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A typical academic classification

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• etc.

You may also want to see dubious historical resources and historical myths for a list of false beliefs and histories which were once or are now popular and widespread, but which are proven to be false or dubious.

Guidelines for history on Wikipedia can be found at Wikipedia:History.

• Archaeology
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• List of historians
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• Pseudohistory for more about uncritical history.

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Many scholars believe the Albanian people are the direct descendants of a group of tribes known as the Illyrians, who arrived in the Balkans around 2000 BC. They intermingled and made war with the Greeks, Thracians, and Macedonians before succumbing to Roman rule around the time of Jesus Christ.

Following the split of the Roman Empire in 395, the Byzantine Empire established its control over present-day Albania. It was during this time (1043) that the Byzantine Emperor, Alexius I Comnenus made the first recorded reference to a people called the Albanians.

All the Illyrian tribes except the Albanians disappeared during the Dark Ages under the waves of migrating barbarians. A forbidding mountain homeland and resilient tribal society enabled the Albanians to survive into modern times with their identity and their Indo-European language intact.

Ottoman supremacy in the Balkan region began in 1385 but was briefly interrupted in the 15th century, when an Albanian warrior known as Skenderbeg united his countrymen and fought-off Turkish rule from 1443-1478. Upon the Ottomans' return, a large number of Albanians fled to Italy, Greece and Egypt and many of the Albanians who remained (about two-thirds of the Albanian population), converted to the Islamic faith. Many Albanians won fame and fortune as soldiers, administrators, and merchants in far-flung parts of the empire. As the centuries passed, however, Ottoman rulers lost the capacity to command the loyalty of local pashas, who governed districts on the empire's fringes. Soon pressures created by emerging national movements among the empire's farrago of peoples threatened to shatter the empire itself. The Ottoman rulers of the nineteenth century struggled in vain to shore up central authority, introducing reforms aimed at harnessing unruly pashas and checking the spread of nationalist ideas.

At the end of the 19th century, efforts by the Turks to suppress Albanian nationalism failed. Albanians had created The Prizen League, attempting to unify Albanian territory and established the current-day Albanian alphabet. Following the conclusion of the First Balkan War, Albanians issued the Vlorë Proclamation of November 28, 1912, declaring independence. Albania was internationally recognized as an independent state in 1913.

Albania's territorial integrity was confirmed at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, after U.S. President Woodrow Wilson dismissed a plan by the European powers to divide Albania amongst its neighbors.

With the complete collapse of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires after World War I, the Albanians looked to Italy for protection against predators. After 1925, however, Benito Mussolini sought to dominate Albania. In 1928 Albania became a kingdom under Zog I, the conservative Muslim clan chief and former prime minister, but Zog failed to stave off Italian ascendancy in Albanian internal affairs. In 1939 Mussolini's troops occupied Albania, overthrew Zog, and annexed the country.

Albanian communists and nationalists fought each other as well as the occupying Italian and German forces during World War II, and with Yugoslav and Allied assistance the communists triumphed.

Following the Second World War, in which both Italy and Germany occupied Albania, communism became the prevailing political ideology within Albania and remained an influential part of its culture for the next 50 years.

Communist strongmen Enver Hoxha and Mehmet Shehu eliminated their rivals inside the communist party and liquidated anticommunist opposition. Concentrating primarily on maintaining their grip on power, they reorganized the country's economy along strict Stalinist lines, turning first to Yugoslavia, then to the Soviet Union, and later to the People's Republic of China for support. In pursuit of their goals, the communists repressed the Albanian people, subjecting them to isolation, propaganda, and brutal police measures. When Communist China opened up to the West in the 1970s, Albania's rulers turned away from Beijing and implemented a policy of strict autarky, or self-sufficiency, that brought their nation economic ruin.

Hoxha's death in 1985 and the fall of communism throughout south central Europe led to widespread changes within Albanian society. The Albanian Government began to seek closer ties with the West in order to improve economic conditions, and initial democratic reforms were introduced including multi-party elections in 1991. Pursuant to a 1991 interim basic law, Albanians ratified a constitution in 1998, establishing a democratic system of government based upon the rule of law and guaranteeing the protection of fundamental human rights. Although Albania has made strides toward democratic reform and maintaining the rule of law, serious deficiencies in the electoral code remain to be addressed.

