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Why did Britain and France declare war on Germany?

World War II began in 1939 and continued for six years until officially ending on May 8, 1945. Through the course of WWII, Adolf Hitler captured and enslaved Jewish residents in every country that his troops overthrew. Those who weren't enslaved were starved and eventually executed. It took combined forces to liberate the Jewish population from German concentration camps and to defeat Hitler.

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How long was the Berlin Wall?

Construction of the Berlin Wall began in 1961. The Communist government of the German Democratic Republic, as East Germany was officially known, placed the wall inside East German territory. Over the decades of the wall's existence, numerous improvements were made to prohibit escape or emigration from East Germany. The most visible portion of the border controls was the wall itself. The fourth and final upgrade was constructed from 1975 to 1980, and consisted of 12 foot high concrete slabs backed by watchtowers, dog patrols, barbed wire and a cleared "death strip" that made shooting tresp..

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Why were pilgrimages important in the Middle Ages?

Throughout the Middle Ages, theChristian pilgrimage was a recognized expression of a person's piety. The economic background or social status of the person did not matter because all people of faith made these pilgrimages.The pilgrimages were essential for Christians who wanted to feel close to Jesus. While the King James Version of the Bible states in Matthew 18:20 that Jesus says, "Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them," the people wanted to see where he had lived and grown up. The pilgrimages took them to the Holy Land. During the fourth c..

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Why did Great Britain enter WWII?

Great Britain had suffered terribly in World War I. As Great Britain and France were keen to do everything possible to avoid a repeat of that conflict, they made an attempt to appease Hitler by allowing aggression against Austria and Czechoslovakia to go unchecked. By the time Germany had begun to mobilize against Poland, it had already successfully taken over both of those nations.\nHitler had much more conquering in mind and his plans for additional land acquisition was not known by the rest of the world. When Hitler signed a pact with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in August 1939, Great Britai..

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Was the Virginia Plan favored by the smaller states?

The Virginia Plan called for two houses in the legislature with the number of representatives from each state in both houses reflecting that state's population. The New Jersey Plan called for one house in the legislature with each state having equal representation in the body. A compromise was finally reached: a two-house legislature with the upper house having two senators from each state and the lower house comprised of representatives based on each state's population.

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Where did the Transcontinental Railroad meet?

The Central Pacific built eastward, starting from Sacramento, California, and the Union Pacific built westward from the west side of the Missouri River. Although commissioned by President Lincoln in 1862, the Transcontinental Railroad project was delayed by the Civil War, and construction didn't start in earnest until 1865. Crews composed primarily of Chinese immigrants, Irish immigrants and Civil War veterans labored for four more years to build the 1,776-mile railroad.

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Who designed the QWERTY keyboard layout?

No one is entirely sure why Sholes chose to lay out his keyboard in the way he did, with several of the more popular letters, including E, N, R and T, not on the "home spaces" at the center of the keyboard. One theory is that he wanted to avoid jams by keeping common letter pairings, such as "th" or "he" separated. Yet, "e" and "r," one of the most common pairings, are right next to one another. Even with the move to electronic typing, the QWERTY layout has remained popular, likely due to the difficulty of learning a new system once one has been learned.

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What routes did Vasco Nunez de Balboa take?

It took over a month for Balboa and his men to make this journey. To reward Balboa for this feat, King Ferdinand II made him governor of the provinces of Panama and Coiba.Vasco Nunez de Balboa was born in 1475. In 1511, Balboa helped to establish the settlement of Darien, which became the first Spanish settlement in South America. He was beheaded in 1519 after being falsely accused of treason.

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Who invented the Internet?

ARPANET was the culmination of decades of thought and work, starting with Vannevar Bush's 1945 concept of a digitized library for organizing and sifting through U.S. Department of Defense data. Mike Wingfield and Larry Roberts designed the first hardware, and Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf invented TCP and IP. Paul Baran, Donald Davies and Leonard Kleinrock invented packet switching. These technologies are the bedrock of Internet architecture.\nTim Berners-Lee brought this architecture to the public with the invention of the World Wide Web. Using the existing architecture of ARPANET's I..

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What was the "one-drop" rule?

In colonial America, it was not uncommon for free blacks to intermarry with white European immigrants, resulting in several melungeon, or mixed, cultural groups that settled mostly in the Appalachians. Because there had been so much intermarriage early on, antebellum Southern lawmakers resisted a one-drop rule. However, during the Jim Crow era, there was a push for miscegenation laws that made defining races legally necessary. The Black Power movements of the 1960s also adopted the one-drop rule, counting anyone with black African ancestry as African-American.

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