General History for Colleges and High Schools

INTRODUCTORY.--The most important movement that marked the latter part of the Middle Ages was the grouping, in several of the countries of Europe, of the petty feudal states and...

THE "DIVINE RIGHT" OF KINGS AND THE "ROYAL TOUCH."--With the end of the Tudor line (see p. 561), James VI. of Scotland, son of Mary Stuart, came to the English throne, as James...

INTRODUCTORY.--The French Revolution is in political what the German Reformation is in ecclesiastical history. It was the revolt of the French people against royal despotism and...

REIGN OF COMMODUS (A.D. 180-192).--Under the wise and able administration of "the five good emperors"--Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and the two Antonines--the Roman empire reached it...

THE TUDOR PERIOD.--The Tudor period [Footnote: The Tudor sovereigns were Henry VII. (1485-1509); Henry VIII. (1509-1547); Edward VI. (1547-1553); Mary (1553-1558); and Elizabeth...

POMPEY THE GREAT IN SPAIN.--The fires of the Civil War, though quenched in Italy, were still smouldering in Spain. Sertorius, an adherent of Marius, had there stirred up the mar...

THE VEILED MILITARY DESPOTISM.--After the overthrow of the Directorial government, a new constitution--the fourth since the year 1789--was prepared, and having been submitted to...

REIGN OF AUGUSTUS CÆSAR (31 B.C. to A.D. 14).--The hundred years of strife which ended with the battle of Actium left the Roman republic, exhausted and helpless, in the hands of...

THE THREE CHIEF MATTERS.--English history since the close of the Napoleonic wars embraces a multitude of events. A short chapter covering the entire period will possess no instr...

THE TYRANTS.--In the Heroic Age the preferred form of government was a patriarchal monarchy. The _Iliad_ says, "The rule of many is not a good thing: let us have one ruler only,...

THE FIRST CONSULS.--With the monarchy overthrown and the last king and his house banished from Rome, the people set to work to reorganize the government. In place of the king, t...

GREEK ORIGIN OF ROMAN ARCHITECTURE: THE ARCH.--The architecture of the Romans was, in the main, an imitation of Greek models. But the Romans were not mere servile imitators. The...

GENERAL STATEMENT.--The Crusades were great military expeditions undertaken by the Christian nations of Europe for the purpose of rescuing from the hands of the Mohammedans the...

We have now traced the growth of the power of republican Rome, as through two centuries and more of conquest she has extended her authority, first throughout Italy, and then ove...

THE FIRST ROMAN PROVINCE.--For the twenty-three years that followed the close of the first struggle between Rome and Carthage, the two rivals strained every power and taxed ever...

CAUSES OF THE WAR.--During the closing years of the life of Pericles, the growing jealousy between Athens and Sparta broke out in the long struggle known as the Peloponnesian Wa...

EXPEDITIONS OF DARIUS AGAINST GREECE.--In narrating the history of the Persians, we told how Darius, after having subdued the revolt of his Ionian subjects in Asia Minor, turned...

KINSHIP OF THE MEDES AND PERSIANS.--It was in very remote times, that some Aryan tribes, separating themselves from the other members of the Aryan family, sought new abodes on t...

THE SEVEN SAGES; THE FORERUNNERS.--About the sixth century B.C. there lived and taught in different parts of Hellas many philosophers of real or reputed originality and wisdom....

THE GREEKS AS LITERARY ARTISTS.--It was that same exquisite sense of fitness and proportion and beauty which made the Greeks artists in marble that also made them artists in lan...

FEUDALISM DEFINED.--Feudalism is the name given to a special form of society and government, based upon a peculiar military tenure of land which prevailed in Europe during the l...

GENERAL STATEMENT.--We have already indicated (see pp. 366-7), the two periods of modern history; namely, the _Era of the Protestant Reformation_ and the _Era of the Political R...

