Scotland), as well as with each other. Raids by the Vikings were frequent after about AD 800, and the Norsemen took control of large parts of what is now England. During this period several rulers attempted to unite the various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, an effort that led to the emergence of the Kingdom of England by the 10th century.

In 1066, the Normans invaded and conquered England. There was much civil war and battles with other nations throughout the Middle Ages. The Kingdom of England was a sovereign state until the reign of Richard I who made it a vassal of the Holy Roman Empire in 1194. In 1212 during the reign of his brother John Lackland the Kingdom instead became a tribute-paying vassal of the Holy See  until the 16th century when Henry VIII broke from the Catholic Church. During the Renaissance, England was ruled by the Tudors. England had conquered Wales in the 12th century and was then united with Scotland in the early 18th century to form a new sovereign state called Great Britain. Following the Industrial Revolution, Great Britain ruled a worldwide Empire, the largest in the world. Following a process of decolonization in the 20th century the vast majority of the empire became independent; however, its cultural impact is widespread and deep in many countries of the present day.