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Indian school children pay homage to a portrait of Indian independence icon Mahatma Gandhi to mark the 70th anniversary of Gandhi's assassination. Gandhi was on the way to a prayer meeting in the Indian capital when he was shot three times in the chest and head on January 30, 1948.

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Assassination of Gandhi

Passive Resistance For some 50 years, Gandhi, born on October 2, 1869, and called “Mahatma” (“great‑souled” in Sanskrit), fought for India’s independence from Britain, practicing civil disobedience and peaceful protests that included fasting, boycotts and marches. He was an adherent of satyagraha (“truth‑force”), a passive political resistance he defined as “a weapon of the strongest […]

Tiananmen Square Protests

Background to Unrest The protests resulted from long‑simmering frustration with the limits on political freedom in China—given its one‑party form of government, with the Communist Party holding sway—and ongoing economic troubles. Although China’s government had instituted a number of reforms in the 1980s that established a limited form of capitalism in the country, poor and […]

China: Timeline

It’s hard to say how old Chinese culture actually is, but it’s one of the oldest that still has a presence in the modern world. Legends claim that the earliest rulers in China were the Xia Dynasty, from 2100 to 1600 B.C., with Yu as the first emperor, but there is little proof that the […]

Qing Dynasty

Fall of the Ming Dynasty Near the end of the Ming Dynasty in 1616, Manchurian forces from northeastern Asia defeated the Ming army and occupied several cities on China’s northern border. A full‑scale invasion followed. China was defeated in 1644, with Emperor Shunzhi establishing the Qing Dynasty. Many of the new Han subjects faced discrimination. […]

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How the Kim Dynasty Took Over North Korea

North Korea hasn’t always been under the totalitarian rule of the Kim regime. Foreign enablers and internal strife have completely reshaped the region over the last 100+ years, transforming a once‑peaceful monarchy into the oppressive dictatorship we know today.

How Did Emperor Hirohito Respond to the Atomic Bomb Attacks?

After the devastating bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the leadership of Japanese Emperor Hirohito was put to the test.

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Demilitarized Zone

The spread of Communism in Korea led to a battle that was brief yet bloody, and a national divide that exists to this day.

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Mohandas Gandhi

Historian Yohuru Williams gives a brief recap of the life of Mahatma Gandhi.

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General Chiang Kai-shek addresses the troops in China during World War II, circa 1943.

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China’s Overlooked Role in World War II

More than two years before German tanks blitzed Poland and four years before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, what some historians consider the start of World War II occurred in China in 1937. The country’s eight‑year war with Japan sowed the seeds for the attack on Pearl Harbor but ultimately contributed to the Allied victory […]

How Theodore Roosevelt Changed the Way America Operated in the World

When Theodore Roosevelt succeeded William McKinley as president in 1901, he was aware that America was in a different international position than it had been just a few years earlier. The United States had been a continental empire since its founding, but as a result of the Spanish‑American War in 1898, it had ventured beyond […]