Encyclopedia of World History W

The Ancient World

Wang Mang (45 b.c.e.–23 c.e.) Chinese usurper Wang Mang’s fame derived from his failed attempt to establish a dynasty called Xin (Hsin), meaning “new,” between 9 and 23 c.e. when the Han dynasty divided into two parts, the Western, or Former, Han (202 b.c.e.– 9 c.e.) and the Eastern, or Later, Han (25–220 c.e.). His rise refl ected the great power the families of imperial consorts of Han rulers often enjoyed, leading to his usurpation of the Han throne. The Wang family was gentry; some of its male members served in the civil service, but its rise to power was due to the selection of one of its daughters. Wang Chengjun (Wang Cheng-chun) was sent to the harem of the future emperor Yuandi (Yuan-ti) and bore him a son in 51 b.c.e., for which she was made empress. When her husband died in 33 b.c.e. and was succeeded by her 18- year-old son, she gained the powerful position of empress dowager. Her longevity and the youth and short life span of her son and his successors enabled her to dominate the Han government and to appoint her family members to the most important offi ces of the land. After the death of all her brothers the now Grand Empress Dowager Wang appointed her nephew Wang Mang regent, then acting emperor. Finally he proclaimed himself emperor of a new dynasty called Xin (Hsin) in 9 c.e., crushing revolts by loyalists of the Han dynasty. As emperor, Wang Mang made drastic changes to the government, rationalizing his changes on his interpretations of Confucian teachings. He thus reinstituted feudalism, made many offi ces hereditary, nationalized land, changed the monetary system, and made laws that discriminated against the merchants. Although many of his changes were unenforceable and were soon rescinded, they nevertheless provoked popular discontent. His attempts to change the relationship with the nomadic Xiongnu (Hsiung-nu) and Central Asian states produced unrest along the borders. Finally, even nature turned against his regime: droughts in the capital region, breaks of the Yellow River dikes, extensive fl ooding due to a change of the course of the Yellow River, and other natural disasters resulted in famine and revolts. The most serious peasant revolt was called the Red Eyebrow Rebellion. Several princes of the imperial Liu clan rose to lead the rebel forces in 22 c.e., and Wang Mang was killed the following year. Two more years of civil war ended in the restoration of the Han dynasty in 25 c.e. Although some of his reforms were well intentioned, Wang Mang is remembered in history as a usurper, and Chinese historians do not recognize his brief Xin dynasty as legitimate. See also Guangwu (Kuang-wu). Further reading: Sargent, Clyde B. Wang Mang: A Translation of the Offi cial Account of His Rise to Power Given in the History of the Former Han Dynasty. Shanghai, China: Graphic Art Book, 1947; Twitchett, Denis, and Michael Loewe, eds. The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 1, The Ch’in and Han Empires, 221 B.C.–A.D. 220. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Jiu-Hwa Lo Upshur W 485 Way of the Sea See King’s Highway and Way of the Sea. Wei Man (Wiman) (second century b.c.e.) founder of Korean state Wei Man came from northern China and lived in the second century b.c.e. He staged an unsuccessful uprising against the newly established Han dynasty in 195 b.c.e. and fl ed with 1,000 followers to the northern Korean peninsula, where he founded a state called Caoxian (Ch’ao-hsien) in Chinese—the name is anglicized as Choson, one of the names by which Korea is called. His capital was close to modern Pyongyang, capital of modern North Korea. Choson was a sinicized state, refl ecting the accelerated penetration of Chinese economic, military, and political power into the Korean peninsula since the late Warring States era in China in the third century b.c.e. With superior military and economic strength, Wei Man’s successors (who controlled highly developed ironworks) were able to expand the kingdom throughout the northern part of the Korean peninsula against Korean tribes. The killing of a Chinese envoy by Choson soldiers and the harboring of Han deserters by Chosen led to war between the two states. A Chinese force invaded Choson in 109 b.c.e. and forced its surrender in 108 b.c.e. after the assassination of King Ugo, Wei Man’s grandson. The establishment of four commanderies in Korea followed the destruction of Choson; they were administered as territories of the Han dynasty. See also Han Wudi (Han Wu-ti); Zhou (Chou) dynasty. Further reading: Gardiner, K. H. J. The Early History of Korea. Canberra: Australian National University, 1969; Weems, Clarence Norwood, ed. Hulbert’s History of Korea. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962. Jiu-Hwa Lo Upshur Wen and Wu (fl . 12th century b.c.e.) dynastic founders Kings Wen (the Literary or Cultivated) and his son Wu (the Martial) are the founders of the Zhou (Chou) dynasty, c. 1122–256 b.c.e. The Zhou people lived to the west of the Shang in the Wei River valley on the plain of Zhou (hence the dynastic name) in present-day Sha’anxi (Shensi) Province, west of the Shang heartland. Both were descended from the Neolithic Longshan (Lungshan) culture, but the Zhou people were less cultivated. The Shang oracle bones described them as sometimes enemies and also as allies against the Jiang (Chiang) barbarian tribes further west. A Zhou leader was also referred to as “Chief of the West,” to whom a Shang noblewoman was given in marriage. A son was born of the union, King Wen. King Wen was described as a paragon of virtue. Wen paved the way for overthrowing the Shang dynasty by forming coalitions with other states but died in the 50th year of his reign, about 1133 b.c.e., before he could accomplish his goal. Since Zhou rulers practiced primogeniture, his oldest son, Wu, succeeded him. Around 1122 b.c.e. King Wu led a second campaign against the Shang, a coalition army purportedly 45,000 strong that consisted of forces from eight anti-Shang states, including men from a faraway Yangtze River valley state called Ba (Pa) in present-day Sichuan (Szechwan). At a place called Muye (Mu-yeh), meaning “Shepherd’s Field,” not far from Yin, Wu gave a speech that detailed the crimes of Shang king Shou. In a decisive battle against a larger but disaffected Shang army Wu’s forces won decisively. King Shou retreated to his palace in Yin, set it afi re, and died. Wu restored order quickly, even placing a Shang prince in Yin as his vassal ruler, to continue conducting sacrifi ces to his powerful ancestral spirits, but under the supervision of three of Wu’s brothers. Wu then returned to his capital in Hao, located just southwest of the modern city Xi’an (Sian), but died soon after, in 1116 b.c.e. while still young and before consolidating his conquest. The throne passed to Wu’s oldest son, King Cheng (Ch’eng), but under the supervision of one of Wu’s younger brothers, Dan (Tan), the Duke of Zhou. As regent, the duke consolidated the new state and laid down the foundations that made the dynasty a great and lasting one. Kings Wen and Wu and the Duke of Zhou are remembered as great men and ideal rulers in Chinese history. Early Zhou proclamations justifi ed the transfer of power as the wish of their high god, Tian (T’ien), or heaven, who was equated with Shangdi (Shang-ti), the Shang high god. From this came the concept of the Mandate of Heaven, that heaven oversaw the affairs of humans and appointed a virtuous human to rule on its behalf. The mandate could be passed down the generations in the ruling family, provided they ruled justly. If they did not rule justly, as was the case with the last Shang king, he forfeited the mandate. A righteous man would be appointed to replace him, in this case the Zhou king. This concept became central to Chinese political thinking. 486 Way of the Sea Further reading: Chang, Kwang-chih. The Archaeology of Ancient China. 4th ed., rev. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986; Creel, Herrlee G. The Birth of China, a Study of the Formative Period of Chinese Civilization. New York: Frederich Ungar Pub., 1937; Hsu, Cho-yun, and Kathryn Linduff. Western Chou Civilization. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988. Jiu-Hwa Lo Upshur wisdom literature Historians of the ancient world have come to recognize that wisdom literature represents the expressions of cultures and civilizations that rely on human experience to cope with life’s mysteries and uncertainties. The genre is pervasive over a wide spectrum of peoples in many ages and places. Wisdom literature in the Bible is a genre that is somewhere between the prophetic and the apocalyptic writings in its content and style. When the prophets of the Bible became fewer and less vocal after the Babylonian captivity, the teachers of wisdom began to promote their perspective as the representatives of biblical faith. After them there arose, centuries later, the seers and mystics who were writers of apocalypticism. In many ways the teachers of biblical wisdom coincided with the development of philosophy in the Greek intellectual world as it outgrew the mythical explanations of the creation and life crafted by Homer and Hesiod. The time period for both biblical wisdom and Greek philosophy was the fi fth–fourth centuries b.c.e. and later, otherwise known as the Persian, or Attic, Period. The Hebrew people drew upon three sources for their wisdom literature. First, Israel had produced leaders and thinkers over the centuries whose achievements had been remembered, studied, and emulated. In the course of its history, such fi gures as Solomon, Daniel, and Baruch had made an impression on later generations as teachers of wisdom. Thus, traditions developed that were native to the Hebrew people and distinctive in comparison to neighboring ethnic groups. By the same token, many other ancient kings and rulers had reputations for dispensing wisdom and sound advice, and stories circulated in their societies that would enhance public trust in their administration. Second, the nature of government and civilization favored the emergence of educated classes who could organize peoples and run social institutions. These people had to learn reading and writing, and they specialized in bringing stability to otherwise chaotic situations. This source of wisdom literature, therefore, relied on scribes and bureaucrats who had the leisure for refl ection and writing. They might have had the resources to travel, learn other languages, and consider moderate reforms. Third, the surrounding nations of the Middle East also presented a rich matrix for biblical wisdom literature. The Egyptians, the Sumerians, and the Babylonians were most famous for their wisdom teachings. Their traditions emerged long before the Greeks and the Hebrews of the fi fth–fourth centuries b.c.e. Scribal schools probably sprang up in response to the demands of Middle Eastern governments for able administrators. Masters who exercised great infl uence over their pupils led such schools. This phenomenon also is similar to the education that was offered by the purveyors of sophism (and perhaps Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle) in the Greek world. Invariably, in most of these environments the scribal classes favored stability and order, and so wisdom literature was largely supportive of the status quo. Ancient Egypt in particular was the center for learning for thousands of years. As is often the case in wisdom literature, Egyptian materials come in the form of a father’s advice to his sons. One very old collection of sayings, the Instruction of Vizier Ptah-hotep (2400 b.c.e.), shows parallels to the biblical book of Proverbs. Schools set up for educating Egyptian civil servants about their roles in court life are the background for passages in the Instruction of Amenemope (1000–600 b.c.e.) and excerpted and adapted by the editor of Proverbs. The civilization of Sumer has proverbs almost as old as Egypt’s. Clearly it also had scribal schools set up by its government. Sumerian editors organized their wisdom materials by topic and theme, while it is hard to fi nd the organizational thread that unites much of biblical wisdom. Sumerian observations on nature also do not moralize as much as the Hebrew writings. The city-states of Akkad and Babylon also gave a milieu for Hebrew biblical traditions. One theme of wisdom literature has to do with undeserved suffering, most famously expressed by the long-suffering hero Job in the Bible. This theme is found in the Babylonian poem I Will Praise the Lord of Wisdom, whose main character is often called the Babylonian Job, and in other works such as Dialogue about Human Misery and Dialogue of Pessimism. There are a couple other possible infl uences on Hebrew wisdom literature. First, there is a fragmentary book from the Aramaeans called Proverbs of Ahiqar that was well known in the ancient Middle Eastern world and translated into many languages. The earliest written text, however, for Ahiqar comes from the Persian Period. Then there is the Greek world, with its later emphasis on wisdom literature 487 rationalism and science. Biblical books such as Sirach, Wisdom of Solomon, and Ecclesiastes may betray familiarity with late Greek philosophy. The themes of Hebrew wisdom imply that the God of the Bible works through creation, natural phenomena, and life experiences. Contemplation of the created order gives perspective for life’s most vexing problems: death, sickness, and poverty. There is often optimism in early wisdom literature that everything has a purpose and that this purpose can be discovered. Later wisdom literature, however, shows skepticism that nature alone will supply answers. Even wisdom has its limits in the face of the mystery of suffering. Wisdom books in the Bible are distinguished from others because they do not depend on law and prophecies—direct revelation—for their validity. These books include Proverbs, Job, Qoheleth, Sirach, and Wisdom of Solomon (Greek). Other candidates for this category are Song of Solomon and specifi c parts of Genesis, Psalms, Jonah, Daniel, and Baruch (Greek). In the New Testament one can fi nd the sem blances of wisdom sayings in many of the speeches of Jesus (Christ) of Nazareth and in the practical teachings of the letter of James. In fact, there is a tension between the wisdom dimension of much of the New Testament and the apocalyptic urgency of the Kingdom of God in its preaching. Outside of the Bible canon are later pseudepigraphical sources (e.g., 4 Ezra, 2 Baruch [Syriac], Odes of Solomon), and many believe that rabbinic Judaism has its roots in the traditions of Hebrew wisdom literature. According to the Bible, true wisdom is personifi ed as a woman in a variety of positive female roles. The book of Proverbs especially shows her to be a hostess, a sister, a wife, and source of intimate revelation about how the biblical God relates to creation. In some cases she serves as a mediator between God and humanity. Early models for this image can be found in the Egyptian concept of maat, or cosmic truth or balance, and in the Canaanite fertility goddess of Asherah, who was symbolized as a tree of life and who hosted banquets in the Ugaritic myths of Baal. In the New Testament aspects of personifi ed wisdom were incarnated in the divinized identity of Jesus Christ. Rabbinic Jews tended to interpret any personifi cation of wisdom in terms of the Halakah, or the religious duties of daily life. See also Classical Period, Greek; David; Egypt, culture and religion; Hellenization; Homeric epics; pre-Socratic philosophy; prophets; Pseudepigrapha and the Apocrypha; Talmud; Ugarit. Further reading: Murphy, Roland E. “Introduction to Wisdom Literature.” In New Jerome Biblical Commentary, edited by Raymond E. Brown, Joseph A. Fitz myer, Roland E. Murphy. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1990; ———. Wisdom Literature. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1996. Mark F. Whitters Wu See Wen and Wu. Wudi See Han Wudi.

The Expanding World 600 CE to 1450

Wales, English conquest of By 1276 and prior to the invasion undertaken under the reign of Edward I, Wales was divided into three separate zones. Despite the opposition of the Welsh to the presence of the Angevin kings (those who had entered Wales during the Norman Conquest of England), they remained powerful in central Wales, while the Welsh monarchy, which had been in place since the 10th century, remained the powerful force in rural areas. The Angevin kings were Norman, although the settlers were Saxon English. This inevitably led to settlers bringing the English language with them into Wales, but this brought a negligible threat to the survival of the Welsh language. The fi rst zone applied to the areas located nearest the English border, belonging to the Marcher lords, who were the descendants of the fi rst advancing Norman lords who accompanied William the Conqueror in the early 11th century. Furthermore these were considered as the fi rst line of defense against the counterinvasion of England by Wales. However, they managed to establish their own authority and exercised their own legal system for numerous generations. The two remaining zones were divided between those who remained politically independent and those under the rule of the Welsh princes. The only hope for the resurgence of the Welsh princes’ power largely rested with the possibility that a weak monarch would once again lead Britain. However the prevailing power of the monarch meant that the princes were largely confi ned to their traditional sphere of infl uence in the small area of Gwynedd, and in the northern section of the country, in areas such as Anglesey and Snowdonia, and it was in these areas that the traditional Welsh laws and customs prevailed. A prominent Welsh prince, Llywelyn, planned a revolt against their dominance. Through the support of his followers, he gained more land, defeated the incumbent royal armies, established links with Scotland, and declared himself the fi rst and last native prince of Wales. Llywelyn’s alliance began with Simon de Montfort, the last baron who stood against King Henry III. De Montfort had defeated the king at the Battle of Lewes in 1264, which consequently gave offi cial recognition to Llywelyn’s title of prince of Wales. This was still subject to a payment of £20,000 to the king. The Treaty of Montgomery, signed in 1267 by the restored Henry III, signaled the peak of Llywelyn’s power and gave Wales its status as a principality. Wales now had a constitutional right to possess its own characteristics as a state. However Llywelyn was faced with the problem of having no heir to his throne. Furthermore his rival brothers were lodging a claim for the inheritance of his estate, to which they were entitled to an equal share. Llywelyn lacked the funds to settle a debt he owed to Henry III. Consequently Llywelyn imposed higher taxes on the people, which created considerable resentment but was considered an essential to establish Wales as a nation independent of English rule. He took practical steps to facilitate this aim, attacked the Marchers’ fortresses built in South Wales as a preventative measure against the native Welsh reaching the English border, and in turn claimed power over three-quarters of Wales. W By 1282 the Welsh had become increasingly unhappy at the powers exerted over them by English lordship, and consequently rebelled. Llywelyn led the rebellion, captured castles, and defeated the royal army. The king’s response was to lead a large army into Wales, which further antagonized the population. Intervention came from the archbishop of Canterbury, John Peckham, who tried to bring agreement to the both sides. Peckham suggested that Llywelyn would be offered land and titles in England if he abdicated his position as prince of Wales. This provoked outrage, with the Welsh council arguing that Edward I ruled over Wales by tyranny, and further solidifi ed the campaign for Welsh independence. Llywelyn branded the English invasion of Wales and their fi ght against it as a “war of national liberation.” The Welsh attacked the English knights and made use of the varied Welsh terrain, with which the English were unfamiliar. However their optimism was quickly extinguished by the death of Llywelyn in a fi ght with an English soldier. Llywelyn’s head was dismembered and sent to London and carried through the streets as proof of the prince’s death. Despite Llywelyn’s death, the revolt continued for a short time and eventually ended in 1284, with the Welsh conceding defeat. In victory King Edward established towns in Wales, constructed more castles, encouraged movement into Wales from England, and established and preserved English-run institutions in Wales. This position received statutory recognition through the Royal Assent provided to the Statute of Rhuddlan, passed in 1284, which ultimately led to the imposition of the English common law in Wales and covered all matters, except land claims. The Welsh language remained in Wales, although the daily business in the country was now conducted through the medium of English. The tax system imposed on the country hit the poorest the hardest and drove them further into destitution. See also Edward I and II. Further reading: Davies, John. A History of Wales. London: Allen Lane, 1993; Davies, R. R. The Age of Conquest: Wales, 1063–1415. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000; Herbert, Trevor, and Gareth Elwyn Jones eds. Edward I and Wales. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1988. Mark J. Crowley Wang Anshi (Wang An-shih) (1021–1086) Chinese statesman and reformer Wang Anshi was a well-known refomer and statesman of the Chinese Song (Sung) dynasty that ruled from 960 to 1279. Wang Anshi was a Renaissance man, who was equally at home in statecraft and in poetry. Wang was born into a landlord family in Linchuan, Jiangxi (Kiangsi) Province. After he passed the stringent imperial civil service exams, he became an offi cial. Involved initially in government at the local level, he saw the hardships of the Chinese peasantry, and the exactions of the landlords who controlled their lives. Wang’s exposure to the life of the peasants had a profound infl uence upon his life. Wang participated in the debate among Song scholaroffi cials on the application of Confucianism in the ordering of society and as instrument of political reform that had begun earlier in the Song dynasty. He believed that the state existed in large measure to serve the needs of its citizens. He said, “The state should take the entire management of commerce, industry, and agriculture into its own hands, with a view to succoring the working classes and preventing them from being ground into the dust by the rich.” In 1058 Wang took the momentous step of writing a memorial to the emperor to present his views. Unfortunately, the emperor at that time, Kenzong (Jen Tsung), was not interested in reforms. Yingzong (Ying Tsung, r. 1063–67), the next Song ruler, was more receptive. The new emperor was intent on making reforms and made Wang his chief minister. Wang and a few other offi cials enacted the New Laws during the 15 years they were in power, aimed to encourage agricultural production by reducing the burdens of the common people. Their New Laws also limited the privileges of high-ranking offi cials and landlords, who naturally hated the reforms. He realized that the 424 Wang Anshi King Edward established towns in Wales and constructed more castles, such as Conwy Castle in Gwynedd, Wales. landowning classes were shirking their fair burden of taxation, which was falling almost entirely upon the peasantry. Also when peasant farmers needed seed or agricultural implements, they had to turn to moneylenders, who charged them usurious rates of interest. With Wang’s reforms, they were able to apply to the central government instead for agricultural loans. The offi cials’ ultimate goal was to make the government more effi cient and effective to face the northern nomads. Wang reinterpreted the Confucian Classics to support their program of an activist and interventionist state. The reformist credo was “The true scholar should be the fi rst to become anxious of the world’s troubles and the last to enjoy its happiness.” Their controversial reforms were opposed by the conservative Confucians, who accused them of being Legalists in disguise. Wang’s tactlessness as well as his policies contributed to his downfall. His ideas enjoyed favor again after his death under Huizong (Hui-tsung) (r. 1110–25). However Huizong’s disastrous domestic and foreign policies would culminate in the fall of the Northern Song in 1127 and with it an era of vigorous policy debates in the Song court. When Yingzong died in 1067, his successor, Shenzong (Shen-tsung), continued to support Wang and his reforming allies. However they had made important enemies, both in the country and at the imperial court, among conservatives and among the landowners. Eventually Shenzong succumbed to the conservatives and removed Wang as prime minister in 1074. Sima Qian (Ssu-ma Chien), a renowned historian, became prime minister in his place and ended the reforms. Shenzong returned Wang to power in 1075, but by then his supporters had begun to desert him. In 1076 Shenzong dismissed Wang again, and he never returned to government service. See also Neo-Confucianism. Further reading: Bary, William T. de, ed. Sources of Chinese Tradition, Vol. 1. New York: Columbia University Press, 1960; Liu, James C.T. Reform in Sung China: Wang An-shih and his New Policies. Cambridge, MA: Havard University Press, 1959. John F. Murphy, Jr. Wang Yangming (Wang Yang-ming) (1472–1528) Chinese scholar Wang Yangming was an infl uential scholar during the era of the Ming dynasty in China, the last native Chinese dynasty. In 1644 invaders from Manchuria would overthrow the Ming, beginning the Qing (Ching) dynasty. The Qing dynasty would rule until the collapse of the Chinese empire in the revolution of 1912. Wang developed a philosophy that would have a dramatic effect not only on China but also on Japan and Korea, both of whose cultures were infl uenced by China. His teaching would be perpetuated through schools of philosophy during much of the 16th century. Jacques Gernet wrote in A History of Chinese Civilization that “the central notion of his philosophy is that of ‘innate moral knowledge,’ (liang-chih), (the term is borrowed from Mencius), a principle of good which is inherent in the mind before any contamination by egoistic thoughts and desires, and which one must try to rediscover in oneself.” Following Mencius, instead of Confucius, Wang Yangming aroused much controversy in Ming philosophical circles and the imperial government, since Confucian thought was at the bottom of the entire Chinese imperial system. There is much of his system that is Buddhist, especially that of the Chan school, carried by the monk Bodhidharma to China, that emphasized intuitive knowing. Wang Yangming’s idea that objects do not exist entirely apart from the mind because the mind shapes them stems from this. Here, Wang Yangming closely follows the Buddhist idea that the entire world is made up of maya, and thus is not entirely or truly real. Mencius’s teaching had a warmth and intimacy that were lacking in Confucian thought. Mencius said, “Everyone has a heart that is sensitive to the sufferings of others. The great kings of the past had this sort of sensitive heart and thus adopted compassionate policies. Bringing order to the realm is as easy as moving an object in your palm when you have a sensitive heart and put into practice compassionate policies.” Wang Yangming made an estimable contribution to Chinese philosophy, especially in his insistence on “the unity of knowledge and action.” A moderate individualist, he taught that knowledge should be the guide to proper conduct and that proper conduct thus is the fulfi llment of knowledge. See also Neo-Confucianism. Further reading: Creel, Herlee G. Chinese Thought from Confucius to Mao Tse-tung. