Standards

Question 1

What is the Spirt of the Law?

Answer 1

The Spirit of Law is a treatise on political theory, as well as a pioneering work in comparative law, published in 1748 by Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu. It included constitutional theory (including a classification of political systems: republican, monarchical, and despotic; liberty and the separation of powers; climate, culture, and society).

Question 2

What is periodization?

Answer 2

Periodization is the process of categorizing the past into discrete, quantified named blocks of time in order to facilitate the study and analysis of history. This results in descriptive abstractions that provide convenient terms for periods of time with relatively stable characteristics.

Question 3

What was the agricultural revolution?

Answer 3

The Agricultural Revolution was a period of technological improvement and increased crop productivity that occurred during the 18th and early 19th centuries in Europe.

Question 4

What is Pan-Africanism?

Answer 4

Pan-Africanism is a worldwide movement that aims to encourage and strengthen bonds of solidarity between all indigenous and diaspora ethnic groups of African descent.

Question 5

Why was the invention of the stirrup significant?

Answer 5

A slight alteration to the custom of riding a horse may have dramatically changed the way wars were fought. It was invented after the domestication of horses, somewhere in Asia, possibly China or India.

Question 6

What was the Columbian Exchange?

Answer 6

The Columbian exchange, also known as the Columbian interchange, named after Christopher Columbus, was the widespread transfer of plants, animals, culture, human populations, technology, diseases, and ideas between the Americas, West Africa, and the Old World in the 15th and 16th centuries.

Question 7

What was the Industrial Revolution?

Answer 7

The Industrial Revolution, now also known as the First Industrial Revolution, was the transition to new manufacturing processes in Europe and the United States, in the period from about 1760 to sometime between 1820 and 1840.

Question 8

What was the Scientific Revolution?

Answer 8

The Scientific Revolution was a series of events that marked the emergence of modern science during the early modern period, when developments in mathematics, physics, astronomy, biology (including human anatomy) and chemistry transformed the views of society about nature. The Scientific Revolution took place in Europe towards the end of the Renaissance period and continued through the late 18th century, influencing the intellectual social movement known as the Enlightenment.

Question 9

What was the Enlightenment?

Answer 9

A European intellectual movement of the late 17th and 18th centuries emphasizing reason and individualism rather than tradition. It was heavily influenced by 17th-century philosophers such as Descartes, Locke, and Newton, and its prominent exponents include Kant, Goethe, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Adam Smith.

Question 10

What was the Renaissance?

Answer 10

The Renaissance was a period in European history marking the transition from the Middle Ages to Modernity and covering the 15th and 16th centuries. The intellectual basis of the Renaissance was its version of humanism, derived from the concept of Roman Humanitas and the rediscovery of classical Greek philosophy.

Question 11

What is Marxism?

Answer 11

Marxism, a body of doctrine developed by Karl Marx and, to a lesser extent, by Friedrich Engels in the mid-19th century. It originally consisted of three related ideas: a philosophical anthropology (an effort to understand individuals as both creatures of their environment and creators of their own values), a theory of history, and an economic and political program. There is also Marxism as it has been understood and practiced by the various socialist movements.

Question 12

What is urbanization?

Answer 12

Urbanization refers to the population shift from rural to urban areas, the decrease in the proportion of people living in rural areas, and the ways in which societies adapt to this change.

Question 13

What are trading systems?

Answer 13

Trading systems are sets of rules or instructions that control the buying or selling of a futures, forex or stock instrument.

Question 14

What are NGOs?

Answer 14

A non-governmental organization (NGO) is a non-profit, citizen-based group that functions independently of government, but may be involved in international philanthropic, developmental, or social missions. NGOs are often organized on local, national, and up to the international levels to serve specific social or political purposes.

NGOs, or non-governmental organizations, play a major role in international development, aid, and philanthropy.

NGOs are non-profit by definition, but may run budgets of millions or up to billions of dollars each year.

As such, NGOs rely on a variety of funding sources from private donations and membership dues to government contributions.

Question 15

What is Greenpeace?

Answer 15

Greenpeace is a non-governmental environmental organization with offices in over 55 countries and an international coordinating body in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Question 16

Why were railroads significant in Argentina?

Answer 16

The growth and decline of the Argentine railways are tied heavily with the history of the country as a whole, reflecting its economic and political situation at numerous points in history, reaching its high point when Argentina ranked among the 10 richest economies in the world (measured in GDP per capita) during the country’s Belle Époque and subsequently deteriorating along with the hopes of the prosperity it came so close to achieving.

In the early years, the railway was emblematic of the vast waves of European Immigration into the country, with many coming to work on and operate the railways, and also in the sense that the population boom experienced as a result of this immigration required means of transportation to meet growing demands. Much like in the American West, the railways also played a key role in the creation and expansion of new population centres and boomtowns in remote parts of the country.

Question 17

Why were railroads significant in India?

Answer 17

Railways were the most important infrastructure development in India from 1850 to 1947. In terms of the economy, railways played a major role in integrating markets and increasing trade. In terms of politics, railways shaped the finances of the colonial government and the Princely States.

Before the advent of the railways in India, only a very small proportion of agricultural output was exported as agriculture was carried on only for subsistence. But railways transformed its very nature by commercializing it. Railways made India’s agriculture internationally competitive and, as a result, a floodgate of exports of agricultural products such as wheat, rice, jute oilseeds, and cotton was opened up.