INTRODUCTORY STATEMENT.--The Arabs, or Saracens, who are now about to play their surprising part in history, are, after the Hebrews, the most important people of the Semitic rac...

BEGINNING OF THE REFORMATION IN FRANCE.--Before Luther posted his ninety- five theses at Wittenberg, there appeared in the University of Paris and elsewhere in France men who, f...

THE ARYAN INVASION.--At the time of the great Aryan migration (see p. 4), some Aryan bands, journeying from the northwest, settled first the plains of the Indus and then occupie...

formula, is sent both to his people and to Pharaoh to proclaim the true God by this very title, and to declare that the God of the highest Egyptian theology was also the God of...

REBUILDING THE WALLS OF ATHENS.--After the Persians had been expelled from Greece, the first care of the Athenians was the rebuilding of their homes. Their next task was the res...

THE GREEK SENSE OF BEAUTY.--The Greeks were artists by nature. "Ugliness gave them pain like a blow." Everything they made was beautiful. Beauty they placed next to holiness; in...

THE DIVINE RIGHT OF KINGS.--Louis XIV. stands as the representative of absolute monarchy. This indeed was no new thing in the world, but Louis was such an ideal autocrat that so...

GENERAL STATEMENT.--Macedonia lay to the north of Greece proper. The ruling class of the country was probably of Hellenic race; at all events the Macedonian kings were allowed t...

EGYPT AND THE NILE.--Egypt comprises the delta of the Nile and the flood- plains of its lower course. The whole land is formed of the deposits of the river; hence Herodotus, in...

DIVISIONS OF ITALY.--The peninsula of Italy, like that of Greece, divides itself into three parts--Northern, Central, and Southern Italy. The first comprises the great basin of...

CHARLES' DOMINIONS.--Charles I. of Spain, better known to fame as Emperor Charles V., was the son of Philip the Handsome, Archduke of Austria, and Joanna, daughter of Ferdinand...

XXXII. Migrations and Settlements of the Teutonic Tribes. XXXIII. The Conversion of the Barbarians. XXXIV. Fusion of the Latin and Teutonic Peoples. XXXV. The Roman Empire in th...

THE COUNTRY.--The term Netherlands (low-lands) was formerly applied to all that low, marshy district in the northwest of Europe, sunk much of it below the level of the sea, now...

INTRODUCTORY.--The most important event in the history of the tribes that took possession of the Roman empire in the West was their conversion to Christianity. Many of the barba...

TIGLATH-PILESER I. (1130-1110 B.C.).--It is not until about two centuries after the conquest of Chaldæa by the Assyrian prince Tiglathi-Nin (see p. 43), that we find a sovereign...

GENERAL REMARKS.--The second great struggle between the principles of Liberalism and of Despotism, as represented by the opposing parties in the English Revolution, took place i...

NATURE AND CAUSES OF THE WAR.--The long and calamitous Thirty Years' War was the last great combat between Protestantism and Catholicism in Europe. It started as a struggle betw...

INTRODUCTORY.--In a previous chapter we traced the gradual rise of the spiritual and temporal power of the Papacy, and stated the several theories respecting its relation to sec...

INTRODUCTORY.--Without at least some little knowledge of the religious ideas and institutions of the ancient Greeks, we should find very many passages of their history wholly un...

ITALY AT THE DOWNFALL OF NAPOLEON.--The Italian people, as being the most dangerously infected with the ideas of the Revolution, were, by the reactionary Congress of Vienna, con...

ALEXANDER I. AND THE HOLY ALLIANCE.--Upon the downfall of Napoleon, Alexander I. (1801-1825) of Russia organized the celebrated union known as the _Holy Alliance_. This was a le...

CHARACTER OF THE LEGENDARY AGE.--The real history of the Greeks does not begin before the eighth century B.C. All that lies back of that date is an inseparable mixture of myth,...

INTRODUCTION.--In an early chapter of our book we told how Christianity as a system of beliefs and precepts took possession of the different nations and tribes of Europe. We pur...

