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The Black Death was one of the most devastating pandemics in human history in Europe between 1348 and 1350.

3. When Spain tried to invade and conquer England it was a fiasco, and the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 associated Elizabeth's name forever with what is popularly viewed as one of the greatest victories in English history.

4. The capture and subsequent trial of Charles led to his beheading in January 1649 at Whitehall Gate in London, making England a republic. The trial and execution of Charles by his own subjects shocked the rest of Europe (the king argued to the end that only God could judge him) and was a precursor of sorts to the beheading of Louis XVI 145 years later.

5. The New Model Army, under the command of Oliver Cromwell, then scored decisive victories against Royalist armies in Ireland and Scotland. Cromwell was given the title Lord Protector in 1653, making him 'king in all but name' to his critics.

6. The Battle of Waterloo was fought on Sunday 18 June 1815 near Waterloo in present-day Belgium. Imperial French army under the command of Emperor Napoleon was defeated by combined armies of the Seventh Coalition, an Anglo-Allied army under the command of the Duke of Wellington combined with a Prussian army under the command of Gebhard von Blucher. It was the culminating battle of the Waterloo Campain and Napoleon's last. The defeat at Waterloo put an end to Napoleon's rule as Emperor of the French and marked the end of his Hundred Days' return from exile.

7. Charles Robert Darwin (1809 – 1882) was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection. He published his theory with compelling evidence for evolution in his 1859 book “On the Origin of Species”.

8. The 1926 general strike in the United Kingdom lasted nine days, from 4 May 1926 to 13 May 1926. It was called by the general council of the Trade Union Congress) in an unsuccessful attempt to force the British Government to act to prevent wage reduction and worsening conditions for coal miners.

9. The Blitz (from German, "lightning") was the sustained strategic bombing of Britain by Nazi Germany between 7 September 1940 and 10 May 1941, during the Second World War. The city of London was bombed by the Luftwaffe for 76 consecutive nights and many towns and cities across the country followed. More than one million London houses were destroyed or damaged, and more than 40,000 civilians were killed, half of them in London.

 

Active vocabulary

 

Pay attention to the ready structures like:

their own idea of the past

take for granted

all banners flying

poised on the edge of

suffer considerable bomb damage

civilian victims of bombing

colossal fracture in our history

dig up the ancient cities

be enshrined in law

amateur historian

common ancestry


Date: 2015-01-02; view: 928


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