Related articles

• Timeline of Albanian history to 1993
• Timeline of Albanian history from 1994
• History of Europe
• History of present-day nations and states

External links

Reference

In 1500 Pedro Alvares Cabral, a Portuguese navigator, is generally credited as the first European to reach Brazil. The colony was thinly settled by various indigenous tribes. Only a few have survived to the present, mostly in the Amazon basin.

In the next centuries, Portuguese colonists gradually pushed inland, bring large numbers of African slaves. (Slavery was not abolished until 1888.) Brazil was developed as a commercial colony, based to a large extent on slavery.

The King of Portugal, fleeing before Napoleon's army, moved the seat of government to Brazil in 1808. Brazil thereupon became a kingdom under Dom Joao VI. Although the royal family returned to Portugal in 1821, the interlude led to a growing desire for independence amongst Brazilians, In 1822, the son of Dom Joao VI, then prince-regent Dom Pedro I, proclaimed the independence, September 7, 1882, and was crowned emperor. The second emperor, Dom Pedro II, was deposed in 1889, and a republic was proclaimed, called the United States of Brazil. (In 1967 the country was renamed the Federative Republic of Brazil.)

On November 15 1889, Deodoro da Fonseca declared the Republic, and deposed the king, Dom Pedro II, assuming the govern of the country.

From 1889 to 1930, the government was a constitutional democracy, with the presidency alternating between the dominant states of Sao Paulo and Minas Gerais. This period ended with a military coup that placed Getúlio Vargas, a civilian, in the presidency; Vargas remained as dictator until 1945.

Brazil received an influx of over 5 million immigrants in the late 19th, early 20th centuries, a period that also saw Brazil industrialise and further expand into its interior.

A military junta took control in 1930; dictatorial power was assumed by Getulio Vargas, until finally forced out by the military in 1945. Since 1930, successive governments have pursued industrial and agriculture growth and development of the vast interior.

Just as the 1889 regime change led to a decade of unrest and painful adjustment, so too did the revolts of 1930. Provisional President Getúlio Dorneles Vargas ruled as dictator (1930-34), congressionally elected president (1934-37), and again dictator (1937-45), with the backing of his revolutionary coalition. He also served as a senator (1946-51) and the popularly elected president (1951-54). Vargas was a member of the gaucho-landed oligarchy and had risen through the system of patronage and clientelism, but he had a fresh vision of how Brazilian politics could be shaped to support national development. He understood that with the breakdown of direct relations between workers and owners in the expanding factories of Brazil, workers could become the basis for a new form of political power—populism. Using such insights, he would gradually establish such mastery over the Brazilian political world that he would stay in power for fifteen years. During those years, the preeminence of the agricultural elites ended, new urban industrial leaders acquired more influence nationally, and the middle class began to show some strength.

A democratic regime prevailed 1945-1964, during which the capital was moved from Rio de Janeiro to Brasilia. If corporatism was the hallmark of the 1930s and 1940s, populism, nationalism, and developmentalism characterized the 1950s and early 1960s. Each of these contributed to the crisis that gripped Brazil and resulted in the authoritarian regime after 1964.

One of the world's most populated urban centers, São Paulo epitomizes the contradictions of modern Brazil, a country with one of the world's most inequitable distributions of wealth. A dynamic, modern city with a sizable middle and upper class, the city center is nonetheless surrounded by high-poverty, high-crime "favelas" or shantytowns. Uneven development and huge disparties between rich and poor are pressing themes in Brazilian history.

In 1964, President Joao Goulart instituted policies that aggravated Brazil's elites; he was overthrown by a military coup. The next five presidents were all military leaders. Censorship was imposed, and much of the opposition was suppressed amid charges of torture. Democratic presidential elections were held in 1985 as the nation returned to civilian rule. Fernando Collor de Mello was elected president in December 1989. In September 1992 Collor was impeached for corruption; he later resigned. Acting president Itamar Franco was sworn in as president. In elections held on October 3, 1994, Fernando Henrique Cardoso was elected president. Reelected in 1998, he guided Brazil through a wave of financial crises.

Highly unequal income distribution remains a pressing problem. By the 1990s, more than one out of four Brazilians continued to survive on less than one dollar a day. These socio-economic contradictions helped usher Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil's first elected leftwing president, into the presidency in 2003.

