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.
Movements of people from Cuba to the United States comprise a longstanding feature of both countries’ histories. The panic of 1857 prompted numerous Cuban cigar manufacturers to move their operations to Key West, Tampa, and elsewhere along the Florida coast. During and after the Ten Years’ War (1868–78), …
In what many experts consider the closest the world has yet come to nuclear war, for 13 days in October 1962 the United States and the Soviet Union faced off over the Soviet placement of nuclear missiles in Cuba. In the end, the Soviet Union backed down, agreed …
On January 1, 1959, a broad-based insurrectionary movement—with Fidel Castro at its helm—overthrew the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista and inaugurated the Cuban revolution, a process of social transformation that continues to the present writing. Its ideology was at first broadly nationalist and democratic, but by 1961 the revolution …
On June 4, 1878, Britain concluded a treaty with the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II, officially known as a Convention of Defensive Alliance. In this treaty Abdul Hamid agreed to the loan of Cyprus to Britain, while retaining Ottoman sovereignty over the island and the right to collect …
On July 19, 1974, Turkish warships and landing craft moved toward the northern coast of Cyprus. The invasion—or intervention, to the Turks—was Turkey’s answer to the military coup of 15 July that toppled Archbishop Mikhalis Khristodoulou Makarios III, president of Cyprus, at the behest of the military junta …
The Dalai Lama has been both the temporal and the spiritual leader of Tibet since the 16th century. Tibetans are followers of Vajrayana (Vehicle of the Thunderbolt), or Tantric Buddhism, and believe that the Dalai Lama is the reincarnation of the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara (Chenrezig in Tibetan, and Guanyin …
In 1989 a civil war began in the African nation of Sudan after an officer in the Sudanese army, Omar al-Bashir, seized power through a coup d’état. The roots of this war are complex, including struggle over limited resources following a serious drought and famine in the mid-1980s, …
Dorothy Day was a peace and social justice activist, journalist, and writer who cofounded the Catholic Worker Movement, with the aim of enabling the needy to support themselves with dignity. Day developed a concern for the poor at an early age. Her family endured the 1906 San Francisco …
After its defeat in the civil war the Republic of China (ROC), led by the Nationalist Party (or Kuomintang, KMT), fled to Taiwan, an island province, while the Chinese Communist Party ruled the mainland, called the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Fearing invasion by the PRC and to …
This country, located in central Africa, is bounded by the Republic of the Congo to the west; Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, and Uganda on the east; Zambia and Angola on the south; and Sudan and the Central African Republic on the north. The capital city is Kinshasa, which changed …
Deng Xiaoping was born on August 22, 1904. As leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Deng was not officially the leader of China but acted as such during the late 1970s until his death. Deng’s legacy was the creation of a Chinese form of socialism with limited …
During and after the cold war, the United States and the Soviet Union conducted a series of talks and signed several treaties dealing with arms control and nuclear disarmament. Arms control entails the limitation of nuclear weapons or delivery systems, while nuclear disarmament indicates the actual reduction of …
The fight against drugs dates back as far as 1880, when the United States and China signed an agreement prohibiting opium’s being shipped from one country to the other. However, it was specifically under Richard Nixon’s administration in the early 1970s that the domestic war on drugs sparked …
On the western side of Papua New Guinea (PNG) is situated West Irian, a province of Indonesia. A colony of the Netherlands after August 1828, it was known earlier as Dutch New Guinea or West New Guinea. In 1961 it was renamed Irian Barat (West Irian), and in …
One of the Western Hemisphere’s most repressive and brutal dictatorships, the successive regimes of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier (1907–71) and his son Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier (1951– ), ruled Haiti with an iron fist from 1957 to 1986, when Baby Doc was overthrown following widespread civil strife and …
The end of the cold war was the collapse of the binary international power structure instigated by the military and political rivalry of the United States and the Soviet Union in the wake of World War II. It was also a consequence of the reforms initiated by the …
The Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste, or East Timor, was a Portuguese colony until 1975. On the eve of the Portuguese departure in August 1975, a civil war broke out, leading to the deaths of 1,500 to 2,000 people. There was a unilateral declaration of independence on November 28, …
Shirin Ebadi is a democracy and human rights activist and a lawyer. She was born in northwestern Iran to a Shi’i Muslim family in 1947 and studied law at Tehran University. In 1975 she became the first woman judge in Iran and was appointed president of the Tehran …
One of the world’s most influential schools of economic thought was founded by the United Nations Economic and Social Council Resolution 106(VI) on February 25, 1948, as the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA; in Spanish, Comisión Económica para América Latina, or CEPAL), headquartered in Santiago, Chile. Under …
In 1517 Martin Luther nailed Ninety-five Theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg, a university town in the German province of Saxony, to start a debate over indulgences and related questions about Christian salvation. His action is often understood to be the beginning of the Protestant …
