NY Regents Global History and Geography II flashcards

32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.

Neolithic Revolution

The shift from hunting and gathering to settled farming about 10,000 BCE, which produced food surpluses, permanent villages, and specialized labor.

Code of Hammurabi

A Babylonian law code from about 1754 BCE that set penalties differing by social class and is a key primary source for Mesopotamian society.

Athenian democracy

A system in classical Athens where eligible male citizens voted directly on laws and policy, excluding women, slaves, and foreigners.

Pax Romana

A roughly 200-year period of Roman peace and stability begun under Augustus, marked by expanded trade, roads, and imperial administration.

Silk Roads

Overland trade networks linking China, Central Asia, and the Mediterranean that spread goods, technologies, religions, and disease such as plague.

Black Death

The bubonic plague pandemic that reached Europe in 1347 and killed roughly one-third of the population, weakening serfdom and feudal labor systems.

Mongol Empire

A vast empire founded by Genghis Khan in 1206 that secured Eurasian trade under the Pax Mongolica while spreading plague and destroying Baghdad.

Absolutism

A form of monarchy in which the ruler holds unrestricted power, often justified by divine right, as with Louis XIV of France.

Scientific Revolution

A movement from the 1500s to 1700s that replaced revelation with observation and experiment, culminating in Newton's laws of motion and gravitation.

Enlightenment

An eighteenth-century intellectual movement stressing reason, natural rights, and consent of the governed, influencing the American and French Revolutions.

Haitian Revolution

A slave revolt beginning in 1791 that ended French rule and slavery in Saint-Domingue, creating the first independent Black republic in 1804.

Industrial Revolution

The shift beginning in Britain around 1750 from handcraft to machine production in factories, driven by coal, iron, and the steam engine.

Berlin Conference

An 1884-1885 meeting of European powers that set rules for partitioning Africa without African representation, accelerating imperial conquest.

Meiji Restoration

The 1868 overthrow of Japan's Tokugawa shogunate that launched rapid industrialization and military modernization, making Japan an imperial power.

Nationalism

A strong identification with one's nation and its interests, which drove nineteenth-century unification of Italy and Germany and later imperial rivalry.

Causes of World War I

Militarism, alliances, imperialism, and nationalism, with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 as the immediate spark.

Treaty of Versailles

The 1919 peace settlement that imposed reparations and war guilt on Germany, redrew European borders, and created the League of Nations.

Bolshevik Revolution

The 1917 overthrow of Russia's tsarist government by Lenin's Bolsheviks, leading to withdrawal from World War I and creation of the Soviet Union.

Appeasement

The policy of granting concessions to aggressive powers to avoid war, notably at Munich in 1938, which failed to stop Nazi expansion.

Holocaust

The Nazi genocide during World War II that murdered about six million Jews and millions of Roma, disabled people, and other targeted groups.

Containment

The Cold War policy of limiting the spread of communism, carried out through the Truman Doctrine, Marshall Plan, NATO, and proxy conflicts.

Cuban Missile Crisis

The 1962 confrontation over Soviet missiles in Cuba, the closest the Cold War came to nuclear war, ending with a Soviet withdrawal.

Decolonization

The postwar process by which Asian and African colonies gained independence, such as India in 1947 and many African nations in the 1960s.

Glasnost and perestroika

Gorbachev's reforms of openness and economic restructuring in the 1980s that weakened Soviet control and preceded the USSR's 1991 collapse.

Globalization

The growing worldwide interconnection of economies, cultures, and information through trade, investment, migration, and the internet since the late twentieth century.

Demographic transition

A model describing the shift from high birth and death rates to low ones as a society industrializes, passing through a stage of rapid population growth.

Push and pull factors

Conditions that drive people from a place, such as war or famine, versus conditions that attract them, such as jobs, safety, and education.

Cultural diffusion

The spread of ideas, languages, religions, and technologies between societies through trade, migration, conquest, and communication.

Map projection

A method of representing Earth's curved surface on a flat map; Mercator distorts area near the poles while Robinson balances shape and area.

Sourcing a document

Identifying a document's author, date, audience, and purpose before using it, in order to judge its perspective and reliability.

Contextualization

Placing a document or event in its historical time and place by explaining the political, economic, social, and cultural conditions surrounding it.

Enduring issues

Recurring problems across history, such as power, inequality, conflict, scarcity, migration, and human rights, traced across multiple times and places.