Railways gave strong stimulus to internal trade. In doing so, railways were instrumental in transforming the structure of prices in India. The more direct effect of railways extension was the leveling of prices between different regions.

Commercialisation of agriculture caused mainly by an elaborate transport network broke the self-sufficient age-old isolation of the village economy.

Question 18

What was the Bantu migration?

Answer 18

The migration of the Bantu people from their origins in southern West Africa saw a gradual population movement sweep through the central, eastern, and southern parts of the continent starting in the mid-2nd millennium BCE and finally ending before 1500 CE. With them, the Bantu brought new technologies and skills such as cultivating high-yield crops and iron-working which produced more efficient tools and weapons. Eventually, the Bantu dominated, with the exception of South Africa and the Namibian desert, all of the African continent south of a line crossing from southern Nigeria to Kenya.

Question 19

What was the Indo-Aryan migration?

Answer 19

The Indo-Aryan migrations were the migrations into the Indian subcontinent of Indo-Aryan peoples, an ethnolinguistic group that spoke Indo-Aryan languages, the predominant languages of today’s North India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Maldives. Indo-Aryan population movements into the region and Anatolia (ancient Mitanni) from Central Asia are generally considered to have started around 2000 BCE, as a slow diffusion during the Late Harappan period, which led to a language shift in the northern Indian subcontinent.

Question 20

What was the Native American migration?

Answer 20

Scientists have found that Native American populations - from Canada to the southern tip of Chile - arose from at least three migrations, with the majority descended entirely from a single group of First American migrants that crossed over through Beringia, a land bridge between Asia and America that existed during the ice ages, more than 15,000 years ago.

Question 21

What is American Exceptionalism?

Answer 21

American exceptionalism is one of three related ideas:

The first is that the history of the United States is inherently different from that of other nations.
Second is the idea that the US has a unique mission to transform the world.
Third is the sense that the United States’ history and mission give it a superiority over other nations.

Question 22

What is Yankee ingenuity?

Answer 22

Yankee ingenuity is a stereotype of inventiveness, technical solutions to practical problems, “know-how,” self-reliance and individual enterprise associated with the Yankees, who originated in New England and developed much of the industrial revolution in the United States after 1800.

Question 23

What is the Puritan Work Ethic?

Answer 23

The Puritan work ethic is more commonly referred to as the Protestant work ethic. It has both theological and sociological meaning. Theologically, it refers to the view that hard work is a signifier of one’s election (salvation) and that diligence in one’s work is pleasing to God.

Question 24

What was the labor movement?

Answer 24

The labor movement in the United States grew out of the need to protect the common interest of workers. For those in the industrial sector, organized labor unions fought for better wages, reasonable hours and safer working conditions. The labor movement led efforts to stop child labor, give health benefits and provide aid to workers who were injured or retired.

Question 25

What was the Farm Workers’ Movement?

Answer 25

In 1962, Chavez founded the National Farm Workers Association and later created the United Farm Workers with labor activist Dolores Huerta. Chavez led nonviolent labor strikes and weeks-long fasts; protestors faced violence, arrest, and prosecution. The movement established workers’ right to organize and secured better pay and working conditions on many farms.

Question 26

What is the Ku Klux Klan?

Answer 26

The Ku Klux Klan commonly called the KKK or the Klan, is an American white supremacist hate group.

The first Klan flourished in the Southern United States in the late 1860s during Reconstruction, then died out by the early 1870s. It sought to overthrow the Republican state governments in the South, especially by using voter intimidation and targeted violence against African-American leaders.

The second Klan started small in Georgia in 1915. It grew after 1920 and flourished nationwide in the early and mid-1920s, including urban areas of the Midwest and West. Taking inspiration from D. W. Griffith’s 1915 silent film The Birth of a Nation, which mythologized the founding of the first Klan, it employed marketing techniques and a popular fraternal organization structure.

The third and current manifestation of the KKK emerged after 1950, in the form of localized and isolated groups that use the KKK name. They have focused on opposition to the civil rights movement, often using violence and murder to suppress activists.

Question 27

How did the United States shift from a rural to an urban population?

Answer 27

Eleven million people migrated from rural to urban areas between 1870 and 1920, and a majority of the twenty-five million immigrants who came to the United States in these same years moved into the nation’s cities. By 1920, more Americans lived in cities than in rural areas for the first time in US history.

Question 28

What was the Industrial Revolution in the United States?

Answer 28

The Industrial Revolution involved a shift in the United States from manual labor-based industry to technical based industry which greatly increased the overall production and economic growth of the United States, signifying a shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy widely accepted to have been a result of Samuel Slater’s introduction of British Industrial methods in textile manufacturing to the United States, and necessitated by the War of 1812.

Question 29

What was the Great Migration?

Answer 29

The Great Migration, sometimes known as the Great Northward Migration or the Black Migration, was the movement of 6 million African Americans out of the rural Southern United States to the urban Northeast, Midwest, and West that occurred between 1916 and 1970. It was caused primarily by the poor economic conditions as well as the prevalent racial segregation and discrimination in the Southern states where Jim Crow laws were upheld.