Sima Qian's account, Records of the Grand Historian, dates the founding of the Xia to some 4,000 years ago, however this date has not yet been corroborated. Some archaeologists connect the Xia to excavations at Erlitou in central Henan province, where a bronze smelter from around 2000 BC was unearthed. Early markings from this period, found on pottery and shells, are alleged to be ancestors of modern Chinese language, however these claims are unsupported. With no clear, written records such as the Shang's oracle bones or the Zhou bronze vessel writings, the Xia remains poorly understood.

At present, archaeological findings provide evidence for the existence of at least the Shang (1600-1046 BC). Shang archaeological evidence is divided into two sets. The first, from the earlier Shang (circa 1600 to 1300) comes from sources at Erligang, Zhengzhou and Shangcheng. The second set, from the later Shang or Yin period consists of a large body of oracle bone writings. Anyang, Henan (1300-1046 BC), has been confirmed as the last of the six capitals of the Shang.

Historians living in the Imperial Chinese period were accustomed to the notion of one dynasty succeeding each other, while the actual political situation in early China is known to be much more complicated. Hence, as some scholars of China suggest the Xia and the Shang can possibly refer to political entities that existed at the same time just as the later Zhou (successor state of the Shang), is known to have existed at the same time as the Shang.

By the end of 2nd millennium BC, the Zhou began to emerge in the Huanghe valley, overrunning the Shang. The Zhou appeared to have begun their rule under a semi-feudal system. Nevertheless, power became decentralized during the Spring and Autumn Period when larger states assimilated smaller states. The Hundred schools of thoughts of Chinese philosophy and knowledge blossomed during this period, which saw the foundation of Confucianism, Daoism, Legalism and Mohism. As the political consolidation continued, there remained seven prominent states by the end of 5th century BC, and the period in which these few states battled each other is known as the period of the Warring States. Though there a nominal Zhou king remained until 256 BC, his position was largely one of title, and he held little power.

Meanwhile neighboring territories of these warring states were gradually annexed, including areas of modern Sichuan and Liaoning, and governed under the new local administrative system of commandery and prefecture (郡縣), which had been in use since the Spring and Autumn Period and was very loosely a primitive prototype of modern system of Sheng Xian (province and county). A further expansion began during the reign of Ying Zheng, the king of Qin managed to conquer the other states and proclaimed himself the First emperor of Qin (Qin Shi Huang Di) after his unification and annexations in modern regions of Zhejiang, Fujian, Guangdong and Guangxi in 214 BC, thereby the Chinese empire was formed under the Qin Dynasty.

Though unified reign of Qin Dynasty lasted only 12 years, he managed to subdue great parts of what constitutes the core of Han Chinese residence and to unite them under a tightly centralized government seated in Xian. His sons, however, were not as successful; soon the Qin ended, the Qin imperial structure collapsed.

The Han Dynasty emerged in 202 BC - it was the first dynasty to embrace Confucianism, which became the ideological underpinning of all regimes until the end of imperial China. Under the Han dynasty, the Chinese civilization experienced a giant leap on historiography, arts and science. Emperor Wu of Han China (Han Wudi) consolidated and extended the Chinese empire by pushing back the Xiongnu (sometimes identified with the Huns) into the steppes of modern Inner Mongolia and wrested modern areas of Gansu, Ningxia and Qinghai from Xiongnu, which in turn facilitated the first time ever opening of the Silk Road — trading connections between China and the occident.

Nevertheless land acquisitions by elite families had gradually drained the tax base. In AD 9 the usurper Wang Mang founded the short-lived Xin Dynasty and zealously redistributed land to peasants and put groundbreaking monetary and economical reforms into effect; however his reformations were never supported by land-holding families and, though aided the peasant and lesser gentry, was too vigorous and constantly modified such that chaos and upraisings broke loose. Emperor Guangwu of Han China reinstated the Han dynasty with the support of land-holding and merchant families at Luoyang, which located east of Xian and hence coined the new era Eastern Han Dynasty. Han power declined again in the midst of land acquisitions, invasions and struggles of consort clans and eunuchs. Yellow Turban Rebellion broke out in AD 184, ushering in an era of warlords. In the ensuing turmoil, three states tried to gain predominance in the Period of the Three Kingdoms.

