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England gradually developed into a constitutional monarchy, with much of the change occurring in 1688 and 1689, a period of time the English called [BLANK-1]. In 1688, Mary and William of Orange overthrew the unpopular Catholic monarch, King James II, and secured Britain’s future (as well as the British-American colonies) as a predominantly Protestant country. William and Mary’s rise to power was purportedly bloodless, but in reality, it led to riots, unrest, and fighting in England, Ireland, Scotland, and North American cities like Boston and New York. The following year, parliament passed the Bill of Rights of 1689, which granted a number of rights and placed some limitations on the monarchy

[BLANK-1] formed a prominent rice farming business in Japan around the foundation of the Tokugawa Shogunate. He incorporated all of his family members into the business. He was one of the first people to produce the alcoholic beverage, sake, and made a fortune from the product. He reinvested those profits and branched out into other businesses, such as banking. His family continued to dominate each business, and outsiders were not allowed to participate. His example was characteristic of the commercial growth of Japan during this era. Typically, a particular family would receive privileges from the government and would dominate a market and then branch out to other businesses. The commonality of these proto-capitalistic practices contributed to Japan’s early industrialization in relation to the rest of East Asia.

[BLANK-1] spent much of his reign working to modernize Russia along western lines. He sought to extend Russian territory to the Black and Baltic Seas with wars against the Ottoman Empire and Sweden. He toured Western Europe for 18 months attempting to form an anti-Ottoman alliance. His efforts failed, but what he saw in Western Europe reinforced his desire to imitate that region’s political and economic successes. He built Russia’s first naval base, increased service requirements for commoners, altered inheritance laws to conform to unigeniture, and built a western-style capital along the Baltic. He continued his emphasis on westernization by requiring nobles to shave their beards and wear western-style clothing. Nobles were required to attend western-style parties where men and women mixed together and were free to choose their own spouse.

Support for the French Revolution was not uniform; regions in France (particularly in the south and the west) were more traditional, loyal to the Old Regime, and fiercely religious. Unsurprisingly, these regions resisted the radical change brought about by the French Revolution. As the revolutionaries found themselves essentially fighting a civil war while also fighting wars against a number of European powers, their response to these revolting regions turned violent. The greatest example of this violent reaction to counterrevolutionaries was [BLANK-1] where roughly 140,000 Frenchmen were killed and there were mass drownings in Nantes.

During the Ming Dynasty in China, Emperor Chengzu moved the imperial capital from Nanjing to Beijing in the early fifteenth century. There, he constructed an enormous and opulent palace complex known as [BLANK-1]. It had close to 10,000 rooms and was enclosed by walls forty feet high.

One of the results of the Industrial Revolution was increased restrictions placed on workers and state-sponsorship of these restrictions through new legislation. In 1799, the English Parliament passed [BLANK-1]. This legislation outlawed labor unions and the ability of workers to go on strikes. This was a significant victory for British factory owners but a bitter defeat for skilled artisans, who protested the legislation until it was repealed in 1824.

The Ashikaga Shogunate​​Aurangzeb​Bernadette of Lourdes​Carpet-Making​Catherine the Great​Devshirme​The Forbidden City​Francis Bacon​Frederick the Great​The Glorious Revolution​The Iberian Union​The Italian Renaissance​Jiyza​Kangxi​Konoike Shinroku​Mary Wollstonecraft​Matteo Ricci​Mercantilism​Oliver Cromwell​Peter the Great​Polo​The Public Sphere​Rene Descartes​The Russo-Japanese War​Taghaza​Tan Yunxian​The Thirty Years’ War​Timur​The Tsetse Fly​Zhu Yuanzhang

A young peasant from rural France named [BLANK-1] experienced visions of the Virgin Mary at a local grotto in 1858. Hundreds of thousands of invalids and religious pilgrims visited and toured the grotto in hopes of acquiring a miraculous cure or some blessing from the Virgin Mary. This event, which occurred well after Enlightenment ideas had circulated among Europe, suggests that the movement had little effect on the common people. Particularly in predominantly Catholic areas (such as rural France) the belief in religion and the supernatural continued well after the Enlightenment had supposedly secularized European societies.

A Chinese military commander called [BLANK-1], later known as the Hongwu Emperor and Emperor Taizu of Ming, overthrew the Yuan Dynasty in China and founded the Ming Dynasty in 1368. This emperor distrusted and disliked Confucian scholars and responded to criticism of his rule with cruel executions. His decision-making and behavior were so erratic that it is likely that he suffered from at least one severe mental illness. One example of his capriciousness and cruelty was that he had thousands of officials executed because they took shortcuts when writing down grain tax records in 1376.

The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw the largest Muslim incursions into Europe since the 700s as Ottoman Turks expanded into European sections of the Byzantine Empire. Muslims came to control all or part of the Balkans, Wallachia, Serbia, Bosnia, Greece, and Crimea. Under Muslim rule, Christians were expected to provide boys from their families as slaves for the Ottomans. This process of mandatory enslavement of Balkan Christian boys by Ottoman Muslims was known as [BLANK-1].