BASIN OF THE TIGRIS AND EUPHRATES.-The northern part of the Tigris and Euphrates valley, the portion that comprised ancient Assyria, consists of undulating plains, broken in pla...

THE PATRIARCHAL AGE.--Hebrew history begins with the departure of Abraham out of Ur of the Chaldees, about 2000 B.C. The story of Abraham and his nephew Lot, of Isaac and his so...

FORMATION OF THE GERMAN CONFEDERATION (1815).--The German states, thirty- nine in number, were reorganized by the Congress of Vienna as a Confederation, with the emperor of Aust...

CARTHAGE AND THE CARTHAGINIAN EMPIRE.--Foremost among the cities founded by the Phoenicians upon the different shores of the Mediterranean was Carthage, upon the northern coast...

GENERAL REMARKS.--In the foregoing chapter we traced the rise and decline of the power of the Saracens. We saw the Semitic East roused for a moment to a life of tremendous energ...

EDUCATION.--Education at Sparta, where it was chiefly gymnastic, as we have seen (p. 115), was a state affair; but at Athens and throughout Greece generally, the youth were trai...

By the Revival of Learning, in the most general sense, is meant the intellectual awakening of Europe after the languor and depression of the first mediæval centuries. In a narro...

The terms imposed upon Carthage at the end of the Second Punic War left Rome mistress of the Western Mediterranean. During the fifty eventful years that elapsed between the clos...

DIVISION OF THE EMPIRE OF ALEXANDER.--There was no one who could wield the sword that fell from the hand of Alexander. It is told that, when dying, being asked to whom the kingd...

THE BEGINNINGS OF PRUSSIA.--The foundation of the Prussian Kingdom was laid in the beginning of the seventeenth century (1611) by the union of two small states in the North of G...

Northern Greece included the ancient districts of Thessaly and Epirus. Thessaly consists mainly of a large and beautiful valley, walled in on all sides by rugged mountains. It w...

RELATION OF THE CITIES TO THE FEUDAL LORDS.--When Feudalism took possession of Europe, the cities became a part of the system. Each town formed a part of the fief in which it ha...

INTRODUCTORY.--In connection with the history of the break-up of the Roman empire in the West, we have already given some account of the migrations and settlements of the German...

BABYLONIAN AFFAIRS FROM 1300 TO 625 B.C.--During the six centuries and more that intervened between the conquest of the old Chaldæan monarchy by the Assyrian king Tiglathi-Nin a...

DIVISIONS OF THE SUBJECT.--As we have already noted, the fourteen centuries since the fall of the Roman empire in the West (A.D. 476) are usually divided into two periods,--the...

INTRODUCTORY.--Having seen how the Hebrew element, that is, the ideas, beliefs, and sentiments of Christianity, became the common possession of the Latins and Teutons, it yet re...

INTRODUCTORY.--The history of the Normans--the name, it will be recalled, of the transformed Scandinavians who settled in Northern Gaul (see p. 4l3)--is simply a continuation of...

THE LAND AND THE PEOPLE.--Ancient Phoenicia embraced a little strip of broken sea-coast lying between the Mediterranean and the ranges of Mount Lebanon. One of the most noted pr...

THE HUNS AND THE HUNGARIANS.--The Huns, of whom we have already told, were the first Turanians that during historic times pushed their way in among the peoples of Europe (see p....

THE PEOPLE.--Northmen, Norsemen, Scandinavians, are different names applied in a general way to the early inhabitants of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. These people formed the nor...

THE REIGN OF JUSTINIAN (A.D. 527-565).--During the fifty years immediately following the fall of Rome, the Eastern emperors struggled hard and doubtfully to withstand the waves...

CHAPTER I. India and China. 1. India. 2. China. II. Egypt. 1. Political History. 2. Religion, Arts, and General Culture. III. Chaldæa. 1. Political History. 2. Arts and General...