Though these three kingdoms were reunited temporarily in AD 280 (Western) Jin by the (Western) Jin dynasty, the contemporary non-Han Chinese (Wu Hu) ethnicities ravaged the country since early 4th century and provoked large-scale Han Chinese migrations to south of the Chang Jiang. In 303, Di ethnicity rebelled and later captured Chengdu. Xiongnu under Liu Yuan rebelled near today Linfen County; his successor Liu Cong captured and executed the last two Western Jin emperors. More than Sixteen states were established by these ethnic groups. The chaotic north was temporarily unified by Fu Jian and later by Emperor Taiwu of Northern Wei after the former was defeated at the Battle of Feishui. The later started off a sequence of local regimes, all ruled over regions north of Chang Jiang and hence coined the Northern Dynasties.

Along with the immigrants and residents of the south, Emperor Yuan of Jin China reinstated the Jin regime at Nanjing which later developed into the sequence of Southern dynasties of Song, Qi, Liang and Chen that all seated at Jiangkang (near today Nanjing). China was ruled by two independent dynasties, one in the south and the other in the north, and hence coined the era of Southern and Northern Dynasties. The short-lived Sui Dynasty managed to reunite the country in AD 589 after almost 300 years of disjunction.

In AD 618, the Tang dynasty was established and a new age of flourishing began. Buddhism, which had slowly seeped into China in the first century, became the prominent religion and widely adopted by the royal family. Xian, the national capital, was supposedly the world's biggest city. Finally, however, the Tang dynasty declined as well and another time of political chaos followed, the Five dynasties and the Ten kingdoms. The Tang and Han are often referenced as the prosperous ages of China; the Tang, similar to the Han, also established jurisdiction on trade routes.

In AD 960, the Song Dynasty (960-1279) gained power over most of China and established its capital in Kaifeng whereas the Khitan Liao Dynasty ruled over modern Manchuria and eastern Mongolia. In AD 1115 the Jurchen Jin Dynasty (1115-1234) emerged to prominence. Not only did it annihilate the Liao Dynasty in 10 years, the Song also lost power over northern China and Kaifeng to the Jin Dynasty and moved its capital to Hangzhou. The Southern Song Dynasty also suffered the humiliation of having to acknowledge the Jin Dynasty as formal overlords. In the ensuing years China was divided between the Song Dynasty, the Jin Dynasty, and the Tangut Western Xia. Southern Song was a period of great technological development which can be explained in part by the military pressure that it felt from the north.

Zhu Yuanzhang, (Hongwu Emperor of China or Hong-wu) the founder of the dynasty, laid the foundations for a state disinterested in commerce and more interested in extracting revenues from the agricultural sector. Perhaps because of his background as a peasant, the Ming economic system emphasized agriculture, unlike that of Song, which had preceded the Mongolian and relied on traders and merchant for revenues. Neo-feudal land-tenure developments of Song and Mongol period were expropriated with the establishment of the Ming. Great landed estates were confiscated by the government, fragmented, and rented out; and private slavery was forbidden. Consequently, after the death of Yongle Emperor of China, independent peasant landholders predominated in Chinese agriculture. These laws might have paved the way to social harmony and removed the worst of the poverty during the previous regimes. The laws against the merchants and the restrictions under which the craftsmen worked, remained essentially as they had been under the Song, but now the remaining foreign merchants before Ming era also fell under these new laws, and their influence quickly dwindled.

The emperor's role became even more autocratic, although Zhu Yuanzhang necessarily continued to use what he called the Grand Secretaries to assist with the immense paperwork of the bureaucracy, which included memorials (petitions and recommendations to the throne), imperial edicts in reply, reports of various kinds, and tax records.

During the Mongol rule, the population had dropped 40 percent, to an estimated 60 million. Two centuries later it had doubled. Urbanization thus progressed as population grew and as the division of labor grew more intricate. Large urban centers, such as Nanjing and Beijing contributed to the growth of private industry as well. In particular, small-scale industries grew specialized often in paper, silk, cotton and porcelain goods. For the most part, however, relatively small urban centers with markets proliferated around the country rather than the growth of a few large cities. Town markets mainly traded food with some necessary manufactures such as pins or oil.