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953; Ebrey, Patricia. Chinese Civilization: A Sourcebook. New York: Free Press, 1993; Gernet, Jacques. A History of Chinese Civilization. Trans. by J. R. Foster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. John F. Murphy, Jr. Wang Yangming 425 Worms, Concordat of A concordat is a formal agreement between the pope acting in his spiritual function and a state. It is a legal contract between church and state, recognized as a treaty under international law. The antithesis between temporal and spiritual authority was particularly pronounced in the medieval quarrels leading to the practice of agreeing to concordats such as the Concordat of Worms. A similar compromise, the Concordat of London, in 1107 had resolved the investiture confl ict between the pope and the king of England, providing the basis for the Concordat of Worms. On September 23, 1122, Pope Calixtus II (d. 1124) and Holy Roman Emperor Henry V (1086–1125) agreed under the Concordat of Worms, the Pactum Calixtinum, to end their battle over investiture, the power to appoint to church offi ces. The struggle over control over church offi ces had begun during the time of Henry IV (1050–1106) and Pope Gregory VII (1020–85.) Before the 10th century investiture of church leaders was a church prerogative in practice, but it was often done by kings. It gave rise to the practice of simony, or the sale of church offi ces; this was a sin according to the church, but a profi table practice for monarchs. It also created a clergy that was more loyal to the king than to the pope. The emperor had the power to appoint the pope, who had the power to appoint the emperor. Gregorian reformers in the church wanted to end the practice of simony, but they needed to break the appointment tie, which they did in the reign of young Henry IV in 1059. The reformers created the college of cardinals to replace the emperor as selector of future popes. In 1075 Gregory VII decreed that the church alone had the power over appointments. Henry IV removed the pope, and Gregory retaliated by excommunicating Henry. The struggle between emperor and pope gave Henry’s nobles the opportunity they sought; they rose against him. In 1077 Henry apologized, wearing a hair shirt to Canossa and receiving papal forgiveness. After crushing his rebellious nobles, he turned to replacing the pope with a more pliable one. The investiture controversy continued into the next generation of pope and emperor. Henry V agreed to bar bribery and allow free election of bishops and abbots, renouncing his right to invest them with the symbols of their offi ce. The pope in return allowed Henry to attend elections in Germany and to invest the elected with their lay rights and obligations before they were consecrated. Generally, the clergy chose bishops and abbots, but the emperor decided contested elections. The emperor invested the elected person with regalia, powers, privileges, and lands pertaining to his role as vassal. After he paid homage to his emperor, he would be invested with the spiritualia, ecclesiastical powers and lands, as symbolized by the ring and crosier, by his ecclesiastical superior. This compromise provided the basis for relations between popes and Holy Roman Emperors thereafter. The concordat came about as a result of the efforts of Lamberto Scannabecchi (later Pope Honorius II) and the Diet of Wurzburg (1121). Confi rmation of the concordat came at the First Lateran Council in 1123. Later concordats in France included the Concordat of 1516, which gave the king the right to nominate bishops, abbots, and priors, with the pope reserving the rights to confi rm and appoint in special circumstances. After the Estates General of Orléans revoked the right in 1561, confl ict continued until the French Revolution. See also Holy Roman Empire. Further reading: Blumenthal, Uta-Renate. The Investiture Controversy: Church and Monarchy from the Ninth to the Twelfth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988; Cantor, Norman F. Civilization of the Middle Ages. New York: HarperCollins, 1993; Tellenbach, Gerd. Church, State and Christian Society at the Time of the Investiture Contest. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1959; ———. The Church in Western Europe from the Tenth to Early Twelfth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. John H. Barnhill Wu Zhao (Wu Chao) (627–705) Chinese empress Wu Zhao or Zetia (Tse-tien) is famous in Chinese history because she was the only woman who ruled in her own name. Daughter of an offi cial of the recently founded Tang (T’ang) dynasty she was selected to join the harem of the emperor Taizong (T’ang-tsung) at age 15 with the rank of fi fth grade concubine. She bore him no children and as all other childless concubines she retired to a Buddhist convent in 649 when Taizong died. On the fi rst anniversary of Taizong’s death his son and successor Gaozong (Kao-tsung) attended a commemorative service at the Buddhist temple where Wu resided and took her back to the palace when he returned, and she became his concubine. Her intrigues caused the fall and death of Gaozong’s wife, the empress Wang, and 426 Worms, Concordat of the consort Xiao (Hsiao), mother of the crown prince. Installed empress in 656 she bore Gaozong four sons and a daughter. Her eldest son became crown prince. Energetic and ambitious she assisted her weak-willed and vacillating husband in administration, especially after he suffered a major illness, perhaps a stroke, in 660. Gaozong’s deteriorating health led the court to suggest the installation of Crown Prince Li Hong (Wu’s eldest son), already 24 and an able young man, as regent. In 675 while visiting his parents Li Hong suddenly died. His standing up to her earlier over her treatment of her opponents has led to speculation that he had been poisoned by his mother. Gaozong died in 683. He was succeeded by his and Empress Wu’s second son, then aged 27, under the reign name Zhongzong (Chung-tsung) with his mother as regent, as stipulated in Gaozong’s will. The hapless new emperor was soon demoted to the rank of prince and exiled with his wife and children. Empress Wu then installed another son on the throne, Ruizong (Juitsung); pronounced him unable to rule; became regent; and promoted her brother’s son to the title of “emperor expectant.” In 689 Wu Zhao held a magnifi cent festival in which she assumed the title of “Sage Mother, Divine Sovereign.” In 690 she proclaimed the founding of a new Zhou (Chou) dynasty, took the title “Holy and Divine Emperor,” and moved the capital city from Chang’an (Ch’ang-an) to Luoyang (Loyang). She then began a reign of terror against all members of her husband’s family and Tang offi cials opposed to her usurpation, during which thousands were brutally killed or exiled. Revolts were put down ruthlessly. Those of the Li family who survived, including her sons, lived under house arrest. While many strong women ruled behind the throne as wives, mothers, and grandmothers of male rulers, Wu Zhao was the only woman to rule in her own right. She was hardworking and capable and the empire prospered under her rule. She expanded the examination system of recruiting civil offi cials on the basis of ability and initiated the personal examination of candidates by the monarch. In 693 she even added a work that she wrote, titled “Rules for Offi cials,” as a compulsory text for the exams. It expressed her political philosophy based on selected passages from Confucian and Daoist (Taoist) canons. Wu’s foreign relations mainly were involved with the Tibetan Kingdom in the west and Turkic and Khitan tribes in the north. In 692 Chinese armies crushed the Tibetans and reestablished protectorates among the oasis states along the Silk Road. Bribes of expensive goods of Chinese manufacture, marriage alliances, and military actions also ensured peace between the Turkic and Khitan tribes. Empress Wu’s reign became adversely affected by her scandalous personal life, which became more bizarre as she aged. Her successive lowborn and little educated favorites were given enormous state powers, which they abused. They included a peddler of cosmetics and aphrodisiacs whom she installed as abbot of the White Horse Monastery, the oldest Buddhist establishment in Luoyang. He pleased her by supervising the building of a sumptuous ceremonial hall, called the Mingtang, that was 294 feet high, topped by a gold-clad phoenix 10 feet tall, but she had him killed when she tired of his corruption and arrogance. Her fi nal and most scandalous favorites were a pair of young entertainers, the Zhang (Chang) brothers, who grew fabulously rich on bribes because of her favor. When her grandson, her granddaughter, and her husband reportedly criticized her behavior and their conversation was reported to her, Empress Wu had all three young people killed in 701. Although she had proclaimed a new dynasty and had proclaimed her nephew (her brother’s son) heir, Empress Wu did not fi nally settle the succession, perhaps torn between the claims of her own clan and those of her sons. The fact that her nephews were unworthy men might have added to her problems. In the end, Di Renjie (Ti Jeh-chieh), a senior statesman in her administration who had served both her and the Tang sovereigns loyally, won the argument in favor of the Tang claim. He convinced her that only her son could properly perform the ancestral sacrifi ces to her spirit when she died. By 705 Empress Wu was often ill and rarely attended to business. Many courtiers feared that the Zhang brothers, who had constant access to her, might attempt a coup if she should suddenly die. In 705 they entered the palace with an armed escort and with the deposed Zhongzong in tow seized and executed the Zhang brothers. Empress Wu then formally abdicated and Zhongzong ascended the throne as emperor. The Tang dynasty was restored, surviving members of the Li clan were restored to their titles and ranks, and those who had not were given posthumous honors. Empress Wu was given her own palace in the imperial complex in Luoyang, where she lived with all honors until her death later in that year. Further reading: Fitzgerald, C. P. The Empress Wu. Melbourne: The Australian National University, 1953; Lin, Yutang. Lady Wu, A True Story. London: William Hanemann Ltd., 1957; Twichett, Denis, ed. Cambridge History of China, Vol III: Sui Wu Zhao 427 and T’ang China 589–906. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Jiu-Hwa Lo Upshur Wycliffe, John (1330–1384) church leader Theology and ecclesiastical affairs had been in ferment for some time before the 16th-century upheavals now known as the Protestant Reformation, which left behind enduring divisions among Western Christian churches. For at least three centuries theologians had held divergent opinions on the possibility of confl ict between the Bible and its interpretation by offi cial teachers in the church. These disagreements grew in heat and importance as calls for reform in the moral and institutional life of the church increased. Two of the most important fi gures in the tumultuous movements in theology and church life in the two centuries prior to the Reformation are John Wycliffe and John Huss. John Wycliffe was born in Yorkshire, England, around 1330. He arrived in Oxford in the 1350s, at a time when the infl uence of the holistic approach to teaching theology that characterized late Scholasticism was on the wane. Scholarly interest now centered on particular problems in theology, and the application of logic and terminological refl ection to treating those problems. After Wycliffe had become a doctor of divinity and master of Balliol College, Oxford, the duke of Lancaster recruited him into his service and Wycliffe later represented King Edward III of England on a committee negotiating with papal offi cials in Bruges over the jurisdictions of the king and the pope. He soon decided to focus more keenly on matters of church reform. Wycliffe’s philosophical and methodological ideas supported and reinforced his ideas on church reform. He stood for a radically biblical theology, taking the Bible as “an emanation of the supreme being transposed into writing,” denying that its authoritative interpretation rests with the bishops of the church, and calling for its translation into the vernacular. Wycliffe’s doctrine of predestination held that God knows all the elect from all eternity, and that it is because God knows them to be elect that they are elect, and so members of the church. Therefore those who act in a way that is not in keeping with God’s law show themselves to be impostors, and if holders of offi ce in the church, they forfeit their legitimacy as leaders. Similarly Wycliffe denied the existence of a right to private property, seeing such a supposed right as mark of the church’s decline from a period of purity prior to the Middle Ages. The denial of a right to exclusive property and his radical theology of the Eucharist drew the most passionate reactions to any of Wycliffe’s doctrines. Wycliffe denied that in the Eucharist the bread and wine change into the substance of Christ’s body and blood, though he claimed the body and blood of Christ are also present with the bread and wine. All 24 propositions of Wycliffe’s theology were condemned in 1382, but the protection of the duke of Lancaster saved him. He died of natural causes in 1384. In 1415, however, the Council of Constance condemned Wycliffe as a heretic. That same council condemned and burned John Huss, the leader of a dissenting movement in Prague, in what is now the Czech Republic, for holding Wycliffe’s opinions. Since Wycliffe’s views were more radical and inspired greater passion, the council convicted Huss, not very accurately, of holding Wycliffi te views, and thereby justifi ed his capital punishment. In fact he held similar ideas to Wycliffe’s, though generally in a more moderate form. Huss stood in the line of movement for reform that predated Wycliffe. He held that one could appeal to Scripture to oppose canon law or even councils. While wicked prelates do not lose their title to offi ce, Huss claimed that the members of the church owe them no obedience. Unlike Wycliffe, however, Huss held that bread and wine do change into the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist. The Lollards were a popular English movement that drew deeply on Wycliffe’s theology. The movement began in Oxford around 1378. It posed a great enough threat to the government that in 1401 membership in the movement could bring punishment by death. By 1415 after a failed attempt to oust Henry V and the condemnation of Wycliffe at the Council of Constance, Lollardy went underground and lasted mainly as a movement in northern England, inspiring various reform-minded preachers and social activists. See also heresies, pre-Reformation. Further reading: Hudson, Anne. The Premature Reformation: Wycliffi te Texts and Lollard History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988; Kenny, Anthony. Wycliffe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985; Oberman, Heiko. Forerunners of the Reformation: The Shape of Late Medieval Thought. Philadephia: Fortress Press, 1981. John Yocum

The First Global Age 1450 to 1750

Wanli (Wan-Li) (1563–1620) Ming dynasty emperor Zhu Yizhun (Chu I-chun) was born in 1563 and ascended the throne as Emperor Wanli on his father’s death when he was nine years old; his temple name, conferred after his death, was Shenzong (Shen-tsung). His reign (1573–1620) was the longest of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), but his personal qualities made it an irreversibly disastrous one, which his weak and incompetent successors were unable to reverse. Because he was a child and did not rule personally, the first 10 years of Wanli’s reign went well as his birth mother and his father’s empress cooperated with Grand Secretary Zhang Zhuzheng (Chang Chu-cheng) to supervise his education and direct the government. All changed for the worse when Zhang died in 1582. Wanli would never appoint strong and capable men to high positions again. In fact as his reign progressed, he let many positions unfilled when their incumbents died or retired, crippling the government. Wanli became more unpredictable and self-absorbed with time. Between 1589 and 1615 he never appeared at imperial audiences, leaving his ministers and foreign envoys to kowtow before an empty throne. He attended no public ceremonies after 1591, not even his own mother’s funeral. Instead he relied on eunuchs to inform him about affairs and to act as intermediaries between him and his ministers. He refused to read government reports and official memorials, leaving the state in chaos and upright officials in despair. He was moreover extravagant, spending lavishly on his palaces, clothes, entertainment, and a magnificent mausoleum for his body after death, bankrupting the treasury. Adding to the burden of the treasury was the by now huge imperial family scattered throughout the land, all supported by lavish grants from the treasury. Wanli was also addicted to food, alcohol, and sex and became so fat that he could not stand unsupported. The dynasty never recovered because his son and successor survived him by only a month. The next ruler (his grandson) was slow-witted and only interested in carpentry, so he entrusted the government to eunuchs and finally left the throne to his younger brother Chongzhen (Ch’ungchen, r. 1628–44). Chongzhen never had a chance and committed suicide as rebel forces swept into Beijing (Peking), ending the dynasty. Military problems abounded. Mongols attacked in the north, ethnic minority groups revolted in the southwest, and between 1593 and 1598 the Japanese invaded Korea, a campaign that was only thwarted after China sent a large army. A more serious threat appeared in the northeast with the rise of the nomadic Jurchens under Nurhaci. Adopting a new name, Manchu, and a new dynastic title, the Qing (Ch’ing), these prior frontier vassals would later replace the Ming dynasty. On the wider scene, the Wanli reign signaled the emergence of a new economy and society. Crops from the New World increased food production, commercial and manufacturing enterprises expanded, and with the coming of the Europeans via sea, new trading connections would be formed. Finally Christianity was reintroduced into China under the Jesuit Matteo Ricci. See also Jesuits in Asia. Further reading: Chan, Albert. The Glory and Fall of the Ming Dynasty. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982; Huang, Ray. 1587 a.d. Year of No Significance, The Ming Dynasty in Decline. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981; Twitchett, Denis, and Frederick W. Mote, eds. The Cambridge History of China, Volume 8, The Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644, Parts 1 and 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988 and 1998. Jiu-Hwa Lo Upshur William III (1650–1702) king of England, Scotland, and Ireland William III, king of England and prince of Orange– Nassau, is famous in history as the ruler who rallied the forces of Europe against French hegemony under Louis XIV, king of France. Overcoming adversity was a lifelong task for William. He was born the only son of William II, prince of Orange and stadtholder of the Dutch Republic (an elective not hereditary office in the United Provinces, the official name of the Dutch Republic between 1578 and 1815), and Mary Stuart, daughter of Charles I. William’s birth occurred eight days after his father’s death. The death came a week after a failed coup wherein his father had sought to strengthen his position. His mother’s family was in exile during this the period of the Commonwealth (1649–60). The result of the death and failed coup d’etat was that the anti-Orange faction, the oligarchy of rich merchants primarily based in Holland and led by the De Witt brothers, seized control and abolished the office of stadtholder. William saw his mother’s family restored to power in England in 1660 but lost his mother later that year. Now an orphan, he awaited his chance. It came when Louis XIV made a sudden attack on Dutch territory in revenge for Dutch diplomatic attempts to block his aggrandizement in the Netherlands. The De Witt regime was overthrown, and William was made stadtholder, captain-general, and admiral for life. In the struggle for survival, although France had the military advantage, he had the diplomatic triumph of securing aid from Brandenburg, Austria, and Spain. The breakthrough came when England switched sides and he married his cousin Mary, daughter of the duke of York, in 1677. Although France made gains elsewhere, the Dutch Republic and most of the Netherlands were saved from the French. William organized the League of Augsburg in opposition to French annexations in Germany and the Low Countries. His major triumph came when the English opposition to his father-in-law (now James ii ) approached him in 1687. In return for supporting the rights of Parliament and opposing the pro-Catholic religious policies of James II, they promised him the throne. William landed in England in 1688, overthrew James II, and defeated his adherents at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. The political result was the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which led to the formal supremacy of Parliament. Thereafter, he and his wife, Mary, third and first in the line of succession, were declared sovereigns as William III and Mary II. His position had become so secure that he was able to rule after the death of Mary in 1694, even though her sister Anne was closer in line of the succession. William’s domestic policies were not especially successful, as he remained focused on external affairs. The major blot on his record during the 1690s was the massacre of the MacDonald clan in Glencoe, Scotland, wherein the perpetrators were rewarded. His achievements during the 1690s were in the Wars of the League of Augsburg, which lasted from 1689 to 1697 and forced Louis to give up all acquisitions gained during the war. The prospect that Spain and all its possessions would fall to France on the death of Charles II in 1700 threatened to undo his efforts to create a balance of power in Europe. Once again, he rallied much of Europe against France to prevent Louis XIV from becoming a new Charles V. The subsequent War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13) did eventually accomplish this result. William, however, was not there to see it, as he died in March 1702 after a fall from his horse. Rarely successful in war, but almost always in diplomacy, he had as his main achievement the idea of a balance of power as necessary for European security. William was the author of a precursor to the idea of collective security but did not live to see its first application in the Peace of Utrecht in 1713. See also Counter-Reformation (Catholic Reformation) in Europe; Holy Roman Empire; Reformation, the. Further reading: Baxter, Stephen B. William III and the Defense of European Liberty. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1976; Chacks- 402 William III field, K. Merle. The Glorious Revolution. London: Winconton Press, 1988; Claydon, A. M., and Tony. William III. New York: Longman, 2002; Macaulay, William B. History of England to the Death of William III. London: Heron Books, 1967; Ogg, David. William III. New York: Collier Books, 1967. Norman C. Rothman Williams, Roger (c. 1603–1683) Puritan dissenter Roger Williams was born in London, about 1603, and showed promise at an early age. He graduated from Pembroke College, Cambridge, and was ordained an Anglican clergyman in 1629. He married that same year, served briefly as a chaplain to a Puritan family in Essex, and in 1630 sailed for New England. Originally welcomed for his piety, Williams soon became controversial. Most importantly he believed in separatism, the concept that the Anglican Church was beyond reforming, and that true Christians should separate themselves from it. He considered serving the church at Salem, but Massachusetts authorities intervened to prevent it. He was briefly in Plymouth, an avowedly separatist colony, but returned to Salem in 1634 and served as teacher, or assistant clergyman, in defiance of the wishes of the colony’s leaders. At Salem, he preached a set of ideas that eventually led to his banishment. In addition to separatism, he maintained that each person had the right to choose his or her own religion, and therefore neither civil nor ecclesiastical authorities had any power to enforce religious doctrine. It was an idea totally unacceptable to a people who knew they were right and were dedicated to seeing that everyone conformed to their view of God’s truth. Williams also believed that Christian charity extended to the native population, a position that forced him to argue that the Indians were the rightful owners of the land and that the king had no right to grant it to other Englishmen. It was an unacceptable challenge to the very legitimacy and even existence of the colony. Its leaders decided he must be stilled. In the fall of 1635, the General Court voted to banish Williams, and upon learning that he might establish a settlement on Narragansett Bay, sent troops to arrest him. Warned by a friend, possibly John Winthrop, he escaped to the south, and the following year established Providence, Rhode Island’s first settlement. Beyond the jurisdiction of Massachusetts, Rhode Island became a haven for those driven out of Plymouth and Massachusetts and welcomed the disgruntled and unhappy in search of a freer and more tolerant environment, particularly Baptists, Jews, and Quakers. To gain control over the inevitable unruliness of the Narragansett Bay region and thwart a possible encroachment by Massachusetts, Williams sailed to England and secured a patent for the Providence Plantations in 1644. While there, he published his most famous defense of religious liberty, The Bloudy Tenet of Persecution. His efforts to unite the colony were challenged by William Coddington in Newport, and Williams returned to England to have Coddington’s power rescinded. Williams also continued his defense of his views with the publication of The Bloudy Tenent yet More Bloudy, a rebuttal to John Cotton’s response to his original work. Upon his return, Williams reunited Rhode Island, served as its president, and continued to permit religious dissenters, including Anne Hutchinson, to settle there. He also continued to ally with the native population and in the 1660s successfully defeated an attempt by William Harris to defraud the Narragansetts of their land. When King Philip’s (Metacom’s) War (1675– 1676) broke out in 1676, however, the Narragansetts sided with their fellow natives, and Williams became captain of the Providence militia. He died at Providence in 1683. A tolerant and forgiving man, although one stern in his personal religious views, Williams is best remembered for his support of religious toleration and the separation of church and state, as well as his advocacy of human equality. Further reading: Gaustad, Edwin S. Roger Williams. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005; Morgan, Edmund S. Roger Williams: The Church and the State. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967. H. Roger King Winthrop, John (1588–1649) Puritan colonial leader John Winthrop was born in January 1588 in Suffolk County, England, the only son of a prosperous landowner. He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, but did not earn a degree. By family arrangement, he married at 17 and devoted himself to managing family estates. He also studied law and was admitted to Gray’s in 1613. He became a justice of the peace in 1617 and appointed an attorney in the Court of Wards in 1627, by which time he had become an ardent Puritan. Winthrop, John 403 Beset with a large family to provide for, troubled by the widespread corruption of the Court of Wards, and deeply disturbed by the government’s religious and political practices, he threw in his lot with the fledgling Massachusetts Bay Company. When the company agreed to turn control of itself over to the residents of the colony it was about to establish, Winthrop agreed to be one of those residents, and the company elected him governor. He sailed in April 1630, leaving many of his family in England. Winthrop set the character of early Massachusetts in a sermon preached on board the Arabella. In that sermon, he argued that the colony would be created as a covenant with God with civil and ecclesiastical power consolidated in the hands of the colony’s leaders. He devoted his political life, both in and out of office, to that principle. He also maintained that Massachusetts should be “a city upon a hill,” chosen by God to serve as an example to England of what God intended for his people. Despite his best efforts, Massachusetts was not the docile, benign autocracy Winthrop had envisioned. The individualistic Roger Williams, with his separatism and his attacks on both the colony’s ownership of its land and its claim to enforce religious conformity, was a sore trial for Winthrop. Although Winthrop liked Williams personally, he understood that Williams’s continued residence in Massachusetts was detrimental to the future of the colony and supported his banishment in 1635. No sooner than the Williams affair had been settled, Winthrop had to deal with a similarly destructive issue in the antinomian crisis surrounding Anne Hutchinson. Hutchinson’s view that salvation was gained only through God’s grace, and not through the performance of works, challenged clerical leadership and church discipline and had unacceptable implications for social order and the authority of the established government. Perhaps because she was a woman, he showed far less consideration for her than he had for Williams when she was banished from the colony and later excommunicated from her church. In both cases, Winthrop certainly showed no sympathy toward those who had challenged the colony’s mission, but his goal was the survival of the colony, and in this he did what he believed to be necessary. He remained active in the life of the colony after these confrontations, serving as governor, deputy governor, magistrate, and diplomat in negotiating the formation of the United Colonies in 1644. He was its first president. His History of New England, 1630–1649 is a major source for the early history of both Massachusetts and New England. It reveals little about Winthrop’s personal life, but it does show a man who put the greater good of his colony’s survival above all else. Further reading: Bremer, Francis. John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003; Morgan, Edmund S. The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop. Boston: Little, Brown, 1958; Rutman, Darrett. Winthrop’s Boston: A Portrait of a Puritan Town. New York: W. W. Norton, 1972. H. Roger King witchcraft Since early medieval times there had been persecution of women deemed to be witches throughout Europe, but the period from 1450 until 1750 perhaps saw the greatest number of people identified as witches being killed. With the fear of witchcraft beginning about 1450, many countries started enacting laws against witches. These involved targeting older women who uttered curses, lived with black cats, or embarked on “strange” practices. The persecution took place all over Europe, both in heavily Roman Catholic areas such as Spain and southern Germany, and in Protestant England and Denmark. As witches were deemed to be heretics, their penalty was to be burned at the stake, usually after confessions had been extracted under torture. If the women confessed their sins, in some places they were garroted before their body was burned. In most cases the women suffocated from the smoke long before being burned. In 1577, it was recorded that 400 witches were burned in the French city of Toulouse alone. In 1487, two Dominican monks, Jacob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer, wrote the Malleus maleficarum or The Witches’ Hammer, which was initially submitted to the Faculty of Theology at the University of Cologne. This book was an attempt to have a “scientific” method of identifying witches, as the authors both were inquisitors. The book went through 29 editions until the printing of the Lyon edition of 1669, with the Spanish Inquisition, in 1538, cautioning people that not everything in the book was true. King James VI of Scotland (later King James I of England) also became interested in witches after a visit to Denmark. In 1597, he wrote about them in his book Daemonologie. He 404 witchcraft saw all witches as equally guilty of a crime against God. As late as 1687, another ruler, King Louis XIV of France, also published an edict against witches. However by that time interest in “witch hunting” had declined, and the last witch to be executed in western Europe was killed in 1775 at Kempten in Germany. Colonial America Witchcraft in colonial New England has captured the American imagination for centuries and remains open to interpretation. Although New England was not the only place in early America where people were accused of familiarity with the devil, it was here that religion, gender, and politics resulted in hysterical outbreaks and the execution of 35 people. In 1542, England’s parliament first declared witchcraft a capital offense, and in 1626 a Virginia woman named Wright was accused of being a witch. Although witchcraft could mean heresy, most colonists who leveled such charges alleged “maleficium”: doing someone else harm by supernatural means. When the Puritans settled New England in the 1630s, they took these ideas with them. Intent on establishing the New Israel in America, they were perennially on the watch for any signs that the devil might be threatening their mission. To these early New Englanders, the devil could possess a Native American, a black cat, or a fellow colonist at will. The first accusation of witchcraft in New England was leveled in 1638 at Jane Hawkins, a midwife and associate of Anne Hutchinson. Hawkins’s radical religious beliefs and connection with Hutchinson probably contributed to her accusation, as did suspicions about her midwifery. “It was credibly reported that, when she gave medicines,” wrote Governor John Winthrop, “she would ask the party, if she did believe, she could help her.” The first New Englander to be executed for witchcraft was Alice Young of Windsor, Connecticut, in 1647. Over the next century, nearly 350 people were accused of maleficium, about 35 of these being hanged for their crimes. Although prosecutions ended with the 17th century, as late as 1724, Sarah Spenser of Colchester, Connecticut, was accused of being a witch. Four of every five New Englanders accused of witchcraft were women, a statistic that reveals how intimately maleficium and gender were linked in the minds of the Puritans. They believed women to be weaker creatures than men and thus more susceptible to satanic temptation. Among women, those who were over 40 and lived alone were most likely to be accused, especially if they owned property. In terms of timing, more than half of all accusations and two-thirds of executions took place during three outbreaks. In 1662, eight-year-old Elizabeth Kelly of Hartford, Connecticut, suffered possession during which she cried out the name of a neighbor, Goodwife Ayers. Although Ayers was tried, the incident soon snowballed and over the next year, 12 more were accused and four executed. A similar outbreak occurred in Fairfield, Connecticut, in the 1690s, but these outbreaks pale in comparison to what transpired in Salem. By 1692, the Puritans’ goal of creating a New Israel seemed to be lost. Everywhere the devil seemed to be winning: the Crown had revoked Massachusetts’s charter, Indians were raiding towns on the Maine frontier, Woodcut showing punishments for witches from Tengler’s Laienspiegel, Mainz, 1508 witchcraft 405 and young people appeared uninterested in religion. Economic change was also unsettling the region, with coastal settlements like Salem town becoming wealthy and attracting non-Puritans, much to the dismay of poorer agricultural settlements on the interior, like Salem village. In this climate, witchcraft found popular acceptance. In February 1692, Betty Parris, the nineyear- old daughter of Salem village minister Samuel Parris, began experiencing fits along with her 11-yearold cousin Abigail Williams. An investigation revealed that the girls had been engaging in occult practices to determine who their future husbands would be. The girls blamed Parris’s Caribbean Indian slave Tituba for instructing them and accused Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne of tormenting them. In late February, local magistrates investigated the situation and jailed Tituba, Good, and Osborne, but this did not solve the problem. Over the next few months, other young women began to experience fits and by May more than two dozen people had been accused. At this point, Governor Sir William Phips appointed a special Court of Oyer and Terminer to try the cases. Headed by Lieutenant Governor William Stoughton, the court quickly became a spectacle with accusers screaming when they confronted the defendants and the accused being submitted to bodily searches to see whether they possessed a teat for suckling Satan’s offspring. Flouting many of the conventions of English and Massachusetts law, the court allowed the admission of “spectral evidence”: testimony about maleficium from a demonic creature in the form of an accused witch. By June 1692, the outbreak had spread to nearby towns of Andover, Haverhill, Topsfield, and Gloucester, and by October the list of the accused included the wives of Governor Phips and several leading ministers. In late 1692, Phips finally put a halt to the proceedings, and in May 1693, he ordered the last of those imprisoned to be freed. By this point, however, 185 people had been accused and 19 executed. See also King Philip’s (Metacom’s) War (1675– 1676); Massachusetts Bay Colony. Further reading: Boyer, Paul, and Stephen Nissenbaum. Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974; Karlsen, Carol F. Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England. New York: W. W. Norton, 1987; Norton, Mary Beth. In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. New York: Knopf, 2002. John G. McCurdy Wu Sangui (Wu San-kuei) (1612–1678) Chinese general Wu Sangui was the commander of a powerful Ming army stationed at Sanhaiguan (Sanhaikuan), the pass of the Great Wall of China at its eastern terminus. In 1644, faced with a rebel army that had captured Beijing (Peking), and the last Ming emperor dead from suicide, he opened the pass and welcomed the Manchu army under Prince Dorgon into northern China; together they freed Beijing of the rebels. The result was the creation of the Qing (Ch’ing) (Manchu) dynasty in China. Wu Sangui was raised in Liaoxi (Liaohsi) in Manchuria, the son of a general. In 1644, his retired father and family were living in Beijing while he was stationed in southern Manchuria at the head of 80,000 troops. In April, he received orders to move his troops 100 miles south to Shanhaiguan (Shan-hai Kuan), the easternmost pass of the Great Wall that separated northeastern China from Manchuria, so that he could be in better position to relieve Beijing from threatening rebels. This move left all Manchuria, to the rapidly expanding Manchus. At the end of April, he received further orders to march to defend Beijing against the rebel forces of Li Zicheng (Li Tzu-ch’eng), but the city had fallen before he could reach it and he retreated to Sanhaiguan to await further orders. Meanwhile the last Ming emperor had committed suicide, and Wu’s family had been taken prisoner. The rebel leader then forced the elder Wu to persuade his son to surrender, and when he refused, all the Wu family were tortured and killed. Trapped between two dangers, the rebel army advancing from the south and the Manchus moving in the north, Wu negotiated with the Manchus, who had been Ming vassals for over 200 years. Prince Dorgon, regent for the boy Manchu ruler Fulin (Fu-lin), accepted Wu’s offer jointly to rid the rebels. Li Zicheng’s army was no match for the coalition, and he fled Beijing for Sha’anxi (Shensi) province after an orgy of killing, burning, and looting. While the people of Beijing expected Wu to restore the Ming dynasty, what they got was Prince Dorgon, who promptly announced the Manchus as saviors of the people against the bandits and proclaimed the establishment of the Qing dynasty on behalf of his young nephew. Wu’s forces destroyed the remnant rebels in 1645 and he was rewarded with the title Prince Pacifier of the West and after serving in Shaanxi and Sichuan (Szechuan) for several years, he was sent to Yunnan province as hereditary governor with full civil and mil- 406 Wu Sangui itary powers. One of his sons was married to a daughter of Manchu emperor Shunzi (Shun-chih). A Ming pretender had earlier established himself in Yunnan in 1656. Wu set out to destroy his power in Yunnan, finally chasing him into Burma, capturing him and his court, and killing him and his son. Fearing the power and ambition of three Chinese generals who had helped establish Manchu power in 1644 (called the Three Feudatories because they had been granted hereditary fiefs in southern China) and suspicious of Wu, Emperor Kangxi (K’ang-hsi) ordered all three to resign in 1673. Wu responded by declaring himself emperor of a new Zhou (Chou) dynasty in 1674 and began an offensive that pushed northward to the Yangzi (Yangtze) valley, winning many adherents. The tide turned in 1677, when the other two feudatories surrendered. Wu died of dysentery in 1678, leaving his throne to a young grandson who committed suicide in 1681 as his movement crumbled. Wu Sangui left a mixed legacy. Ming loyalists regard him as a traitor because the Manchus could not have captured power in 1644 without him. His motivation was personal, and probably he did not understand the consequences of his action. By the time he rebelled, he was old and Qing power was established under a vigorous young Kangxi emperor. Further reading: Hummel, Arthur W., ed. Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period. Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1943–44; Kessler, Lawrence D. K’ang-hsi and the Consolidation of Ch’ing Rule, 1661– 1684. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976; Spence, Jonathan D., and John E. Willis, Jr., eds. From Ming to Ch’ing: Conquest, Region and Continuity in Seventeenth- Century China. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979. Jiu-Hwa Lo Upshur

Age of Revolution and Empire 1750 to 1900

Wahhabi movement Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab (d. 1792), a cleric from the Arabian Peninsula (present-day Saudi Arabia), founded the Wahhabi movement after concluding that innovation and interpretation had corrupted Sunni Islam. He used the works of the early Muslim thinker Ibn Taymiyya to justify his interpretation and advocated an Islamic reformation. Wahhabis claimed the way of Salaf as-Salih, or the rightly guided Muslims who sought to restore Islam to its true state. While some consider Abd al-Wahhab a great Islamic reformer, others refer to him as the father of modern Islamic terrorism. After being expelled from his home village in the Najd, Abd al-Wahhab moved to Dir’iya and formed an alliance with the chieftain Muhammad Ibn Saud in 1795. The alliance of Wahhabism and the Saud dynasty proved a potent religious and military force that would survive several major military defeats over two centuries. Ibn Saud used Wahhabism to justify his conquests of Arabia, arguing that many Muslims had become unbelievers and that orthodox, or rightguided, Muslims had the right or even the duty to conduct violent jihad (holy war) against the unbelievers. By 1795 the Wahhabis, in alliance with the Saud family, controlled most of the northern and eastern parts of the Arabian Peninsula. By 1804 they had taken the Hijaz and the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. The Ottoman Empire, accused of corrupt Islamic practices by the Wahhabis, opposed the movement and enlisted the support of Muhammad Ali in Egypt to crush both the Saud family and the Wahhabis and to reassert Ottoman hegemony over Arabia. From 1811–20 Muhammad Ali’s able son Ibrahim was able to defeat the Wahhabis and drive them back into the remote northern part of the Arabian Desert. Wahhabism recognized the Qu’ran and the Hadith (teachings of the Prophet Muhammad) as the basic texts. Unlike other Muslims, Wahhabis did not adhere solely to one specifi c Islamic school of jurisprudence, but rather based their beliefs on direct interpretations of the words of the Prophet. Wahhabis believed that other Muslims, such as the Sufi s and the Shi’i, followed non-Islamic practices. They sought to restore Islam to its true state. Wahhabi interpretations of the Hadith were austere and puritanical. The most severe Wahhabi practices were manifested in the Arabian Peninsula, In 1924 the Wahhabi Saud dynasty reconquered the two Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina, giving them control of the hajj, the annual pilgrimage. Control over the hajj gave Wahhabis ample opportunity to preach to Muslim pilgrims, while subsequent revenues from vast petroleum reserves gave the Saudi dynasty the resources to fund Wahhabi-based religious schools, newspapers, and outreach organizations. Most Muslims outside Arabia rejected Wahhabi Islam, and traditional Sunnis, while accepting the Hanbali scholar Ibn Taymiyya, rejected Abd al-Wahhab’s interpretation of his work. See also Arab reformers and nationalists. W Further reading: Esposito, John. Islam: The Straight Path. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005; Fandy, Mamoun. Saudi Arabia and the Politics of Dissent. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999; Winder, R. Bailey. Saudi Arabia in the Nineteenth Century. London: Macmillan, 1965. Julie Eadeh Waitangi Treaty New Zealand became an offi cial colony of Britain on February 6, 1840, with the signing of the Waitangi Treaty. The treaty gave the British government, headed by Queen Victoria, political sovereignty in New Zealand. In the treaty, the Maori gave sovereignty to the government of Britain but were allowed to continue their own cultural practices and traditions. Though many provisions were made for the protection of the Maori, especially in regard to land boundaries and ownership, throughout the 19th century the Maori seceded many of their rights and homelands to the colonial New Zealand government, mostly during the Maori wars. In 1939 the British Colonial Offi ce gave Captain William Hobson the authority to offi cially annex the islands now known as New Zealand as a part of the British Empire. Britain wanted to annex New Zealand through the singing of the Waitangi Treaty for a few reasons. Europeans had been in New Zealand since that late 18th century, but emigration and trade from British subjects in the islands increased substantially during the 1830s. In the 1830s British politics and culture were under a heavy moral infl uence to protect native cultures affected by British imperialism, such as the Maori. This moral sentiment in Parliament and in the popular newspapers helped to prompt the Colonial Offi ce to try to annex the colony in order to help protect the Maori from British exploitation. The missionary Henry Williams copied the Waitangi Treaty, which was eventually signed by 529 chiefs on eight different copies in Maori and in English. There were differences, however, between the English and the Maori text that later created problems between the settlers and the Maori after the signing of the treaty. Many of the terms that the English incorporated into the treaty, such as sovereignty, were foreign concepts to the Maori. The Maori and the English copies also differed, most importantly in the concept of chieftainship, the native Maori conception of political organization, with the British concept of sovereignty. Though numerous Maori chiefs did not sign the Waitangi Treaty, it became offi cial New Zealand law on February 6, 1840. The treaty was broken down into a preamble and three parts. The controversy focused predominantly on the preamble and the second article. The English preamble suggested that the main focus of the Waitangi Treaty was to establish a British government to create a British colony. This differed from the Maori version that stated that the Queen Victoria wanted the treaty to protect and allow the Maori to retain land indefi nitely. In the second article, the Maori “individuals” as well as “the Chiefs and Tribes of New Zealand” were allowed possession of land. But the Maori version stated that the “unqualifi ed exercise of . . . chieftainship” governed land claims. This later helped the colonial government in New Zealand force individual land ownership upon the Maori, which allowed the British settlers to purchase land that was formerly held in common. Many Anglo–New Zealanders consider the Waitangi Treaty as the origin of the modern nation-state of New Zealand. There has been continued debate about the original intention as well as the effects of the treaty upon the Maori. In the 20th century, there has been a conscious attempt to redress the wrongs of the 19th century. The Waitangi Act, signed on October 10, 1975, established the Waitangi Tribunal, which eventually paid reparations to the Maori. Further reading: Belich, James. Making Peoples: A History of New Zealand From Polynesian Settlement to the End of the Nineteenth Century. Auckland: Penguin Press, 1996; Sinclair, Keith. The Origins of the Maori Wars. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1957; Smith, Phillippa. A Concise History of New Zealand. Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Brett Bennett War of 1812 The War of 1812 began in June with a U.S. declaration of war against Great Britain. At the time, U.S. grievances seemed clear to a majority of the American public and to members of Congress from the South and West who voted in favor of the declaration. They were convinced that Great Britain was supporting American Indian attacks against U.S. settlers in the Old Northwest, such as Shawnee chief Tecumseh’s clashes with settlers in the Ohio River valley, in violation of agreements dating back to the treaty that ended the American Revolution. 440 Waitangi Treaty Although this has since been demonstrated to be false, it was widely believed at the time. In addition, British naval outrages against U.S. ships on the high seas in the context of the Napoleonic Wars had infl amed the American public. While New England and the Northeast were largely opposed to the war, mainly because of their important economic connections to the British Empire, President James Madison derived signifi cant support from the other regions for his idea to capture Canada, making it a diplomatic bargaining chip against real and perceived British aggression. The fi rst half of the war was disastrous for the United States because the young nation was not at all militarily, administratively, or fi scally prepared for any war, least of all for a war against the world’s greatest power at that time. The U.S. Navy’s active ships numbered a few dozen at best. The army numbered a few thousand, and, in the early going, most of these soldiers were inadequately trained militia led by politically appointed offi - cers or aging Revolutionary War veterans. The nation had an insuffi cient weaponry manufacturing base, no real means to resist a British naval blockade, nor the fi scal and administrative machinery to raise, train, or pay for military forces. The United States experienced defeat at Detroit and was repeatedly repulsed in its attempts to take Canada. The only good news for the United States in the fi rst half of the war was victories by navy warships, but this did not prevent the British from blockading the U.S. Navy into its ports by 1813. Bright spots for the United States in 1813 included Master Commandant Oliver Hazard Perry’s victory at the Battle of Put-In Bay against a British naval squadron. Coupled with Master Commandant Thomas Macdonough’s victory at the Battle of Lake Champlain in 1814, the United States was able to retake control of the Great Lakes region. In addition, by 1814 the Americans saw to it that a new army was formed, trained, equipped, and offi cered. Removing ineffective appointees from the higher ranks, the army commissioned newer, younger, and more aggressive offi cers such as Andrew Jackson, Winfi eld Scott, and Edmund Gaines. By 1814 these offi cers had trained an army made up of soldiers who were in uniform for the duration instead of short-term enlistees. These men were well enough trained in line-of-battle tactics to overcome crack British troops, fresh from helping defeat Napoleon, at the bloody Battle of Lundy’s Lane in Niagara Falls, Ontario. In addition, Major General Jackson was able to win some of the most strategic U.S. victories. Driven by his hatred of American Indians, Jackson molded regular and militia forces into units that broke the back of American Indian military power in the Old Southwest at battles such as Horseshoe Bend. These wartime defeats, especially of the Creek Nation, would pave the way for postwar U.S. conquest and occupation of the region and eventual Indian removal in the postwar period. After enduring humiliating British raids on Baltimore and Washington, D.C., in which the British burned public buildings and forced President Madison to fl ee what is now the White House, the United States belatedly achieved one fi nal victory at the Battle of New Orleans. This clash occurred in January 1815, three weeks after a peace treaty, principally negotiated for the United States by John Quincy Adams, had been signed at Ghent, Belgium. Ultimately, the war ended as it had begun: with a miscommunication. In 1812 the British had agreed to U.S. diplomatic demands but the treaty did not get to Washington, D.C., before Congress declared war. The war’s odd beginning and end have puzzled diplomatic historians for decades. The United States had been unprepared for war, representatives of the New England states were, by 1814, meeting in Hartford, Connecticut, to consider secession, and the United States was losing so badly at the beginning of the war that many people feared the country might lose some of its original territory to the British Empire. Almost from the day war was declared, in fact, the Madison administration had negotiators in Europe trying to bring an end to a confl ict that the United States had started. But as the United States came out of the war with its territory intact, America’s public, press, and politicians somehow turned a stalemate into a spectacular U.S. victory. The United States even derived its national anthem, Francis Scott Key’s “Star-Spangled Banner,” penned during the British attack on Baltimore, from a war it nearly lost. See also Native American policies in the United States and Canada. Further reading: Brown, Roger. The Republic in Peril: 1812. New York: W. W. Norton, 1971. Stagg, J. C. A. Mr. Madison’s War: Politics, Diplomacy, and Warfare in the Early American Republic, 1783–1830. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983. Hal M. Friedman War of the Pacifi c (1877–1883) Sparked by confl icts over control of the rich nitrate fi elds in the Atacama Desert along South America’s Pacifi c coast, the War of the Pacifi c proved a national War of the Pacific (1877–1833) 441 humiliation for the allies Peru and Bolivia and a national triumph for Chile. With its decisive victory, Chile wrested from Bolivia Antofagasta, its only access to the sea, thus rendering the country landlocked and shearing off Peru’s southernmost province of Tarapacá. The strip of land conquered by Chile was loaded not with one but two vital natural resources, nitrates and copper, that later proved crucial in the development of the Chilean national economy. The war caused lasting resentment against Chile by its two defeated neighbors that endures to this day. It also sparked a popular uprising in the Peruvian highlands that exposed the weak sense of national belonging among Peru’s highland Indian, black, and Chinese populations, and that for a time threatened to fragment Peru into warring regions. Some scholars maintain that the ideology espoused by the highland rebels was itself explicitly nationalist, spearhead of a nationalist project directly at odds with the elitist nationalist discourse emanating from the capital, Lima. This was just as the Peruvian national state and the Lima-based commercial elite were experiencing a deep fi scal crisis in consequence of the depletion of Peru’s guano reserves following the age of guano. The war’s short-term trigger was Bolivia’s 1878 imposition of higher taxes on Chilean nitrate operations in the Bolivian province of Antofagasta, contrary to an earlier agreement between the two countries. Chile balked, tensions escalated, and soon Peru was drawn into the confl ict in consequence of its secret mutual defense treaty with Bolivia. Hostilities commenced in April 1879 with a series of sea battles that raged along the Pacifi c coast. In the 1870s both nations had recently built formidable modern navies, though Chile’s proved far superior, destroying Peru’s in six months. The decisive encounter was the Battle of Angamos of October 8, 1879, in which the Chileans captured the Peruvian battleship Huascar and killed its able commander, Miguel Grau. With its control of the sea secure, and with Bolivia knocked out of the picture, Chile launched a land invasion of Peru. Following its January 1881 victories in the Battles of San Juan and Mirafl ores, the Chilean army occupied Lima and ousted the dictatorship backed by the Peruvian caudillo Nicolás de Piérola, installing a government headed by Francisco García Calderón. For nearly three years following Chile’s capture of Lima, the Peruvian General Andrés Cáceres led an armed resistance to Chilean occupation in the central and southern Peruvian highlands, backed by an insurgent army of Indian, black, and Chinese workers and peasants, the montoneras. Soon the army nominally headed by Cáceres fractured, as the montoneras and other groups pressed their own agendas that had less to do with ousting the Chilean occupiers than with overturning longstanding relations of power and privilege in the highlands, especially with regard to the region’s highly unequal patterns of landownership and labor relations. Drawing on social memories of highland resistance during the Great Civil War a century earlier, the rebels kept up their resistance even after the war’s formal end in the Treaty of Ancón of October 1883. Scholarly debates continue regarding the nature of this resistance movement, particularly its social composition, geographic extent, and the motivations of its participants in various regions, as expressed in both their written texts and collective actions. The montonera movement highlights a broader pattern in Latin American history, in which fi ghts among dominant groups lead to sustained challenges to existing social relations by those from below. Further Reading. Farcau, Bruce W. The Ten Cent War: Chile, Peru, and Bolivia in the War of the Pacifi c, 1879–1884. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000; Sater, William F. Chile and the War of the Pacifi c. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. Michael J. Schroeder Washington, George (1732–1799) general and fi rst U.S. president George Washington, a fourth-generation Virginia planter, played a central role in every phase of America’s separation from Britain and creation of the United States. Acclaimed during his own lifetime as Father of his Country, Washington was indeed the American Revolution’s “indispensable man.” One of seven children of Virginia landholder Augustine Washington, George’s formal education ended when he began training as a surveyor at age 16. Over six feet tall and heir to Mount Vernon, George, a stockholder in Virginia’s Ohio Company, was picked by the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1754 to help command troops sent west to assert the private land company’s claims to territory controlled by the French and their Indian allies. In what would prove to be opening maneuvers in the Seven Years’/French and Indian War, Washington and his troops killed a French commander and a Seneca chieftain, erecting Fort Necessity to consolidate British/ Virginian regional claims. The French soon coun- 442 Washington, George tered, killing one-third of his men, but Washington and his remaining troops were allowed to evacuate. Working closely with British generals as war broke out in earnest, Washington would learn important lessons about British ways of warfare. The massacre of General Edward Braddock and two-thirds of his troops at Fort Duquesne in 1755 showed Washington the futility of fi ghting a European-style war amid harsh frontier terrain. Like many others, he seethed at British arrogance and condescension toward colonial troops. Elected in 1758 to the House of Burgesses, Washington consolidated his position as a leading Virginian by marrying Martha Dandridge Custis, the colony’s wealthiest widow, becoming stepfather to her son and daughter. He would spend the years prior to 1775 as both country squire and active farmer, expanding and diversifying his plantations, acquiring more than 300 slaves. A tough taskmaster who pursued runaways, Washington nevertheless tried to keep slave families intact, endorsed the gradual elimination of slavery, and arranged for his own slaves’s emancipation in his will. Chosen in 1775 to organize and lead a Continental army, Washington made serious errors and struggled to fi ll and train his ranks. Yet his skill at avoiding or escaping disastrous encounters, combined with bravery, selfdiscipline, and quiet confi dence, enabled Washington to eventually cooperate with state militias and keep his often sick and hungry army together. As it became clear that the American-French victory at Yorktown in 1781 would be the war’s last major encounter, Washington made what may have been his greatest contribution to the republican ideals of the American Revolution: He retired to Mount Vernon. Washington was hailed as a new Cincinnatus, the victorious fi fth-century b.c.e. Roman general who returned to his farm rather than accept money or power from a grateful populace. Washington’s retirement would not last long. His military service had convinced him of the need for a George Washington at his home in Mt. Vernon, Virginia, with his wife, Martha (left), and two children. Although his presidency was avowedly nonpartisan, his opinion of the French Revolution revealed him as a Federalist and sparked abuse from the Republican press. Washington, George 443 government strong enough to fi eld an effective army. As a member of the landed gentry, he also saw in the 1786 Shays’s Rebellion by poor western Massachusetts farmers and veterans the seeds of collapse of the new nation. Persuaded to chair the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, he brought order and legitimacy to the closed-door proceedings while playing only a minor role in its debates. Once enough states had ratifi ed the U.S. Constitution, Washington was unanimously chosen as the United States’s fi rst president, taking offi ce in New York City on April 30, 1789. Focusing on fi scal stability and political credibility, Washington selected trusted colleagues, including Alexander Hamilton, his former military aide, and fellow Virginian Thomas Jefferson, former ambassador to France, for what became known as the cabinet. As Americans debated what to call their new leader, Washington discouraged “regal” titles in favor of “Mr. President.” By 1790 Americans were celebrating their president’s February 22 birthday. Governing did not always prove so rewarding for the aging leader. As Hamilton and Jefferson clashed over a series of vital issues, factions, soon to become political parties, vied for Washington’s backing. His second term was especially diffi cult. Although Washington’s presidency was avowedly nonpartisan, his opinion of the French Revolution, as it declined into anarchy, revealed him as a Federalist and sparked abuse from the Republican press. The 1794 Whiskey Rebellion saw Commander in Chief Washington marching into Pennsylvania at the head of 13,000 federal troops sent to pacify opponents of Hamilton’s hated whiskey tax. A controversial treaty, negotiated by and named for Washington’s close colleague, John Jay, provoked outrage when it seemed to put the fl edgling United States in Britain’s pocket. Washington had a fi nal precedent to set. With Hamilton’s help he crafted a farewell address to announce that he would not seek a third term. In it, Washington urged Americans to come together as a nation and warned against foreign alliances based on other than sound national interests. Washington’s second voluntary withdrawal from power set an example that only one U.S. president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, has ever breached. In his fi nal retirement, Washington closely monitored construction of the new federal district that would bear his name, renovated Mount Vernon, and added to his vast land holdings. He died of a throat infection at age 67 after insisting on riding out to do chores in a freezing December rain. An outpouring of tributes ensued, none better remembered than Congressman Henry Lee’s “First in war, fi rst in peace and fi rst in the hearts of his countrymen.” See also political parties in the United States. Further Reading: Brookhiser, Richard. Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington. New York: Free Press, 1996; Ellis, Joseph J. His Excellency, George Washington. New York: Knopf, 2004. Marsha E. Ackermann Watch Tower Society Charles Taze Russell founded the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society in 1884. This society brought together many Bible study groups that he had established throughout Pennsylvania over more than a decade. Russell rejected many traditional and mainstream Christian doctrines. However, his most radical teaching had to do with eschatology (doctrines about the Second Coming of Christ, the Battle of Armageddon, and the establishment of the Kingdom of God). Russell claimed that the Bible contained a secret code revealing the dates (1874 and 1914) for what he famously phrased “the end of the world as we know it.” Given the obvious lack of visible evidence, Russell came to believe that Christ had returned in only a spiritual sense in 1874 and that the fi nal confl ict between the forces of God and those of Satan was merely set in motion in 1914. At the conclusion of these protracted events, sometime in the very near future, insisted Russell and his society, God would unleash a mass genocide on all unbelievers and reward the faithful with eternal life. After Russell’s death and several schisms, the primary group, now calling themselves Jehovah’s Witnesses, under the leadership of Joseph Rutherford, became focused on missionary activity, organizing what was rapidly becoming a world community. Successive leaders developed a publishing empire primarily to produce translations of the Bible and literature supportive of their controversial theology. Jehovah’s Witnesses are often recognized today for their unconventional beliefs and anticultural behaviors, some of which have led to important legal cases and resulted in Supreme Court decisions that have substantially enhanced America’s religious freedoms. Jehovah’s Witnesses forbid their members to engage in the celebration of Christian and civic holi- 444 Watch Tower Society days (except for the Memorial of Christ’s Death), which they believe originated in pagan rituals. They accept baptism and the Lord’s Supper as sacraments, but the latter is reserved for the “Anointed Class” (144,000 elite believers), while the “Great Crowd,” or current general membership, may observe this oncea- year Passover-style meal. But it is their unwillingness to join the armed forces, to salute the fl ag, recite the Pledge of Allegiance, run for public offi ce, vote in public elections, or accept blood transfusions, vaccinations, and organ transplants that have led to their legal problems and occasional persecutions, the most vicious of which were conducted by the Nazis in the 1940s, when thousands of Witnesses died in concentration camps. Holding a strict monotheism, they deny the existence of the Trinity, believing Jehovah to be the Supreme Being. Christ is viewed as God’s fi rst created spiritual being and is legitimately called God’s Son even though he is not divine. Christ was incarnated in Jesus as a sinless man and invisibly resurrected and enthroned by God as a king over heaven and Earth. The Holy Ghost is simply a biblical term describing God’s method of work in the world and not a separate entity. Jehovah’s Witnesses also deny the immortality of the soul and the existence of hell as a place of punishment. For them the death of unbelievers is merely the annihilation of human consciousness. Further reading: Jenkins, P. Mystics and Messiahs: Cults and New Religions in American History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001; Penton, M. J. Apocalypse Delayed: The Story of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998; Stone, J. R. Expecting Armageddon. New York: Routledge, 2000. Rick M. Rogers Wesley, John (1703–1791) and Charles (1707–1788) religious reformers The story of the Methodists cannot be told without John and Charles Wesley. Sermon and hymn, poetry and prose have permanently marked the story of Methodism. Methodism was indelibly formed, not only by the preached and published sermons of John, but also by the poetry and hymnody of Charles. John Wesley was the 15th child and second surviving son of Samuel and Susanna Wesley. John was born at the Epworth Rectory on June 17, 1703; he died on March 2, 1791, and was buried at the City Road Chapel in London. When John was six years old, he and Charles were rescued from the burning rectory. This made a stronger impression on John than it did on Charles, as he came to see himself as a child of Providence, a “brand plucked from the burning.” Charles Wesley was the youngest of three surviving sons and the 18th child born of Samuel and Susanna Wesley. Charles was born in the Epworth Rectory, about 23 miles northwest of Lincoln, England, on December 18, 1707. He died in London, on March 29, 1788, three years prior to John’s death. In 1713 John entered Charterhouse School in London, and in 1720 he entered Christ Church College, Oxford, where he earned his M.A. in 1727. As early as 1725, John was ordained deacon and later in 1728 he was ordained a priest. After graduation, John returned home to help his father as a curate for two years before returning to Oxford to carry out his assignments as an elected fellow of Lincoln College. In 1716 Charles was sent to Westminster School, where his older brother Samuel, an usher at the school, provided a home and board for him. In 1721 he was elected King’s Scholar and began to receive free board and tuition. In June 1726 Charles entered Christ Church, Oxford, where he completed his degree in 1729 and became a college tutor. Earlier in life, Charles Wesley had objected to becoming “a saint all at once,” but later at Oxford he became restless over the absence of assurance in salvation and, thus, started the Holy Club in 1729. Initially, the Holy Club began with the intent of following the prescribed method of study set by the university, but soon became more uniquely defi ned. The original four men who made up the Holy Club (William Morgan, John Clayton, John and Charles Wesley) were jeered with names like Bible Moths, Bible Bigots, Supererogation Men, Sacramentarians, and Methodists. Finally, the name Methodist stuck because of their methodical study of Scripture, fervent daily prayers, ministering to those in need, and weekly attendance in the Eucharist. Upon John’s return to Oxford in 1729 he would join the Holy Club started by Charles. During those early formative years, the young and impressionable John struggled with two questions: “How do I become a Christian? How do I remain a Christian?” Later in life, Wesley would refl ect in his journal that he was struggling over the nature of justifi cation and sanctifi cation and that the struggle was in effect placing the cart before the horse. In other words, he was Wesley, John (1703–1791) and Charles (1707–1788) 445 struggling to understand salvation and was confusing the two. A few years later, in 1735, after much anguish over the decision to enter Holy Orders, Charles yielded and was ordained a deacon by Reverend Dr. John Potter, Bishop of Oxford. On the following Sunday, he was ordained a priest by Reverend Dr. Edmund Gibson, bishop of London. Still searching for that assurance of faith, Charles decided to accompany his brother John to the new colony of Georgia to serve as secretary to General Oglethorpe. This Georgia interlude has been referred to as the second rise of Methodism. After a short sixmonth stay in Frederica, Georgia, Charles would return to England in 1736 still seeking rest for his soul. In 1737 Charles found considerable help in his spiritual formation; through the infl uence of the Moravians, and most notably, Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf, Peter Bohler and Mr. Bray, he was fi nally able to stop trusting in his own self-righteousness. On John’s return to England in 1738—often referred to as the third rise of Methodism—John was painfully aware of his failure as a missionary in Georgia and was sorely depressed over the state of his own soul. As providence would have it, John would fi nd similar help and counsel from Peter Bohler as his brother Charles. Three days after Charles’s assurance of salvation, John would have his own assurance of faith. John went reluctantly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where he heard Martin Luther’s preface to Romans. Wesley would later say, “I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation, and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.” After years of ministry with his brother John, as an itinerant and fi eld preacher, Charles was married to Sarah Gwynne on April 8, 1749, with his brother offi ciating at the wedding. Sarah was 23 and Charles was 40 when they married. Unlike John’s marriage to Mary Vazeille that would end up in separation and without children, Charles’s marriage was happy. Eight children were born to the couple; only three of the youngest survived infancy: Charles, Sarah, and Samuel. While every member of this family was musical, the two sons were considered musical prodigies. Charles Wesley, the poet of Methodism, was undoubtedly one of the greatest poets the church has ever known. The Poetical Works of John and Charles Wesley fi lls 13 volumes of approximately 9,000 poems that would eventually be set to music for the hymns that not only shaped Methodism but continue to be sung today. Some of the more well-known songs include “Jesus, Lover of My Soul,” “Oh for a Thousand Tongues to Sing,” “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing,” “And Can It Be That I Should Gain,” “Lo, He Comes with Clouds Descending,” “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling,” and “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today.” Increasingly, John Wesley found that he was no longer welcome in his own Church of England; he established the Methodist Society in England. As the Methodists in close-knit groups of fellowship and mutual accountability would “watch over one another in love,” in prayer, singing of hymns, Scripture reading, exhortation, encouragement, and confession, they were able to zealously “give out” God’s love in “works of mercy” and “works of piety.” Both brothers have left a rich legacy of “faith fi lled with the energy of love,” not only in their poetry and hymns, preaching and leadership, but by their own lives of faith. Further reading: Collins, Kenneth J. John Wesley: A Theological Journey. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2003; Heitzenrater, Richard P. The Elusive Mr. Wesley. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2003. K. Steve McCormick Charles and John Wesley (above) started the Methodist Church through study and questioning of their faith. 446 Wesley, John (1703–1791) and Charles (1707–1788) White Lotus Rebellion The White Lotus Society was one of several secret societies that emerged from time to time during the history of imperial China. They required members, mostly from lower social classes, to adhere to rituals associated with Buddhism and Daoism (Taoism), food taboos, and penance. Such groups attracted the attention of the government, which often took steps to suppress them. The White Lotus Society had roots in the Song (Sung) dynasty and survived the Song government’s efforts to suppress it. It emerged as one of the rebel movements during the late Mongol Yuan dynasty and helped to topple it. The Qing (Ch’ing) dynasty was ruled by a frontier people, the Manchu, a fact that upset many of the majority Han Chinese. Because early Manchu rulers had been successful and China had been prosperous through the second half of the 18th century, potential opponents of the dynasty had lain low and not been able to garner significant support. Like its predecessors, the Qing government was ambivalent toward popular religious organizations such as the White Lotus, condemning religious festivals and rituals as wasteful, disruptive, and potentially harmful to morality. The White Lotus Rebellion (1796–1804) began in the southeastern border area of Sichuan (Szechuan) Province in 1796. Sichuan had undergone dramatic population growth during the 18th century, due to large-scale immigration from neighboring provinces, to about 20 million by 1800; government efforts to slow the pace of immigration into Sichuan had been ineffective. The large influx of people strained government resources and caused tension between the immigrants and the existing local population. In 1781 the government arrested a White Lotus leader named Liu Song (Liu Sung) and banished him to the frontier. His harassed followers then revolted and the unrest spread quickly from Sichuan to neighboring provinces in central and northern China. This rebellion indicated the turning point of Qing dynastic fortunes; the army sent to suppress it proved too rotten to perform its task. The rebels were able to garner popular support due in part to their millenarian religious appeal and also to their racial-nationalistic stand against Manchu rule. Finally, local gentry and officials in the affected regions organized militias to undertake the task of putting down the rebellion, which cost the government 100 million silver taels. Although put down in 1804, the White Lotus Rebellion was the forerunner of more devastating revolts of the 19th century that contributed to the downfall of the dynasty. Further reading: Feuerwerker, Albert. Rebellion in Nineteenth Century China. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1975; Kuln, Philip A. Rebellion and Its Enemies in Late Imperial China: Militarization and Social Structure, 1796–1864. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970. Jiu-Hwa Lo Upshur women’s suffrage, rights, and roles Against the background of the Enlightenment and American, French, and Industrial Revolutions, Western women’s lives changed dramatically, although not until the 20th century would most gain the right to vote. By 1900 Western societies had become accustomed to women’s participation in public affairs, even if governments, and many individual men and women, still questioned its appropriateness. The profound changes reshaping European and North American women’s lives were not examples of unfettered progress toward equality but, rather, a series of challenges to, and compromises with, ancient traditions of female inferiority and dependency. Although there had long been women of distinction and even importance—queens, priestesses, scholars, and saints—the first influential proponent for all women was Englishwoman Mary Wollstonecraft. A former governess who supported the French Revolution and collaborated with Thomas Paine, she published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792. Women, said Wollstonecraft, were equal to men in their ability to reason. Therefore, women must be treated as reasonable and equal members of the human race. FEMALE EDUCATION At a time when the “female” brain was perceived as feebler and less focused, Wollstonecraft proposed free public school systems to equally educate boys and girls together in intellectual, physical, and vocational pursuits. The reality of the times was otherwise. In the 18th century and later, many women educated themselves by sneaking books from male family members or secretly listening in on brothers’ lessons. Some were lucky to be encouraged by fathers or brothers, or had access to rigorous schools led by female teachers, like Emma Willard of New York, who had themselves achieved a decent education. Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller of Massachusetts was women’s suffrage, rights, and roles 447 educated in Greek and Latin by her lawyer father and later learned German and Italian. In 1839, she organized a series of meetings, mainly for women, to discuss intellectual and political issues. Hers was an Americanized version of the European salon that fl ourished, especially in France, in the late 18th century. Unlike those salons, organized by well-educated women but dominated by men, Fuller’s gatherings were a form of female adult education. Proponents of female education were not necessarily feminists. Catharine Beecher championed improved teacher training for women and helped develop home economics as a science, not because she approved of female equality, but because she believed that women needed to do their traditional work more effi ciently. In Britain Isabella Beeton likewise advised women on cooking and home management. Ohio’s new Oberlin College opened its doors to a few women in 1833. But women only colleges seemed to offer a more acceptable solution. Founded in Massachusetts in 1837 by Mary Lyon, a chemist, Mount Holyoke Female Seminary was the fi rst. In Britain, Frances Mary Buss founded a college preparatory school for girls in 1850, and in 1871 Britain’s Shirreff sisters, Maria and Emily, themselves self-taught, created the National Union for Promoting the Higher Education of Women. Some all-male institutions added adjunct female colleges as did Harvard University in 1879, establishing Radcliffe College. Coeducation for children older than 10 was extremely controversial, for both pedagogic and moral reasons, but grew as public education expanded. This did not mean that female students were warmly welcomed by their male classmates and professors, or afforded equal accommodations. Despite some concessions to female students, neither Oxford nor Cambridge Universities offered women full academic privileges until well into the 20th century. Likewise, Paris’s Sorbonne let women audit courses long before granting them degrees. ECONOMIC RIGHTS AND WORK OPTIONS In the preindustrial economy, distinctions between men’s and women’s work were far less clear than they became in the 19th century. Women’s work (except in the upper classes) had always included cleaning, food preparation, and child care, but men and women, boys and girls, often labored side-by-side on their farms, or made products like brooms and shoes at home for sale to local distributors. As the growing market revolution displaced local commerce, and manufacturing migrated from home work to factories, female labor was redefi ned. Woman’s sphere would be the home exclusively; women would no longer produce for their family but consume goods made by the new economy. Too delicate and refi ned for the public fray, the true woman, as “angel of the house,” would make home a refuge for her husband and children. This vision, often called the cult of domesticity, excluded millions of poor and enslaved women in Europe and North America. Unmarried women, deserted women, women whose husbands struggled to support their family all found most kinds of paying work closed to them. There were some new opportunities: In New England, growing textile factories, desperate for labor, encouraged farm parents to send their young daughters to work. Carefully supervised and poorly paid, “mill girls” were expected to leave their jobs for marriage. Most did; many also enjoyed new self-suffi ciency. Paid work for respectable lower-class women was primarily domestic service. “Angels of the house” exploited large staffs of female servants. Middle-class women or poor but educated women could become governesses or schoolteachers, but almost had to quit when they married. Some women chose spinsterhood over married dependency. Many pushed the boundaries of female opportunity by taking up work related to women’s lives and needs. Born in England, Elizabeth Blackwell taught school in Cincinnati before overcoming fi erce opposition to become an physician. Blackwell argued that women and children were better served by female doctors who could alleviate their pains without compromising their modesty. Her contemporary, Briton Florence Nightingale, professionalized nursing during and after the Crimean War, giving new respectability to women’s traditional caregiver role. Dorothea Dix, who made her name in prison and mental- health reform, and nurse Clara Barton played similar roles in America’s Civil War. More controversially, others entered, or tried to enter, male domains. An estimated 400 women disguised themselves as men to fi ght in the Civil War. In 1872 the U.S. Supreme Court denied Myra Bradwell a license to practice law in Illinois, saying “The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfi ts it for many of the occupations of civil life.” Victoria Woodhull, an activist U.S. journalist and stockbroker, attempted a run for president on a thirdparty ticket in 1872. Later, married to an Englishman, she backed Britain’s woman suffrage movement. A traditionally male undertaking in which women excelled was writing for pay. New England writer Nathaniel Hawthorne famously blamed the popularity of novels by “scribbling women” for his relative diffi culty 448 women’s suffrage, rights, and roles in reaching a mass audience. For activists including Clara Zetkin and Louise Otto Peters of Germany, writing was a way to earn money while gaining political support. Both France’s George Sand and England’s George Eliot were authors who adopted male names to protest the female condition and achieve stronger sales of their works. MARRIAGE AND CHILD-REARING Unmarried women were objects of pity and scorn who often lived with their parents, but married women were more dependent on men for their very lives. The ancient tradition of couverture defi ned married women as legally incompetent minors. It was not abolished in Britain until 1870. A husband was the undisputed head of the household, controlling absolutely his property, his children, his servants, his wife, and whatever resources she might have brought into the marriage. Extreme cruelty was considered bad form, but moderate beatings were sanctioned by law and religion. Nevertheless, after 1750 there were indications of new and more equal kinds of relationships between men and women. In Europe and America, so-called companionate marriages that allowed for romantic love began to replace or augment unions arranged by parents. In the United States, the “republican” mother responsible for future generations of free citizens was accorded some respect. Experiments in “free love” and multiple marriage scandalized but provided alternatives for adventurous women and men. The lives of women’s rights advocates would have been even more diffi cult without such husbands as Henry Blackwell, whose wife, Lucy Stone, kept her own name, and English philosopher John Stuart Mill, who actively promoted female equality alongside his wife, Harriet Taylor Mill. Even with the best of husbands, married life was diffi cult. Wives endured many pregnancies; infant and maternal deaths were common. Despite servants, the care and feeding of large households severely limited women’s suffrage, rights, and roles 449 A Currier & Ives print titled The age of brass: Or the triumphs of woman’s rights, published in 1869 and featuring women lining up at a ballot box, with a man holding a baby at the end of the line middle-class women’s ability to gain education or take on a job or career. Birth control methods were rudimentary and generally considered sinful. Lacking property rights, married women were at the mercy of an economic system over which they had no control. To satisfy creditors, a husband could sell his wife’s belongings, down to her clothes and cookware. A husband was not required to consider his wife’s wishes when disciplining, educating, or apprenticing their children. If a wife ran off, or obtained a rare divorce, she might never again see her children. In 1848 New York’s Married Woman’s Property Act gave wives some control of their own resources. This initiative, however, as often protected the property interests of a father or brother as those of the wife. POLITICAL RIGHTS The political ferment that brought about the American Revolution and continued in America and Europe until about 1850 inspired new hopes of freedom among women and other oppressed groups. Enthusiasm aroused by such stirring calls for freedom as America’s 1776 Declaration of Independence would harden into an often angry struggle for women’s political recognition later in the 19th century. Abigail Adams, wife of president John Adams, was not the only woman to ask her nation to “remember the ladies.” Between 1776 and 1807 a few women actually voted in New Jersey, where the state’s new constitution had failed to specify that only males were entitled to the franchise. From 1809 to 1849 when the word male was inserted, Québec’s female property owners voted in municipal and provincial elections. But in France, both Revolutionary-era rulers and Napoleon I’s regime curbed women’s search for freedom with stricter laws. The cause that galvanized America’s organized woman suffrage movement was the battle to end slavery. Many middle-class women, horrifi ed by the plight of slave mothers and children, found common cause in abolition and began comparing their own restricted freedoms to slavery’s chains. Sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimké, who grew up attended by slaves on a South Carolina plantation, came north to aid the abolitionist cause. By 1836 they were writing and speaking against slavery, fi rst only to women but soon to mixed audiences, outraging many Protestant clergymen. In 1840 Quaker antislavery leader Lucretia Coffi n Mott and other American abolitionists, including the newly married Elizabeth Cady Stanton, sailed to London for a World Anti-Slavery Convention. Mott, an offi cial delegate, was forbidden to speak on account of her sex. In July 1848 Mott and Stanton reconnected to organize a two-day woman’s rights meeting at Seneca Falls. Some 300 attended, including about 40 men, one of whom was Frederick Douglass, abolitionist leader and former slave. Meanwhile, in many European nations, a reform tide that peaked in 1848 was propelling women’s rights advocates in a similar direction. Pauline Roland and other French women associated with the socialistleaning Saint Simonian and Fourierist movements called for marital reform and universal suffrage laws that included women. Then came a backlash: in 1851 a new Prussian law not only forbade women to join political parties but prohibited them from attending meetings where politics were discussed. A series of British voting reform acts excluded women. Led by Emmeline Pankhurst, Britain’s suffrage movement intensifi ed after 1880. Despite press mockery, the U.S. women’s rights movement grew briskly, especially after Susan B. Anthony, a teacher and temperance crusader, joined forces with Stanton. After the Civil War, however, the two suffrage leaders precipitated a bitter split in the movement when they protested a constitutional amendment that allowed male former slaves, but no women of any race, to vote. Not until 1890 did the two suffrage organizations reunite. By 1900, four western states (beginning with Wyoming in 1869) allowed women to vote in all or most elections, and piecemeal suffrage was being doled out in Sweden, Britain, and parts of the British Empire. See also abolition of slavery in the Americas; American temperance movement. Further reading: Anderson, Bonnie S., and Judith P. Zinsser. A History of Their Own: Women in Europe from Prehistory to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000; Flexner, Eleanor, and Ellen Fitzpatrick. Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1996. Marsha E. Ackermann

Crisis and Achievement 1900 to 1950

Wafd Party (Egypt) The Wafd was the major political party in Egypt from its inception in 1918 to the military-led revolution in 1952. In the fall of 1918, shortly before the end of World War I, a delegation, or Wafd, of Egyptian nationalists, led by Sa’d Zaghlul, met with Reginald Wingate, the British high commissioner, to discuss the future of Egypt. In the course of the meeting, the delegates demanded complete independence (Istiqlal Tam). Wingate told the delegates that the matter would be referred to officials in London, and in his correspondence with the Foreign Office he recommended that negotiations should be held. However, the Foreign Office was occupied with more pressing matters involving Germany and what should be done in Europe after the war, nor was the government willing to give up its control over the Suez Canal. Consequently, the demands of the Wafd were flatly rejected, and the delegates were denied permission to attend the Paris Peace Conference. When Zaghlul and others were arrested and deported in the spring of 1919, demonstrations broke out all around the country. A massive full-scale revolution resulted as Egyptians from all classes, both sexes, all religions, and all professions joined in strikes, boycotts, and demonstrations demanding independence and the release of the Wafd leaders. Hundreds were killed, and the British were forced to bring in troop reinforcements to put down the revolt. Wingate was recalled and replaced by General Edmund Allenby, a hero of World War I. The Foreign Office anticipated that Allenby would take a hard line and crush the nationalist movement. Allenby recognized that it was impossible to quell nationalist demands and demanded that Zaghlul be allowed to meet with officials in London. The Wafd traveled to the Paris Peace Conference and to London, but negotiations failed. Upon their return, the demonstrations continued, and the Wafd retained the support of the majority of Egyptians. The British granted nominal independence under a constitutional monarchy of King Fuad in 1922, but Britain retained widespread power, continued to station troops in Egypt, and interfered in Egyptian politics. The interwar years were characterized by a tricorner struggle between the monarchy, the British, and the Wafd for political power. The Wafd won every honest election. In the 1924 elections it received a resounding victory, and Zaghlul became prime minister. However, he was forced to resign following the assassination of Lee Stack, British sirdar (ruler) of the Sudan, while he was visiting his close friend Allenby in Cairo in 1924. Furious, Allenby demanded, without direct permission from London, a public apology, a huge indemnity, the withdrawal of Egyptian troops from the Sudan, and prosecution of the killers. King Fuad, who disliked both the Wafd and the constitution, then appointed a more malleable cabinet. Allenby was replaced by Lord George Lloyd, a hardline imperialist. Both Lloyd and the king worked to weaken the Wafd, encouraging the creation of a number of rival parties, but Lloyd’s arrogance incited further Egyptian discontent. Zaghlul died in 1927, and Mustafa Nahhas became the Wafd president. Nahhas briefly became prime minister in 1929, and in 1934 the new W British high commissioner, Sir Miles Lampson (later Lord Killearn), recommended that the constitution be reinstated. In 1936 the Wafd, led by Nahhas, won the elections and entered negotiations with the British. The Anglo- Egyptian Treaty of 1936 provided for the withdrawal of British troops except along the Suez Canal and was hailed as a victory for the Wafd. In 1937 the Montreux Convention abolished the capitulations, extraterritorial rights and privileges enjoyed by foreigners living in Egypt, and gradually phased out mixed courts, which had given foreigners greater judicial privileges than Egyptian citizens received. However, negotiations over the status of the Sudan, ruled by Britain with nominal Egyptian input, constantly deadlocked. Egypt had helped to pay for the conquest of the Sudan and had soldiers stationed there, but the British refused to link the issues of the Sudan and Egypt. During the 1920s and 1930s more extreme political parties on the left and right emerged. A number of paramilitary groups such as the Green Shirts, patterned on Benito Mussolini’s paramilitary Blackshirts in Italy, engaged in terrorism and assassinations of political leaders. The Wafd had its own Blue Shirts, who publicly fought rival groups. A growing gap between the rich and the poor contributed to the discontent. After Fuad’s death in 1935, his son Faruk became king. Faruk was notably anti-British and also attempted to undercut the popularity of the Wafd. When World War II broke out many Egyptians adopted a pro-German stance, not owing to any belief in Nazi ideology but on the basis of “an enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Egyptians hoped that a British defeat would end the occupation. To counter palace opposition, the Wafd under Nahhas adopted a more flexible position vis-à-vis the British. With the German army led by General Erwin Rommel advancing toward Egypt and the Suez Canal from North Africa, Britain was determined to protect its interests in Egypt. In February 1942 the British ambassador, Sir Miles Lampson, surrounded Abdin Palace in central Cairo with British troops and tanks. He issued an ultimatum that the king either appoint Nahhas prime minister or abdicate. Faruk capitulated, Nahhas was appointed prime minister, but Faruk never recovered from the public humiliation. He became increasing, corpulent and earned a worldwide