Category: History Essay Examples
See our collection of history essay examples. These example essays are to help you understanding how to write a history essay. History is a fascinating puzzle with both personal and cultural significance. The past informs our lives, ideas, and expectations. Historians study the past to figure out what happened and how specific events and cultural developments affected individuals and societies. Also, see our list of history essay topics to find the one that interests you.
Emma Goldman, also known as “Red Emma,” was born to Jewish parents on June 27, 1869, in Kaunas, Lithuania (Kovno, Russia) in a climate of mounting czarist repression marked by periodic pogroms. In order to avoid such threats her family moved when she was 13 to St. Petersburg. …
The dictator who controlled Venezuela from 1909 until 1935, Juan Vicente Gómez was officially president on four occasions, from 1909 until 1910, from 1910 until 1914, from 1922 until 1929, and from 1931 until 1935. As a result of the brutal manner in which he ran the country, …
Samuel Gompers, who ushered in a new era of organized labor in the United States, was born on January 27, 1850, in London. At the age of 13 he emigrated and settled on Houston Street, New York. He was interested in trade union activities and joined the local …
The Good Neighbor Policy, announced by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) during his first inaugural address on March 4, 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, was a response to the powerful backlash against U.S. military intervention in the Caribbean and Central America over the previous 35 …
The most dramatic economic shock the world has ever known began on October 24, 1929, “Black Thursday.” After years of large-scale speculations, with millions of investors borrowing money to chase the dream of easy riches and hundreds of banks willing to accept stocks as collateral, stock prices eventually …
The formal concept of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was announced at a press conference on August 1, 1940, by Japanese prime minister Matsuoka Yosuke. It was to be an autarkic bloc of Japanese-led Asian nations free from Western influence or control. Greater East Asia included both …
During the period 1900 until 1950, there were vast migrations of people around the world—some peoples having to flee as refugees and others voluntarily migrating in order to have a better standard of living, with numbers of indentured laborers going to work in other lands, often staying there. …
The Haganah (Hebrew for “defense”) was an underground Jewish paramilitary organization created during the British mandate in Palestine in 1920. The Haganah began as a small voluntary body of men called Ha Shomer, formed to guard Jewish settlements, or kibbutzim. The Haganah consisted of soldiers who had fought …
For seven bloody days during October 1937, the Dominican army massacred thousands of Haitian men, women, and children living in the northwestern frontier region of the Dominican Republic. Thousands more fled for their lives across the border into Haiti. Many of the victims were Dominican-born and thus were …
Hara Kei (Hara Takashi) was a leading member of the Seiyukai political party in Japan in the early 20th century and the prime minister of Japan from 1918 to 1921. Hara was born into a family of samurai background in northern Japan in 1856. After working in fields …
The Harlem Renaissance is the name that was attached to the African-American literary, artistic, and intellectual movement that was centered in Harlem, a neighborhood in Upper Manhattan, New York. Many African Americans had migrated from the South to northern cities in the years after 1916 in what is …
The San Remo Treaty (1920) following World War I granted Britain control over Iraq as a mandate. Following the bloody Iraqi rebellion against the mandate, the British decided at the 1921 Cairo Conference, attended by Sir Percy Cox as Iraqi high commissioner among others, to provide a semblance …
Like many other postcolonial states in the Middle East, the Hashemite monarchy of Jordan has largely artificial boundaries drawn by European imperial powers. The European powers, particularly Britain and France, divided the territories of much of the Middle East between themselves as the previous empire of the Ottoman …
The first vice president of Indonesia, Muhammad Hatta was born on born August 12, 1902, in Bukittinggi, West Sumatra. He had his early education in the Dutch schools of Padang and Batavia. He was in the Netherlands from 1922 to 1932, where he studied in Rotterdam and involved …
A prominent Peruvian political activist and the man who won the 1931 and 1962 Peruvian presidential elections, Haya de la Torre was the founder of the Aprista Party, which has been in the forefront of radical dissent in Peru since 1924. He wanted greater rights— political and economic—for …
Emperor Hirohito of Japan lived in an age of contradictions, caught between ancient traditions and modern realities. The 124th in the line of the longest dynasty the world has known, Hirohito saw the Japanese monarchy become purely ceremonial. Japan was modernized during his reign when he died after …
By the summer of 1945, World War II in the Pacific was virtually over. Since December 1941, the United States had pushed Japanese forces back until only the homeland itself remained in Japanese control. The United States prepared to launch an invasion of Japan. While preparing for the …
Adolf Hitler, the dictator of Germany, proponent of Nazism, and perpetrator of the Holocaust, was born on April 20, 1889, in the Austrian town of Braunau near the German border. His father, Alois, was a customs official, and his mother, Klara, was a gentlewoman. Hitler did not finish …
The term holocaust, derived from the Greek and literally meaning “a sacrifice totally consumed by fire,” refers to the Nazi incarceration and extermination of approximately 6 million European Jews and a million others, including half a million Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Freemasons, resistants from occupied countries, and Russian …
The American president in the crucial years between 1929 and 1933, Republican Herbert Clark Hoover was born on August 10, 1874, in West Branch, Iowa, to Jesse and Hulda Hoover. He received his secondary education in Newberg, Oregon, and graduated with a degree in geology from Stanford University …
