History Fanaticos - Prepare for the future, learn from the past

Vietnam war is regarded to be one of the most controversial and divisive wars in the American history, which left numerous implications on the present-day American society. Americans were present in Vietnam for nearly 30 years, from 1944 to 1973. The US supported French attempt to subjugate their former colony and to stop the spread of communism. However, the French had lost the war by 1954, while Ho Chi Minh established the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the northern part of the country. Consequently, the US supported the creation of the rival state in the southern part of Vietnam, the Republic of Vietnam. Despite the fact that Americans helped, advised and financed South Vietnamese army, they were losing their positions. This led to the direct American involvement in 1965. However, after the 1968 Tet Offensive, the Americans started to withdrawn from Vietnam, which completed in 1973. The war ended in 1975 after the victory of the North Vietnamese Army, which reunited the divided...

This post briefly represents the total number of deaths in the WWII, which was the most monstrous and disastrous conflict in the human history. The biggest difference between WWI and WWII is that there is a great discrepancy between numbers of civilian casualties, which made WWII extremely ruthless and genocidal. Country Military Civilian Total USSR 12 million 17 million 29 million Poland 597,000 5.86 million 6.27 million Germany 3.25 million 2.44 million 5.69 million Yugoslavia 305,000 1.35 million 1.66 million Romania 450,000 465,000 915,000 Hungary 200,000 600,000 800,000 France 245,000 350,000 595,000 Italy 380,000 153,000 533,000 Great Britain 403,000 92,700 495,000 United States 407,000 6,000 413,000 Czechoslovakia ...

In December of 1937, the Japanese Imperial Army marched into China's capital city of Nanking and proceeded to murder 300,000 out of 600,000 civilians and soldiers in the city. The six weeks of carnage would become known as the Rape of Nanking and represented the single worst atrocity during the World War II era in either the European or Pacific theaters of war. The actual military invasion of Nanking was preceded by a tough battle at Shanghai that began in the summer of 1937. Chinese forces there put up surprisingly stiff resistance against the Japanese Army which had expected an easy victory in China. The Japanese had even bragged they would conquer all of China in just three months. The stubborn resistance by the Chinese troops upset that timetable, with the battle dragging on through the summer into late fall. This infuriated the Japanese and whetted their appetite for the revenge that was to follow at Nanking. After finally defeating the Chinese at Shangha...

By the early 1990s, Rwanda, a small country with an overwhelmingly agricultural economy, had one of the highest population densities in Africa. About 85 percent of its population is Hutu; the rest is Tutsi, along with a small number of Twa, a Pygmy group who were the original inhabitants of Rwanda. Part of German East Africa from 1894 to 1918, Rwanda came under the League of Nations mandate of Belgium after WWI, along with neighboring Burundi. Rwanda’s colonial period, during which the ruling Belgians favored the minority Tutsis over the Hutus, exacerbated the tendency of the few to oppress the many, creating a legacy of tension that exploded into violence even before Rwanda gained its independence. A Hutu revolution in 1959 forced as many as 300,000 Tutsis to flee the country, making them an even smaller minority. By early 1961, victorious Hutus had forced Rwanda’s Tutsi monarch into exile and declared the country a republic. After a U.N. referendum that same year, Belgium officia...

        Ukraine, a country divided between East and West, had numerous difficult historical episodes. It is located in Eastern Europe, bordered to the north and east by Russia and Belarus, to the west by Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Moldova, and to the south by the Black Sea and Sea of Azov. The modern Ukraine is divided in two parts by the Dnieper (Dnipro) River, which flows from north to south and into the Black Sea. This division is very important because Dnipro River constituted a border between Russian and Polish-Lithuanian controlled areas of Ukraine, and it still encounters references to Left Bank (eastern) and Right Bank (western) Ukraine. Ukrainian cossacks             Ukraine’s rich history dates far into the pre-historical period, but in terms of the first kind of state which arose on the Ukrainian territory it is important to mention Kievan Rus, from the 9 th century AD. Later on, from 1240 to 1660s, mo...

The story of the Congo is one of the most fascinating stories about European greed and lust for the vast African resources in the era of the expanding European colonial empires. It was an inspiration for the famous novel "Heart of Darkness", written by Joseph Conrad, which was later on an inspiration for the 1979 movie hit "Apocalypse Now", starring Marlon Brando and Martin Sheen (just in case you did not know). Since the 16 th century, the Congo River estuary had been a slave port, and most of the country was colonized by the late 1800s.  However, the rule of Belgian King Leopold II would be the most oppressive and terrorizing rule that Congolese people had ever seen. In the early years of his reign, he displayed an interest in African territories, which would eventually result in calling a conference in 1876, when he summoned famous humanitarians and travellers to come to Brussels. The conference had to show Leopold’s alleged philanthropic intentions, w...