The most extraordinary venture, however, during this stage was the dispatch Zheng He's seven naval expeditions, which traversed the Indian Ocean and the Southeast Asian archipelago. An ambitious Muslim eunuch of Mongol descent and a quintessential outsider in the establishment of Confucian scholar elites, Zheng He led seven maritime expeditions from 1405 to 1433 with six of them under the auspices of Emperor Yongle, probing down into the South Seas, across the Indian Ocean and traversing perhaps as the Cape of Good Hope. His appointment in 1403 to lead a sea-faring task force was a triumph the commercial lobbies seeking to stimulate conventional trade, not mercantilism. The interests of the commercial lobbies and those of the religious lobbies were also linked. Both offensive of the neo-Confucian sensibilities of the scholarly elite, religious lobbies encouraged commercialism and exploration to divert state funds from the anti-clerical efforts of the Confucian scholar gentry. The first expedition in 1405 consisted of 62 ships and 28,000 men — then the largest naval expedition in history. Zheng He's multi-decked ships carried up to 500 troops but also cargoes of export goods, mainly silks and porcelains, and brought back foreign luxuries such as spices and tropical woods.

By the end of the 15th century, Chinese imperial subjects were forbidden from either building oceangoing ships or leaving the country. The consensus among historians of the early 21st century is that this measure was taken in response to piracy and in any case restrictions on emigration and shipbuilding were largely lifted by the mid-17th century.

Some historians have viewed the Qing as continuing the decline started in the Ming, while others have argued that the early and mid-Qing were periods of growth rather than decline. Emperor Kangxi commanded the most complete dictionary of Chinese characters ever put together at the time, and under Emperor Qianlong, the compilation of a catalogue of all important works on Chinese culture was made. The Qing Dynasty also continued the growth of popular literature such as the Dream of the Red Mansions and agricultural advances such as triple cropping of rice which caused the population of China to more than double from between 180 million in 1700 to 400 million in 1800.

During the 19th century, Qing control weakened, and prosperity diminished. China suffered massive social strife, economic stagnation, explosive population growth, and Western penetration and influence. Britain's desire to continue its illegal opium trade with China collided with imperial edicts prohibiting the addictive drug, and the First Opium War erupted in 1840. China lost the war; subsequently, Britain and other Western powers, including the United States, forcibly occupied "concessions" and gained special commercial privileges. Hong Kong was ceded to Britain in 1842 under the Treaty of Nanjing. In addition, the Taiping rebellion and Nian rebellions, along with a Russian-supported Muslim separatist movements in Mongolia and Muslim Xinjiang, drained Chinese resources and almost toppled the dynasty.

China was not a backward country unable to secure the prerequisite stability and security for western-style commerce, but a highly advanced empire unwilling to admit western and often drug-pushing commerce, which may explain the West's contentment with informal "Spheres of Influences". China, unlike tropical Africa, was a securable market without formal control. Following the First Opium War, British commerce, and later capital invested by other newly industrializing powers, was securable with a smaller degree of formal control than in Southeast Asia, West Africa, and the Pacific. In many respects, China was a colony and a large-scale receptacle of Western capital investments. Western powers did intervene military there to quell domestic chaos, such as the horrific Taiping Rebellion and the anti-imperialist Boxer Rebellion. For instance, General Gordon, later the imperialist 'martyr' in the Sudan, was often accredited as having saved the Manchu dynasty from the Taiping insurrection.

By the 1860s, the Qing dynasty had put down the rebellions with the help of militia organized by the Chinese gentry. The Qing dynasty then proceeded to deal with problem of modernization, which it attempted with the Self-Strengthening Movement. In the Sino-French War (1883-1885) and the Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895), the New Armies created by the Qing were defeated, which produced calls for greater and more extensive reform.

• The History of the People's Republic of China and the History of the Republic of China/History of Taiwan for their respective histories after 1949.
• List of China-related topics for a collection of Wikipedia articles on China.
• Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (chinese) for discussions and improvements on how to correctly name Chinese related articles. Those standards should be followed to provide a uniform title format.
• Chinese sovereign for comprehensive lists and proper naming conventions of Chinese rulers.
• Ethnic groups in Chinese history for lists of other groups of people usually not considered as Han Chinese.
• Chinese historiography for an article on scholarship influenced by post-modernism and periodization.
• Timeline of Chinese history for a chronological list of major events and figures.
• History of Hong Kong
• History of Macau

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