reputation for gamblingly, womanizing, and racing fast cars. The king gradually lost what public support he may have had among Egyptians. However, having been put in power by the British, the Wafd was also discredited. Many young Egyptians turned to more radical movements, especially the Muslim Brotherhood. The wartime Wafdist government failed to keep prices down, while mounting inflation and shortages caused more unrest, just as they had in World War I. In 1944, amid charges of corruption and nepotism, Nahhas was forced to step down. The postwar era was marked by assassinations of top Egyptian politicians and armed attacks on the British army along the Suez Canal. The Arab loss in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War further alienated Egyptians, who viewed both the Wafd and the palace as inept and as having failed to meet their demands for the complete withdrawal of British troops from Egyptian soil. However, Nahhas kept his popular image with flamboyant oratory, and the Wafd won the 1950 elections. By this time many of the old guard Wafdists had left the party to form other parties, but Nahhas failed to bring in new cadres with dynamic programs. Negotiations with the British were reopened but stalled over the issue of the Sudan and the stationing of British troops along the Suez Canal. Demonstrations and attacks against the British escalated, and in 1952 the king was overthrown in a military-led revolution. The revolution also marked the end of the Wafd. Nahhas and Fuad Siraq ad-Din, another key Wafdist, both resigned, and all political parties were formally dissolved in January 1953. Wafdist leaders were tried on charges of corruption, and some were jailed. Nahhas died in 1965. Under the presidency of Anwar el-Sadat in the 1970s, the Wafd reconstituted itself as the New Wafd with Siraq ad-Din as president. Although the party attracted members from the urban upper and middle class, it never regained the mass popular support it had enjoyed in the first half of the 20th century. See also Egyptian revolution (1919); Sudan under British rule (1900–1950); Zaghlul, Sa’d. Further reading: Deeb, Marius. Party Politics in Egypt: The Wafd and Its Rivals. London: Ithaca Press, 1979; Terry, Janice J. The Wafd 1919–1952: Cornerstone of Egyptian Political Power. London: Third World Centre for Research and Publishing, 1982. Janice J. Terry Wang Jingwei (Wang Ching-wei) (1883–1944) Chinese politician Wang Jingwei’s given name was Zhaoming (Chaoming), but he was better known by his revolutionary name, Jingwei. The son of a poor government official, 406 Wang Jingwei (Wang Ching-wei) he was educated in traditional schools in China and then studied law in Japan, where he met Chinese revolutionary leader Dr. Sun Yat-sen and joined his cause to overthrow the Manchu Qing (Ch’ing) dynasty. Wang was sentenced to death for a failed assassination attempt on the prince regent in Beijing (Peking) in 1910, which was commuted to a life sentence, but he was freed at the outbreak of the revolution in 1911. Wang initially opposed Sun’s United Front with the Soviet Union but nevertheless joined the United Front government in Canton in 1923. In the power struggle after Sun’s death in 1925, Wang and the left-wing Kuomintang (KMT) won leadership of the government. They collaborated with Soviet adviser Michael Borodin and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and ousted the right-wing KMT leaders led by Hu Hanmin (Hu Han-min) from Canton. Centrist KMT leader Chiang Kai-shek focused on training a modern army. In 1926 Chiang was appointed commander in chief of the National Revolutionary Army in the Northern Expedition against the warlords to unify China. In the wake of Chiang’s victories, Wang moved the KMT government from Canton to Wuhan in the lower Yangzi (Yangtze) River valley. Early in 1927 Chiang allied with the right-wing KMT, purged the CCP in areas under his control, and expelled the Soviet advisers. Wang continued collaborating with the Soviets and the CCP until it became clear that the Soviets intended to eliminate his government and install the CCP in power. Thus, he was forced to dissolve the Wuhan government and go into exile. Wang returned to China in 1930. He subsequently switched sides several times in a quest for power. He fi rst joined a coalition of warlords (called the Reorganizationists) against the Chiang-led government in 1930; it quickly collapsed. Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931 forced the factions of the KMT to cooperate, and Wang headed the civilian government as president of the executive yuan (premier) and foreign minister between 1932 and 1935. However, he became the junior partner to Chiang, who led the military and had more support among KMT leaders. Wang became unpopular because he espoused appeasing Japan. A disgruntled army offi - cer wounded him for his pro-Japanese stance in 1935, and while he convalesced abroad, Japan attacked China in 1937. Chiang’s popularity soared as he led China to war as director-general of the KMT and commander in chief of the armed forces. Wang was dissatisfi ed with being number two man in the party and was defeatist over China’s chances in the war. In 1938 he secretly left China’s wartime capital, Chongqing (Chungking), surfaced in Hanoi in French Indochina claiming to lead a “peace movement,” and then headed for Tokyo, where he gained Japanese support for his leading a puppet government. Although Japan installed him in 1940 as puppet leader in Nanjing (Nanking) for occupied southern China, it also established other puppets in areas it controlled in northern China and Inner Mongolia. Few Chinese of renown in or outside the KMT joined his quisling regime. Wang’s physical and mental health deteriorated as Japan’s war fortunes sank. He went to Japan for medical treatment in March 1944 and died there in October. His demoralized regime collapsed with Japan’s defeat. His politically active widow and other supporters were tried and convicted of treason after the war. See also Sino-Japanese War. Further reading: Boyle, John H. China and Japan at War, 1937–1945: The Politics of Collaboration. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1972; Fairbank, John K., and Albert Feuerwerker, eds. Cambridge History of China, Part 2, Vol. 13, Republican China, 1912–1949. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986; Tien, Hung-mao. Government and Politics in Kuomintang China, 1928–1937. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1972. Jiu-Hwa Lo Upshur warlord era in China (1916–1927) Although the warlord era in China offi cially lasted only a decade, its roots went back to the late Qing (Ch’ing) dynasty, and it persisted after 1927. A warlord, junfa (chun-fa) in Chinese, was a military leader with a personal army ruling autonomously over a region. Warlords were a diverse group; some were well educated, while others were not, for example, Zhang Zolin (Chang Tsolin), who began as a bandit, and Feng Yuxiang (Feng Yu-hsiang), who enlisted as an illiterate boy. Some harbored national ambitions, while others were content to be “local emperors.” However, all warlords shared certain important characteristics: a personal army with close ties between the important offi cers; secure control over a territory and its revenues, which provided for independence; and alliances with other warlords to provide security or secure a balance of power. Personal armies or militias can be traced to the mid-19th century, when large-scale rebellions raged and the Banner and Green Standard Armies of the Qing warlord era in China (1916–1927) 407 government proved inadequate. Stalwart defenders of the dynasty such as Zeng Guofan (Tseng Kuo-fan) met the crisis by raising personal armies in their home provinces that defeated the rebels and restored order. After its resounding defeat in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95), the Qing government commissioned a rising star, Yuan Shikai (Yuan Shih-k’ai), to train a New Army, also called the Beiyang (Pei-yang) Army. The loyalty of this army to Yuan enabled him to secure the abdication of the Qing dynasty in 1912 and to force Sun Yat-sen, the father of the revolution, to concede to Yuan the presidency of the new Republic of China. This army retained its cohesiveness under Yuan but split apart after his death in 1916. Two factions emerged among Yuan’s subordinates, the Chihli Clique under Feng Guozhang (Feng Kuo-chang) and the Anhui Clique under Duan Qirui (Tuan Chi-jui). Another powerful warlord clique was headed by Zhang Zolin of Manchuria. Other lesser warlord groups included those headed by Yen Xishan (Yen Hsi-shan) of Shanxi (Shansi) province, Feng Yuxiang of the Northwestern Provinces, and an uncle and nephew duo surnamed Liu who controlled Sichuan (Szechuan) province. There were literally hundreds of wars fought singly and in coalition among the warlords, ranging from local to national in scale. While most warlords accepted the ultimate reunifi cation of China as inevitable, each wanted to enjoy and expand his power during the interim, form coalitions to postpone the eventual unifi cation, and perhaps emerge fi nally as the unifi er. Thus, they formed alliances, usually unstable, and sought foreign loans and sometimes protection for which they were willing to sell out Chinese interests. The central government in Beijing (Peking) was unstable and powerless during this era: seven men served as head of state who were either the dominant warlord who controlled the capital region at the time or their proxies. The constitution of the early republic and the parliament became the toys of the clique in power. The warlord era brought extreme chaos to China. Military men replaced civilian offi cials, and fi xed taxation was replaced by forced levies to satisfy the neverending demands for revenue. Paradoxically, this bitter period in Chinese history provided for the intellectual diversity and experimentation that led to the intellectual revolution, the revitalization of the Kuomintang, or Nationalist Party, and the formation of the Chinese Communist Party. The era ended with the triumph of the Northern Expedition led by Chiang Kai-shek of the Kuomintang in 1928. See also May Fourth Movement/intellectual revolution. Further reading: Ch’i, Hsi-sheng. Warlord Politics in China, 1916–1928. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976; Gillin, Donald G. Warlord Yen Hsi-shan in Shansi Province, 1911–1949. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967; Sheriden, James E. Chinese Warlord, the Career of Feng Yu-hsiang. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1966. Jiu-Hwa Lo Upshur Washington Conference and Treaties (1921–1922) In 1921 President Warren Harding of the United States called an international conference in Washington, D.C., and invited representatives of Great Britain, France, Italy, Japan, China, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Portugal to attend. The issues at hand were a looming naval race between the United States and Japan, the uneasiness felt by Great Britain and among some Commonwealth nations over the continuation of the Anglo- Japanese treaty, and failure to settle the Shandong (Shantung) Question between China and Japan at the Paris Peace Conference. U.S. secretary of state Charles Evans Hughes and British foreign secretary Sir Arthur Balfour cooperated to achieve the following results: 1. The Four-Power Pact between the United States, Britain, France, and Japan, in which each pledged mutual respect of each others’ interests and to consult and seek diplomatic solutions to problems that concerned them. This pact replaced the Anglo- Japanese treaty and would last 10 years. 2. The Five-Power Treaty (also called the Naval Limitations Treaty), in which the United States, Britain, Japan, France, and Italy pledged a 10- year naval holiday in capital ship building, to limit the tonnage of individual battleships, and other provisions. The fi ve principal naval powers’ respective naval strength would be based on the 5:5:3:1.75:1.75 ratio. Although this ratio gave the United States and Britain naval superiority, it made Japan supreme in the western Pacifi c. It was to last through December 31, 1936. 3. The Nine-Power Treaty (which included all nine countries represented at the conference), in which 408 Washington Conference and Treaties (1921–1922) all eight powers other than China pledged to respect the Open Door and territorial integrity of China and to refrain from seeking special privileges in China. This treaty took a historic principle of U.S. diplomacy (the Open Door policy) and made it international law. China failed to win an immediate end to the unequal treaties and to gain tariff autonomy but was permitted to raise its import tariffs from 3.5 percent to 5 percent. Britain, the United States, France, and Japan agreed to close down the independent postal systems they had established in China, and Britain agreed to return to China its naval base at the port of Weihaiwei. In addition, Hughes and Balfour acted as intermediaries in bringing together the delegates of China and Japan to settle the Shandong Question, which had been unresolved at the Paris Peace Conference. The controversy was whether China should regain sovereignty over Shandong, which had been abridged since 1898 by Germany, or whether Japan should be allowed to maintain a sphere of infl uence over the province. British and U.S. diplomats served as observers in 36 meetings between Chinese and Japanese delegates that culminated in the Sino-Japanese treaty in February 1922. Japan agreed to evacuate from Shandong, return the Jiaozhou (Kiaochow) naval base, and sell the Jinan-Qingdao (Chinan-Tsingtao) Railway to China over a 15-year period. Japan agreed to these concessions largely as a result of Anglo-American pressure, adverse world public opinion, and a moderate government under Prime Minister Hara Kei, who was, however, assassinated just as the conference opened. Taken together, the Washington Treaties forestalled a naval race and improved international relations in East Asia. Further reading: Iriye, Akira. After Imperialism: The Search for a New Order in the Far East, 1921–1931. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965; King, Wunsz. China at the Washington Conference, 1921–1922. Jamaica, NY: St. John’s University Press, 1968. Jiu-Hwa Lo Upshur Weimar Republic The term most commonly used for the government of Germany from 1919 until 1933, named after the town in central Germany where its constitution was drafted, the Weimar Republic was Germany’s fi rst experiment with a liberal democratic government. Throughout its existence the Weimar Republic faced almost constant attacks from the radical left and radical right and had to deal with unstable governments and severe economic crises. It ended in 1933 when Adolf Hitler assumed dictatorial power and effectively revoked the republic’s constitution. The origins of the republic can be traced to the fi nal months of World War I. As it became increasingly clear that Germany was going to lose the war, its generals set in motion plans to negotiate an armistice with the Allied powers. In order to gain favor with the Allies as well as avoid associating the military with the defeat, the generals permitted the creation of a liberal civilian cabinet to carry out the talks. What began as an experiment in constitutional monarchy quickly collapsed as soldiers and workers rose up against the imperial government in November 1918. On November 9 Emperor William II was forced to abdicate. A republic was soon proclaimed. Friedrich Ebert of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) became chancellor and immediately set in motion the election of a constituent assembly. However, before the assembly could meet to draft a new constitution, Ebert was forced to put down the large number of socialist revolutions erupting throughout Germany. As the parliament convened at Weimar to draft a new constitution, the Allies presented Germany with the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. The signing of the treaty dealt a severe blow to the new republic’s legitimacy. Even moderate Germans considered the loss of territory, reparations, and the war guilt clause as unjust and unnecessarily punitive. With the German army apparently undefeated on the battlefi eld, many Germans, especially on the political right, came to believe the so-called Stab in the Back Legend, which blamed Germany’s defeat and humiliation on the liberal civil government, socialists, and Jews. The constitution of the Weimar Republic guaranteed civil liberties, granted universal suffrage, and strengthened the German parliament, the Reichstag. However, the political upheavals led those drafting the constitution to seek a strong executive authority. The offi ce of the president was thus given the right to dissolve the Reichstag and, under the provisions of article 48, the ability to issue emergency decrees. The constitution also allowed for proportional representation, giving smaller parties representation in the Reichstag. The constitution was adopted on August 14, 1919, with Ebert as fi rst president. Weimar Republic 409 Upon ratifi cation of the constitution, the republic’s most pressing challenge was paying the reparations instituted by the Versailles Treaty. As a consequence of the German Empire’s defi cit spending during World War I and mismanagement of the economy after the war, the mark rapidly decreased in value to the point that it was effectively worthless by 1923. French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr Valley to force reparations payments. Mass political violence was common throughout German cities, as right- and left-wing paramilitary units clashed in the streets and attempted to seize power. On November 9, 1923, Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist (Nazi) Party made a failed attempt to overthrow the government of Bavaria in the Beer Hall Putsch. At the same time the mark had sunk to 4.2 trillion marks per dollar. A new government under Gustav Stresemann of the German People’s Party (DVP) helped stabilize the situation with the creation of a new currency, called the Rentenmark. By 1924 the German currency and economy had stabilized. However, the shock to many Germans caused by the hyperinfl ation was severe and would not be forgotten when Germany faced another economic crisis in 1929. STABLE PERIOD Between 1924 and 1929 the Weimar Republic was relatively stable. However, it continued to face weak administrations, as a substantial number of Reichstag deputies were from parties that sought to either undermine or overthrow it. To the parties of the right, the republic was a weak, vacillating, treasonous government dominated by Jews and socialists. The most radical of these parties, Hitler’s Nazis, was steeped in a racist, anti-Semitic ideology. It sought a right-wing anticommunist revolution that would end the republic and create a new authoritarian regime that would purge Germany of socialist and Jewish infl uence and redress the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty. To the radical left the parliamentary democracy was an unacceptable compromise with capitalism that inhibited the proletarian revolution sought by the German communists. In 1925 Friedrich Ebert died, robbing the republic of a strong supporter in the president’s offi ce. To replace him German voters elected the old general Paul von Hindenburg. The republic was not without its supporters, however, and the period between 1924 and 1929 was one of consolidation and many diplomatic victories. The SPD, the German Democratic Party (DDP), and the Catholic Center Party remained the only parties consistently supportive of the republic, and they formed what was known as the Weimar Coalition. These parties, along with the right-of-center DVP, formed most of Weimar’s governing cabinets. However, even the SPD, the republic’s chief supporters, chose to serve as an opposition party during much of Weimar’s existence. In foreign affairs the republic achieved several diplomatic successes under the leadership of Stresemann, who served as foreign minister in all of Weimar’s cabinets until his death in 1929. Stresemann pursued a policy of fulfi llment, by which he publicly declared Germany’s willingness to adhere to the Versailles Treaty while at the same time working to gradually revise most of its provisions. In 1925 Germany signed the Locarno agreements and the Treaty of Berlin, and in 1926 the country was admitted to the League of Nations. The worldwide Great Depression, which erupted as a consequence of the New York stock market crash, caused irreparable damage to the republic’s stability and legitimacy. Whatever gains it had made since 1924 were reversed as German voters, recalling the hyperinfl ation and facing an even worse crisis, became disillusioned with the current governing parties. The depression hit Germany particularly hard. Unemployment in many regions reached over 33 percent. A center-right coalition was assembled under Heinrich Brüning, whose orthodox economic policies failed to combat the depression. Lacking both economic imagination and a majority in parliament, Brüning relied on emergency decrees through the offi ce of President Hindenburg. Brüning’s support in parliament suffered a critical blow during the elections of 1930, which saw a marked increase in votes for antidemocratic parties. The Nazis, who before the depression had held just 12 seats in the Reichstag, saw their numbers rise to 107. In 1932 Adolf Hitler ran for the presidency but was defeated by Hindenburg; Hitler won 37 percent of the vote. NAZI PLURALITY In 1932 Brüning resigned and was replaced by the aristocratic, reactionary Franz von Papen. Von Papen was even less capable of maintaining support from the Reichstag than Brüning had been, and Hindenburg called for elections in July, which produced a stunning Nazi plurality of 37 percent. When Hindenburg offered Hitler a position in the government, Hitler declined, insisting that as leader of the Reichstag’s largest party he should be chancellor. Still unable to effectively govern without enlisting the aid of the SPD, Hindenburg and von Papen called for yet another round of elections in November. Von Papen 410 Weimar Republic fell from offi ce and was replaced by Reichswehr minister Kurt von Schleicher. The decline in votes for the Nazis to 33 percent led to concerns within the ranks of the Nazi Party about sustaining their popularity, and Hitler became amenable to some type of deal with Hindenburg. On January 30, 1933, Hindenburg agreed to appoint Hitler chancellor and von Papen vice-chancellor. Intending to box Hitler in with a majority of non-Nazi ministers, von Papen hoped to be able to control the government. However, the Nazis controlled several important posts, such as the Reich and Prussian ministries of the interior. Following the Reichstag building fi re in February 1933, Hitler pressed the Reichstag to pass an Enabling Law, granting him full dictatorial powers. This act was followed by the dissolution of civil liberties, the banning of political parties, Nazi control of the press, and incarceration of political opponents in concentration camps. In August 1934, upon the death of President Hindenburg, Hitler combined the offi ce of president and chancellor and became Führer. Although the republic had been effectively dead for over a year, this act fi nalized its dissolution. See also Rosa Luxemburg. Further reading: Bessel, Richard. Germany After the First World War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993; Evans, Richard. The Coming of the Third Reich. New York: Penguin Press, 2004; Feldman, Gerald. The Great Disorder: Politics, Economics, and Society in the German Infl ation 1914–1924. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993; Mommsen, Hans. The Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy. Translated by Elborg Forster and Larry Eugene Jones. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996; Peukert, Detlev. The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity. New York: Hill and Wang, 1992. Nicholas J. Schlosser Weizmann, Chaim (1874–1952) Zionist leader, fi rst president of Israel Chaim Weizmann was one of the founders of the modern state of Israel. Born in Motol (now in Belarus) when it was under Russian rule, Weizmann studied chemistry in Switzerland, where he met his future wife, Vera Chatzman, a medical student. In 1904 they moved to England, where Weizmann taught at the University of Manchester. He became a British citizen in 1910. During World War I Weizmann worked at the British Admiralty laboratories and was instrumental in using industrial fermentation for the production of acetone, used in explosive propellants. A leading fi gure in the World Zionist Organization (WZO), Weizmann advocated so-called practical Zionism, which encouraged Jewish settlement in Palestine coupled with an active diplomatic program to gain international support for the creation of a Jewish state. Weizmann’s skills as a diplomat were as great or greater than his skills as a chemist. He became acquainted with many high-ranking British politicians, including Arthur Balfour, foreign secretary during World War I, and Winston Churchill. He was instrumental in the issuance of the Balfour Declaration in 1917, whereby Britain publicly expressed support for some form of Jewish state in Palestine. After World War I Weizmann represented the Zionists at the Paris Peace Conference; he met with Emir Faysal, Sherif Husayn’s son and future king of Iraq in 1918 and 1919. These meetings resulted in the Faysal- Weizmann agreement of January 1919 wherein Faysal recognized the Balfour Declaration and also agreed to Jewish immigration into Palestine. Weizmann agreed to foster economic development for Arabs in Palestine. Faysal stressed in a written codicil at the end of the agreement that his commitments would be null and void if full Arab independence was not granted. When the Arabs failed to achieve national independence after the war, Faysal considered the agreement invalid. Weizmann served as head of the World Zionist Organization from 1920 until 1931 and again from 1935 to 1946. However, his generally pro-British stance angered some Zionists in Palestine, who felt Weizmann was too conservative and not aggressive enough in pushing for the creation of a Jewish state. As a result, Jewish leaders in Palestine, especially David Ben-Gurion, emerged as the actual political powers of Israel after it was established in 1948. However, Weizmann’s diplomatic skills and his cordial relationships with Western leaders were highly prized, and he met with President Harry S. Truman in 1948 to urge U.S. recognition and support for the Jewish state of Israel. After Israel’s independence Weizmann was elected to the largely ceremonial post of president; he held the position from 1949 until his death in 1952. After his death Weizmann was buried in his home of Rehovoth, where he had founded a research institute, now known as the Weizmann Institute of Science. Further reading: Laqueur, Walter. A History of Zionism. 2d ed. New York: Schoken, 1989; Reinharz, Jehuda. Chaim Weizmann, Chaim 411 Weizmann: The Making of a Statesman. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 1985; Weizmann, Chaim. Trial and Error: The Autobiography of Chaim Weizmann. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1949. Janice J. Terry Wilson, Woodrow (1856–1924) U.S. president Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born in Staunton, Virginia, in 1856. Wilson’s father, a Presbyterian minister, moved the family during the Civil War to Georgia, where his son witnessed the devastation wrought upon the South by Northern troops; this left a lifetime impression on him. Wilson graduated from the College of New Jersey (Princeton) and the University of Virginia Law School before earning a doctorate at Johns Hopkins University. After teaching at Bryn Mawr and Wesleyan, he became the fi rst lay president at Princeton in 1902. He implemented policies directed at restructuring and modernizing instructional techniques and discouraged student discrimination by eliminating elite eating clubs. Entering politics, he became the Democratic governor of New Jersey, where he distinguished himself as a reformer while pursuing a progressive strategy that alienated the entrenched political machine of Boss James Smith, Jr. Wilson’s support for fi nance reform, worker’s compensation, a direct primary, and public service commissions elevated him to a national fi gure and a presidential hopeful. In the presidential election of 1912, the Republican vote split between William Howard Taft and Bull Moose Party candidate Theodore Roosevelt, who also received support from the National Progressive Republican League. Wilson, having obtained the Democratic nomination on the 46th ballot, prevailed with an overwhelming majority of the electoral votes and implemented his New Freedom agenda. This innovative progressive program advanced women’s suffrage, reduced tariffs, and instituted an income tax as well as creating the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 with a central bank in 12 reserves, the legality of unions under the Clayton Antitrust Act, a low rate of loans for farmers under the Federal Farm Loan Act of 1916, and the regulation of child labor under the Keating-Owen Act of 1916. Although his administration had not hesitated on military interventions in Latin America, two years after World War I began in 1914 Wilson was reelected on the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War.” At the beginning of World War I, isolationist sentiment in the United States was very strong, and Wilson was determined to follow a policy of neutrality. But as trade with Great Britain and the Allies increased almost fourfold and as Germany refused to discontinue submarine warfare, sentiment changed. When the infl ammatory Zimmermann Note regarding Mexican intervention against the United States at the behest of Germany was intercepted, Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war to “Make the World Safe for Democracy.” His was to be a peace without victory. Woodrow Wilson’s vision of an enduring world peace was set forth in his Fourteen Points, presented before the peace conference at Versailles. They called for: I. Open covenants of peace II. Freedom of navigation III. Equality of trade conditions IV. Armament reductions V. Impartial adjustment of colonial claims VI. Evacuation of Russian territory VII. Restoration of Belgium VIII. Restoration of French territories, including Alsace-Lorraine IX. Readjustment of Italy’s borders X. Autonomous development of Austria-Hungary XI. Evacuation and restoration of Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro XII. Sovereignty for Turkish portions of the Ottoman Empire and free passage through the Dardanelles XIII. Creation of an independent Polish state XIV. Formation of an association of nations to guarantee political independence The Allies did not share Wilson’s vision and only accepted the plan for a League of Nations. At home the “Irreconcilables,” 16 senators and representatives who were led by Henry Cabot Lodge, refused to sign the Versailles Treaty and campaigned vigorously against the League of Nations. Wilson embarked on a demanding national tour to take his message to the U.S. public, who responded with enthusiasm, but no congressional vote changed. Exhausted, the president suffered a stroke and served out his term as a virtual invalid before dying in 1924. The United States never signed the Versailles Treaty and never joined the League of Nations. 412 Wilson, Woodrow Despite his impressive efforts toward achieving and maintaining world peace, Wilson’s legacy is tarnished by his views on race. He allowed his cabinet members to segregate their respective offices, leading to the first widespread segregation in Washington, D.C., since the American Civil War. In later years, as president of Princeton University, Wilson discouraged African Americans from even bothering to apply. Perhaps the greatest indictment of Wilson’s racial views come in the movie Birth of a Nation, a flim that depicts the Ku Klux Klan in a postive light. Wilson’s History of the American People endorses the southern version of Reconstruction, that is, the victimization of southern whites. Further reading: Auchincloss, Louis. Woodrow Wilson. New York: Viking Books, 2000; Devlin, Patrick. Too Proud to Fight: Woodrow Wilson’s Neutrality. New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1975; Knock, Thomas J. To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Janice J. Terry women’s suffrage and rights It took civil disobedience and a world war, but after 1900 new campaigns in the long struggle for woman suffrage finally succeeded. By 1950 most of the world’s women could vote, although holdout nations remained. Legal restrictions and customs also discouraged women from seeking political office. Success made some important changes in women’s lives. Yet many feminist leaders in the United States and elsewhere viewed these changes as inadequate and proposed additional reforms to achieve true gender equality. Despite bruising internal struggles, a new generation of suffragists attracted thousands of supporters, including working women. Mass demonstrations became more confrontational. After she was advised by Britain’s prime minister to “be patient,” suffrage leader Emmeline Gould Pankhurst (1858–1928) became less so, leading her adult daughters and throngs of supporters into confrontations that included hunger strikes and vandalism. More peaceful rallies were mounted by Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847–1929), Pankhurst’s President of the United States during World War I, Woodrow Wilson fought for the adoption of his Fourteen Points to maintain international peace. He is seen here throwing the first ball on the opening day of the baseball season, a political ritual. women’s suffrage and rights 413 movement rival. When World War I erupted in 1914, both organizations patriotically dropped their protests for the duration. In 1918 British women aged 30 could vote; men voted at age 21. The disparity ended 10 years later. In the United States new leaders, including Carrie Chapman Catt (1859–1947), revived a splintered movement by reaching out to immigrant and working women. Stymied in many states, suffragists refocused their efforts on Washington, D.C., proposing what became in August 1920 the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Their hard-fought battle included protests in which women dressed in white, chained themselves to the White House gates, and held hunger strikes. When the United States entered the war in 1917, most suffragists supported the war effort, but pacifist Jeannette Rankin of Montana, the first woman elected to Congress, voted against the war resolution. Suffrage for Canadian women, enthusiastically promoted by temperance groups, first succeeded in Manitoba in 1916. All Canadian women could vote in federal elections after 1918; not until 1940 did Quebec drop its opposition to women voting on provincial issues. In North America the 1920s were nominally the era of the “flapper,” a brash young woman who scandalized with her seeming freedom of dress, speech, and behavior. Although U.S. women college graduates doubled in the decade and a quarter of women held paying jobs, it soon became clear that voting was no magical passport to equality. By 1923 U.S. feminist Alice Paul (1885–1977), who had been jailed in both British and U.S. prewar suffrage protests, was calling for an Equal Rights Amendment. Paul was not alone. Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860– 1935), grandniece of Harriet Beecher Stowe, advocated women’s economic independence free of female stereotypes. English writer Virginia Woolf in her 1929 A Room of One’s Own argued that managing money made women freer than did voting. The meaning of equality was contentious. Some hoped that women and men would eventually be treated exactly alike. Others believed that women still occupied a separate sphere in modern society. Many nations enacted special protections for working women. Newly elected Reichstag deputy Marie Juchacz told her Weimar Republic colleagues in 1919 that women’s grievances should be considered resolved. Many women made their mark by continuing to bring femininity to bear on such issues as child welfare, education, healthful housing, and world peace. By the 20th century, birth control and abortion had become issues of intense public controversy. U.S. nurse Margaret Sanger (1870– 1966), one of 11 children, was arrested for distributing information about contraception and opening a Brooklyn clinic in 1916. Her movement, later named Planned Parenthood, remained controversial even though Sanger took pains to target only married women. Inspired by Sanger, Scots botanist Marie Stopes (1880–1958) wrote Wise Parenthood in 1918 and became Britain’s foremost birth control advocate. In Europe, where political parties and religions were closely tied, the movement struggled. The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution initially promised Soviet women reproductive choices, but by 1936 abortion was recriminalized. The worldwide Great Depression of the 1930s and the subsequent outbreak of World War II had contradictory effects on women. Hard times prompted leaders in many countries to try to prevent married women from “stealing” work from men. The idea that women should refocus on “Kinder, Kirche, Kuchen” (children, church, cooking), attributed to the emerging regime of Adolf Hitler, was broadly accepted by many conservative political parties. Since women were paid less and their employments, like cleaning, teaching, and clerical chores, were not as endangered as “male” manufacturing jobs, depression-era women often became their families’ main breadwinner. In the United States Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal brought women into important govern- Women in the United States received suffrage as a result of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution. 414 women’s suffrage and rights ment positions. Frances Perkins, who had worked at Jane Addams’s Hull-House and with Alfred E. Smith in the aftermath of New York’s Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, became secretary of labor, the fi rst woman to hold a cabinet post. Roosevelt’s wife, Eleanor, held no paid position but reached out to depression victims, including African Americans, in her role as fi rst lady. Nevertheless, most New Deal programs heavily favored male workers. This changed dramatically as the United States entered the war. Women in Europe and North America had played important roles during World War I, but World War II offered even more opportunity. As more men went to war, it fell to women to maintain or even increase their homelands’ agricultural and manufacturing production. In the United States an elaborate propaganda effort persuaded women that they could become “Rosie the Riveter,” a pert and muscular young woman who could wield a welding torch as effectively as she could type a letter. Women, including married women, became a third of the U.S. workforce. Although most female war workers continued to do “women’s jobs,” 350,000 joined the armed forces, and 3 million worked in defense industries. Despite problems with child care and other issues, most were proud of their work and pay. In 1945, as troops began mustering out to resume civilian lives, so did female defense workers. By 1950 Rosie seemed a distant memory as the United States (and most other nations) returned to gender “normalcy.” Further reading: Abrams, Fran. Freedom’s Cause: Lives of the Suffragettes. London: Profi le Books, 2003; Lunardini, Christine A. From Equal Suffrage to Equal Rights: Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party, 1910–1928. New York: New York University Press, 1986. Marsha E. Ackermann World War I In the spring of 1914 President Woodrow Wilson sent his chief adviser, Colonel E. M. House, on a fact-fi nding mission to Europe. Greatly disturbed by the obvious escalating tension generated by international rivalries House reported: “The situation is extraordinary. . . . It only needs a spark to set the whole thing off.” The incident that triggered the explosion was the assassination of the heir apparent to the Austrian throne, Franz Ferdinand, and his wife on June 28, 1914, as they drove in an open car through the streets of Sarajevo, the sleepy capital of Bosnia. The assassin was Gavrilo Princep, a young Bosnian Serb who belonged to a secret terrorist Serbian society pledged to the overthrow of Habsburg control in south Slav territories. Austrian statesmen assumed erroneously that the Serbian government was involved in the murderous deed. Here was an opportunity to settle accounts with the Serbs, who had long fanned political unrest among the Slavic population within the Austrian Empire. Assured of German support, Vienna fi red off a harsh ultimatum to the Serbian government. Belgrade’s reply was conciliatory; it accepted all but one of the demands. The Austrian government deemed the reply unsatisfactory, broke off diplomatic relations, and on July 28 declared war on Serbia. Austria’s hope that the confl ict could be localized was dashed when the rival alliances, which had divided Europe since 1907, immediately came into play. Within a week Austria and Germany were pitted against Serbia, Russia, France, Belgium, and Britain. The former belligerents came to be known as the Central powers and the latter as the Allies. From the beginning both sides tried to enlist allies. In November 1914 the Ottoman Empire cast its lot with the Central powers, as did Bulgaria in October of the following year. The Allies enticed many more nations, with Italy, Romania, Greece, and the United States as the chief ones. German strategy, devised by Count Alfred von Schlieffen in 1905, was intended to avoid a war on two fronts. It called for a holding action against the slowly mobilizing Russians in the east while striving for a quick knockout victory over France. Swinging through Belgium to outfl ank French border defenses, German forces would encircle Paris and destroy the French army by falling upon its rear. Once France was eliminated, the Germans would unite their troops and deal with the Russians at their leisure. In executing their plan the Germans had no compunctions about violating their pledge to respect Belgian neutrality, contemptuously referring to it as “a scrap of paper.” All went well for the Germans in the beginning. Their armies overran southern Belgium and by early September had reached the Marne River, 40 miles from Paris. The Allied forces rallied and counterattacked, forcing the Germans to retreat and dig in along the Aisne River. The opposing armies now tried to outfl ank one another in what came to be called “the race to the sea.” By the end of 1914, the confl ict had entered a new phase. The war of movement had become one of position as hundreds of thousands of men faced each other in two World War I 415 long lines of trenches that stretched from the English Channel across northeastern France to the Swiss border. None of the commanders understood that modern weapons, particularly the machine gun and fast-fi ring artillery, gave the defenders a decided advantage over the attackers. Massive assaults by both sides resulted in terrible loss of life without shifting the trench lines more than a few miles. EASTERN FRONT The war on the eastern front was mobile, in contrast to its western counterpart, with considerable gain and loss of territory. The Russian army fought on two fronts in the early months of the confl ict, one against Germany and the other against Austria. In responding to their French ally’s plea for help, the Russians mobilized faster than German planners had thought possible and invaded East Prussia. Although the Russian army was the largest among all the combatants, it suffered from overhasty preparation, inadequate logistical support and war matériel, and poor leadership. The small German army, reinforced by divisions from the west, destroyed a Russian army at Tannenberg and routed another one two weeks later at the Masurian Lakes. Despite suffering horrendous losses, the Russians had upheld their end of the bargain, forcing the Germans to divert troops to the eastern front and thus easing the pressure on their allies in the west. The Russian moves began auspiciously against the Austrians in the fall of 1914. They overran Galicia, infl icted heavy casualties, and threatened to break across the Carpathian Mountains into Hungary. Reeling, and with the Czechs and other Slavic conscripts deserting in droves, Austria seemed almost on the verge of collapse. But the Russians were unable to administer the coup de grâce because of overextended supply lines and because the Germans sent reinforcements to stiffen the demoralized Austrian armies. During the spring of 1915, a combined German-Austrian force launched a surprise attack against the Russian front and broke through between Tarnov and Gorlice. By the end of the summer, the Central powers had recaptured Galicia, conquered nearly all of Poland, and infl icted on the underequipped Russians severe losses from which they never fully recovered. WESTERN FRONT Heavily involved in operations in the east, the Germans were forced to remain on the defensive in the west throughout 1915. This gave the British and the French the opportunity to seize the initiative and mount a series of attacks in the spring and summer. Each operation began with a preliminary bombardment designed to break up wire entanglements and fl atten the trenches. But German fortifi cations were solidly built and able to withstand the bombardment, so when it stopped, machine gunners returned to their posts and raked the attacking troops with an incessant deadly fi re, cutting down wave after wave. For all their suicidal courage, the British and French armies had nothing to show except a massive casualty list. In 1915 the British, with French assistance, sought to get around the deadlock in the west by attacking the Dardanelles. Successful action here would knock Turkey out of the war, open a southern sea route to Russia, and wreak havoc in Austria’s backyard. An Anglo-French fl eet was sent to force the strait, but the attempt in March was abandoned when six ships were sunk or disabled by undiscovered mines. Toward the end of April, French troops landed on the Asiatic side of the strait, while the main thrust was carried out by British and empire forces on Gallipoli. As the element of surprise had been compromised by the naval attack, the landing forces on the peninsula met fi erce Turkish resistance and were pinned down on the beaches. A long, bloody, and inconclusive campaign developed and drew in more and more Allied troops with no end in sight. Finally, in December 1915 the Allies began the process of withdrawal after suffering a quarter of a million casualties. The operation had been poorly planned and executed, and Winston Churchill, the moving spirit behind it, was ousted as fi rst lord of the admiralty. Both sides turned back to the west in 1916. The Germans struck fi rst. In February General Erich von Falkenhayn, chief of the German General Staff, picked Verdun for the site of a great offensive that he calculated would bleed the already weakened French army to death in a war of attrition. The fortress had no real strategic value, but the battle turned into a test of will, with great losses on both sides. After months of bitter fi ghting, the French line held. In July the British army, under the command of General Douglas Haig, opened its greatest offensive of the war along the Somme. The week-long bombardment that had preceded the assault had little effect on the German defenders, who were sheltered in meticulously constructed dugouts some 40 feet below the surface. As the British went “over the top” and raced across no man’s land, the Germans scrambled from their dugouts, set up their machine guns, and cut them down as they approached. On the fi rst day alone the British sustained slightly over 57,000 casualties, of whom some 19,000 were 416 World War I killed—the highest daily casualty rate of any battle in history. Despite mounting losses, Haig persisted in pushing his men in the face of murderous fi re until the November rains compelled him to terminate the operation. The Battles of Verdun and the Somme had attained a level of horror and destructiveness that were matched the following year by the French failure in Champagne and especially the British defeat at Passchendaele. There was no science to these battles of attrition, the object of which was to exhaust the enemy’s human and material resources. Commanders felt justifi ed in feeding their men into the mincing machine as long as they were convinced they were infl icting greater casualties on the enemy. While the Anglo-French armies continued to hammer away in vain at the enemy’s impregnable position in the west, the Russians achieved a breakthrough in 1916. Although stunned and staggering after the blows of 1915, they pulled things together and had stabilized the line by the latter part of the year. Eager to profi t from Russia’s inexhaustible reservoir of manpower, the western Allies drove their high command to undertake an offensive to draw German troops away from the western front. Unable to make progress against the Germans, the Russians turned against the Austrian army. Beginning in 1916 four Russian armies under the newly appointed commander of the southwest sector, General Alexei Brusilov, achieved instant and spectacular success. The Austrian army, caught by surprise, dispirited, and weakened by withdrawals for operations against Italy in the Trentino, “broke like a piecrust” along a 200-mile front. Throughout July and August and into September, Brusilov’s offensive rolled forward with little resistance, bagging 450,000 Austrian prisoners and infl icting losses of 600,000. It was the greatest victory scored by any of the Allied armies since the onset of trench warfare two years earlier. Had Brusilov possessed the means to bring up reinforcements and supplies at top speed to exploit his gains, he might have driven Austria from the war. As it was, the enforced delay allowed the Germans, with their superior communications, to come to the rescue of their beleaguered ally. Transferring massive reinforcements from France to the east, they halted Brusilov and restored the Austrian front by October. The Brusilov offensive had the effect of compelling both the Germans to abandon the siege of Verdun and the Austrians to divert troops from the Italian front. But the cost had been heavy. Brusilov’s forces had sustained an estimated 1 million casualties. It was the last great Russian effort in the war. The following year the Russian army began to disintegrate, opening the way for the Bolsheviks to seize control of the government in the Russian Revolution and carry out their promise to make peace. By the end of 1917, Russia was out of the war. If victory eluded the Allies on land, their control of the seas would prove decisive in the long run. At the outset Britain’s Royal Navy drove German shipping from the ocean, making it possible to isolate and later occupy its overseas colonies. Sea power, moreover, allowed the Allies to stop and search neutral ships and confi scate any goods that they judged to be of value to the enemy. It may have violated the principles of international law in naval warfare, but it was highly effective. The Allied naval blockade shut off Germany from badly needed overseas resources, not just military supplies for its armies but also food for its civilian population. The most surprising element in the naval war during the fi rst two years was the absence of a major confrontation between the British and German fl eets. Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, commander of the Royal Navy, was content to maintain a blockade from afar and pursue a cautious policy, unwilling to risk a defeat that could Australian infantry wear small box respirators for protection against gas attacks during World War I. World War I 417 endanger Britain’s security. As Churchill once remarked, “Jellicoe was the only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon.” On the other hand, the German High Seas Fleet remained stationed in home ports, although occasionally conducting night raids on British ports. Single-minded and aggressive, Admiral Reinhard Scheer, who replaced Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz as the naval commander early in 1916, was no more anxious than his predecessor to provoke the larger Royal Navy in an all-out battle. Instead, Scheer hoped to weaken the British blockade by luring a portion of the Royal Navy into the main body of the High Seas Fleet, where it could be destroyed. But owing to poor scouting, the greater part of the Royal Navy was at sea when the Germans tried one such sortie at the end of May 1916. What followed was the one great naval battle of the war, fought in the North Sea off Jutland. When it was all over after a day and night of furious action, the British had suffered somewhat heavier losses in terms of tonnage and casualties, but the relative strength of the two navies remained much the same. From the point of view of gunnery and seamanship, the Germans had shown themselves to be superior, but their ships were outclassed by the heavier guns of and inferior in numbers to the British dreadnoughts. Sensing impending disaster, Scheer turned and made for home, escaping practically unscathed under the cover of darkness. The German High Seas Fleet would not venture out of its home ports again for the rest of the war. THE LUSITANIA The Germans next pinned their hopes on the submarine to evade Britain’s control of the sea’s surface. Early in the war German submarines, cruising undetected, had attacked unarmed ships carrying cargoes vital to Britain’s war effort. In May 1915 a British liner, Lusitania, was sunk off the coast of Ireland with the loss of 1,200 lives, many of them Americans. Although the ship was carrying munitions and other contraband goods, the shocking toll of lives among women and children caused a storm of indignation in the United States. Further sinkings of unarmed ships led to stronger protests by President Wilson, who threatened to rupture relations with Berlin. To mollify the Americans, the Germans agreed to suspend attacks against liners and neutral merchant ships. But by the end of 1916, the effect of the Allied blockade was beginning to cause serious food shortages in Germany and Austria. The new military leaders in Germany, General Paul von Hindenburg and his brilliant chief of staff, General Erich Ludendorff, were convinced that defeat was inevitable if the war lasted much longer. Their solution was to resume unrestricted submarine warfare, even though they knew that such a policy was likely to bring the United States into the war on the side of the Allies. They reasoned, however, that it would take the United States many months to train and transport its military forces to the battlefront, by which time they expected to have starved the British into submission. On February 1, 1917, a new phase of unrestricted submarine warfare went into effect after Berlin announced that all ships, including those of neutral nations, sighted within a specifi ed zone around Great Britain or in the Mediterranean would be sunk without warning. Since the U.S. government could not stand idly by and accept the wanton destruction of U.S. property, it declared war on Germany on April 6. At fi rst the submarine campaign met and exceeded the expectations of its planners. In February U-boats sank 540,000 tons of Allied shipping; in March 594,000 tons; and in April a whopping 881,000 tons. Thereafter the toll of tonnage began to subside but remained suffi ciently high in the summer to cause British statesmen considerable anxiety. Faced with a new and destructive offensive weapon, the British gradually developed countermeasures in the form of detection devices, depth charges, mines, and especially the convoy system. Collectively, they brought the submarine menace under control by the end of 1917. Since the submarine had failed to break the blockade, the Germans were confronted with the necessity of forcing a decision on the western front. By then Germany’s population was war weary and starving, and its allies were dispirited and largely spent. Ludendorff, who was really in full charge of the German war effort, decided to stake everything on a fi nal drive for victory before the United States could reach the front in large numbers. Russia’s withdrawal from the war the preceding winter had enabled the Germans to transfer large forces from the eastern to the western front. Between March 21 and July 15 Ludendorff delivered fi ve massive blows, which brought the war to a climax. The fi rst (March 21–April 5) fell upon the British in the Somme sector, close to where their lines joined the French army. Ludendorff aimed to isolate the British army from the French and then drive it into the sea. GENERAL FOCH Using effective tactics pioneered by General Oskar von Hutier, the Germans overwhelmed the badly outnumbered British forces, infl icting an estimated 178,000 casualties and advancing up to 40 miles. The British line bent ominously but did not break. In the midst of the 418 World War I crisis British and French political leaders met and decided to entrust at once control of all forces in the west to General Ferdinand Foch, the most able of the French generals. At the same time, the British government strained every nerve to reinforce its badly depleted forces. By diverting units from other theaters, sending boys 18½ instead of 19 into combat, and returning 88,000 men on leave to their units, a total of 170,000 men were sent immediately to France with others to follow. Having narrowly failed to capture Amiens and divide the two allies, Ludendorff again struck at the British, this time at Lys, south of Ypres (April 9–April 29), where there seemed a possibility of breaking through to the channel ports to cut off their evacuation route. Although the British were driven back 15 to 20 miles in places, the Germans lacked the reserves to convert their initial success into a major victory. Ludendorff’s next attack was directed at the French between Soissons and Reims and, like the other two, got off to a fast start (May 27–June 3). The Germans sent the French reeling back and advanced a record 12 miles in a day. By May 31 they had fought their way to the Marne and were less than 40 miles from Paris. But the offensive stalled because of the exhaustion of the German troops and the timely arrival of U.S. forces, who proved their mettle in their baptism of fi re. Ludendorff’s fourth drive (June 9–June 14) on a 22-mile front between Montdidier and Noyon was intended to convert the two German salients threatening Paris into one. Foch had anticipated the strategy, and the French army, ready and reinforced, resisted fi rmly and limited the advance to only six miles. Time was running out for Ludendorff. His fi nal drive (July 15–July 18), more a measure of desperation than a bid for victory, succeeded in crossing the Marne but soon bogged down. Ludendorff’s gamble had failed, and in the process he had broken the morale and exhausted the manpower of the German army. The initiative now passed to the Allies. Thanks to the ever-increasing number of U.S. divisions, Foch was in a position to undertake a counteroffensive. Beginning on July 18, Foch allowed the Germans no respite, hitting different parts of their line in succession and forcing them back on a broad front. On August 8, which Ludendorff called “the black day of the German army,” the British Fourth Army, backed by 430 tanks, pierced the line east of Amiens. What troubled Ludendorff was not the ground lost but the large number of German soldiers who offered only token resistance before surrendering. As the fi ghting ability of the German army had clearly collapsed, Ludendorff recognized that the war could no longer be won. His only option was to continue to fi ght a defensive action to keep Allied soldiers off German soil until an armistice could be arranged. Germany’s allies were in an even worse predicament. Bulgaria capitulated on September 30, Turkey on October 30, and Austria on November 3. After some negotiation an Allied commission presented German leaders armistice terms that fell little short of unconditional surrender. The Germans were in no position to hold out for better terms. Their army was rapidly disintegrating; many citizens were suffering from malnutrition, and the death rate among children and the elderly was soaring; a full-fl edged revolution had broken out in Munich; and the kaiser had abdicated and sought refuge in the Netherlands. The armistice was signed at 5:00 a.m. on November 11 and went into effect at 11:00 a.m. After four years and three months the guns fell silent in Europe. The effects of the war on the political, economic, and social fabric of Europe were devastating. Not since the Black Death in the 14th century had so many people perished in such a brief period of time. About 10 million of the most able-bodied people of the belligerent nations died in battle, and at least twice that number were wounded, many maimed permanently. Moreover, the loss of civilian life due directly to the war equaled or may even have surpassed the number of soldiers who died in the fi eld. The direct cost of the war, when added to the indirect cost of property damage, diverted production, and trade interruption was incalculable, not only dissipating the national wealth of the European belligerents but leaving them deeply in debt. The war led to the overthrow of the German, Austrian, and Russian Empires, where the substitution of Bolshevism for the rotting czarist regime would have profound consequences, affecting the world for the next 75 years. The confl ict deprived Europe of the primacy it had enjoyed in the 19th century. Never again would it be able to decide the fate of distant countries or, for that matter, be master of its own destiny. Finally, from the tensions and economic dislocation caused by the events of 1914–18 emerged the Nazi state, which provoked the outbreak of World War II in 1939. See also Kitchener, Horatio Herbert; Schlieffen Plan. Further reading: Keegan, John. The First World War. New York: Knopf, 1999; Prior, Robin, and Trevor Wilson. The First World War. London: Cassell, 1999; Simkins, Peter, Geoffrey Jukes, and Michael Hickey. The First World War. World War I 419 London: Osprey, 2003; Terraine, John. The Great War. London: Hutchinson, 1965. George H. Cassar World War II The eventful years between September 1, 1939, and September 2, 1945, form a landmark in world history. From the march of the German war machine into Poland to the Japanese surrender, the world witnessed the most destructive war in human history, fought on land, in the air, and on the sea worldwide. The causes of the war were to be found partially in the provisions of the Paris Peace Conference of January 1919, which was convened after the end of World War I. In spite of the pious declarations of ideas like self-determination and international cooperation by U.S. president Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924), the world system that emerged witnessed social unrest, proliferation of revolutionary activities, and a sense of anger in the vanquished powers. National self-interest, the arms race, the failure of collective security, a dismal performance by the League of Nations, economic upheavals, and the rise of aggressive nationalism in some countries made the interwar period from 1919 to 1939 one of disillusionment and foreboding. PREWAR YEARS The rise of authoritarianism in Italy, Germany, and Japan, along with the Anglo-French policy of appeasement, took the world on an ominous course toward instability and confl ict. The stock market crash in New York resulted in the worldwide Great Depression. The isolation of the United States from European affairs tilted the balance in favor of fascist states. The rise of fascism in Italy and the aggressive foreign policy of Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) started a series of crises leading to World War II. Mussolini exploited the social and economic chaos of post-1919 Italy. The doctrine of fascism was credere, combattere, obbedire (believe, fi ght, obey). League of Nations sanctions failed when Italy invaded Abyssinia and occupied the capital, Addis Ababa, in May 1936. He annexed Albania in April 1939. Mussolini had an ally, Adolf Hitler (1889–1945), in his ventures, and the two formed the Rome-Berlin Axis in October 1936. The Versailles Treaty contained the seeds of future confl ict, and after becoming chancellor in January 1933, Hitler abrogated the provisions of the treaty with impunity. He and his Nazi Party (NSDAP, Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei) spelled out a program of abrogation of the Treaty of Versailles, lebensraum (living space), a greater German Reich, and anti-Semitism. The collapse of the New York stock market on October 23, 1929, brought about worldwide depression, massive unemployment, infl ation, and poverty. It struck the German economy severely. Conscription was introduced, and three wings of armed forces underwent expansion. In March 1936 the Nazi army occupied the Rhineland. Italy was brought into the anti-Comintern pact of Germany and Japan. The policy of lebensraum led to the forcible occupation of Austria in March 1938. The republic of Czechoslovakia, with its minority population of 3.25 million Sudetan Germans, was the next to come under the control of the Third Reich. The Sudetan area was given to Germany at the Munich conference of September 29, 1938. Hitler annexed the whole of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) and Edouard Daladier (1884–1970) of France believed that Hitler would remain satisfi ed with chunks of territory in his neighborhood and that peace would be maintained in Europe. Germany and Japan left the League of Nations in 1933, and Italy did so four years afterward. Hitler signed the “Pact of Steel” with Mussolini in May 1939. Great Britain and France were aghast when Hitler and Joseph Stalin signed a nonaggression pact on August 23, 1939, that included a secret clause for the division of Poland. Germany was now secured against an impending attack from the east. Moscow gladly concluded an alliance with Berlin and awaited an opportunity to invade Poland. Britain realized belatedly that appeasement had failed, began to build up its armed forces, and signed a mutual assistance pact with Poland on August 25, 1939. It had introduced conscription on April 27 under the Military Training Act. When the German war machine marched into Poland in a blitzkrieg (lightning attack) on September 1, 1939, World War II began. Hitler did not care for an Anglo- French ultimatum that he withdraw within two days. Great Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3. The Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east on September 17. In October Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania fell to the Red Army. On November 30, Finland was attacked, and the Soviet Union was expelled from the League of Nations a month later. THE SITZKREIG There was a lull during the fi rst few months on the western front. This period, known as the Sitzkrieg (phony war), lasted until April 1940. Hitler’s Wehrmacht (armed force) overran Denmark and Norway in 420 World War II April 1940, and the following month the army and the Luftwaffe (air force) invaded and took control of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. The French had depended on the impregnable line of fortifi cations known as the Maginot line for protection against a German attack, but the latter avoided it and advanced into France through Ardennes in June. The triumphant Nazi army entered Paris on June 14. An armistice was signed on June 22, and Marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain (1856–1951) became the premier of the puppet Vichy government. General Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970) organized the Free French government in exile, and Britain recognized it on June 28. A resistance movement against the Nazis also developed among exiles from Poland, Norway, the Netherlands, Yugoslavia, Belgium, and other countries. The German air force began to attack military installations in the south of Great Britain and in September began to bomb London and other cities. In the Battle of Britain, from August to October, the Royal Air Force held against the Luftwaffe. The Tripartite, or Axis, pact was signed between Germany, Italy, and Japan. JAPAN MOVES FORWARD Japan, like its Axis partners, had followed an aggressive foreign policy. Militarism was in ascendancy in the country. The era of acquiescence of the Paris conference and the Washington agreements was coming to an end. The extension of naval disarmament to cruisers, destroyers, and submarines at the London conference of 1930 was disliked by the army and the extreme rightists. An agenda of military expansion and territorial acquisition was in the offi ng. From the 1930s the military acted as a force above the law, and there were a series of political assassinations of Japanese politicians by army offi cers. The issue between Japan and China that began over the Manchurian incident propelled Japan toward the war. Manchuria would be a prized possession because its abundance of iron and coal could provide raw materials to the Japanese heavy industries. The vast land area could also solve to an extent the problem of overpopulation. In September 1931 the Japanese Kwantung Army marched unilaterally to occupy Manchuria. The client state of Manchukuo (1932–45) was established. The League of Nations had not done anything substantial to check the Japanese aggression. Japan withdrew from the league in 1933. The second Sino-Japanese War began in July 1937 after a Japanese attack on fi ve northern provinces in China. The Nationalist capital, Nanjing (Nanking), was sacked with brutality. Anti-Comintern alliance and Japanese endorsement of German and Italian policies changed the situation. Japan received full support from the two countries. The Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis was formed after the Tripartite Pact, with the provision of political, economic, and military assistance in case of attack against a signatory by a country not involved in the present European or Sino-Japanese wars. The provision obviously referred to the United States. With the support of Germany and Italy, the Japanese war machine moved into Southeast Asia, incorporating it with the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Balkan countries like Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria joined with the Axis powers on March 25, 1941. Greece and Yugoslavia capitulated to Axis control in April. The Nazi plan of lebensraum had looked toward the east, and Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union began on June 22, with Hungary, Romania, Finland, and Bulgaria joining in. Hitler was confi dent of a victory before the winter, and the Nazi blitzkrieg almost worked. Troops reached Leningrad within three months, overrunning the Ukraine region and nearing Moscow. But the Red Army fought back, and national spirit was high. The winter set in, and the Soviet Union regained much ground. Meanwhile, relations between Japan and the United States were taking a nosedive, which would result in a change in the course of the war. The Allied powers would gain an upper hand. The attack on Manchuria in 1931 and the second Sino-Japanese War, beginning in 1937, convinced the Unites States that Japan was on a mission to dominate the Far East. The Japanese were ready to invade the Dutch East Indies. The United States demanded the withdrawal of Japanese troops from China and Southeast Asia. Japan countered with a proposal that the United States should not interfere with the government set up in Nanjing. After the beginning of World War II, Washington had followed a policy of pro-Allied neutrality and was involved in the war through the Lend-Lease program. It was also fully prepared in case it was forced to join the war. U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) had called a special session of Congress in September 1939 and revised the neutrality laws. British premier Winston Churchill (1874–1965) met Roosevelt on August 14, 1941, and both signed the Atlantic Charter, which called for international peace. Negotiations between the Japanese government, headed by Tojo Hideki (1884–1948), and Roosevelt were not successful. The Japanese attack was imminent, but the United States was in the dark about where the Japanese would strike. The assumption was that it would be in World War II 421 Southeast Asia. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto (1884– 1943) made the strategic decision to attack the U.S. naval base in Hawaii, Pearl Harbor, where the damage would be greatest in a minimum amount of time. The imperial conference of December 1, 1941, ratifi ed the decision to go to war. The mission aimed at infl icting maximum damage and surprised the United States by attacking in their home base. The Japanese move made the decision to enter the war easier for the United States. The whole of the United States directed all its might against Japan. If the attack would have come either on the British Malay or in the Netherlands Indies, the United States might not have found it a suffi cient reason to go to war with Japan. On December 6 President Roosevelt made a fi nal appeal to the Japanese emperor, but it produced no result. At 7:55 the next morning (3:25 a.m. Japan Standard Time, December 8), Japanese warplanes struck the military and naval installation of Pearl Harbor. The air strike leader of the Japanese carrier force, Commander Mitsuo Fuchida (1902–76), spearheaded the 183 planes of the fi rst attack. The well-executed and surprise Japanese attack resulted in a dramatic tactical victory, stunning the United States and the Allies. Simultaneously, there were Japanese attacks on Hong Kong, the Philippines, and Guam. On December 8 Roosevelt declared war on Japan. Germany and Italy declared war on the United States three days later. The United States went ahead with a massive mobilization plan. It became “an arsenal of democracy,” as Roosevelt had commented. THE WAR HEATS UP Within six months Japan expanded over a large area in Southeast Asia. Singapore fell to the Japanese in 422 World War II Hitler accepts the ovation of the Reichstag in Berlin after announcing the “peaceful” acquisition of Austria in March 1938. This set the stage to annex the Czechoslovakian Sudetenland, largely inhabited by a German-speaking population. February 1942 with the surrender of British troops there, and three months afterward U.S. and Filipino troops surrendered in Manila Bay. The Japanese reached the borders of India after occupying British Burma (Myanmar). Subhas Chandra Bose (1897– 1945) had taken the freedom movement against British colonial rule beyond India’s border and formed the Indian National Army (INA) in Singapore. The INA collaborated with the Japanese in the latter’s battles in Singapore and Burma. In March 1942 the Nazi army began a drive toward Caucasia to capture oil fi elds. The German Sixth Army was bogged down on the outskirts of Stalingrad in terrible urban warfare. The German army faced Soviet counterattacks throughout the winter of 1942 and surrendered to the Red Army in February 1943. The Germans were driven out of Caucasia. By the end of the year, the Red Army had occupied portions of Ukraine. The Red Army was in Poland by 1944. In 1942 and 1943 the Axis armies were on retreat on many fronts of the war. The Japanese navy suffered a crushing defeat by the U.S. Navy in June 1942 in the Battle of Midway. The Allies had been victorious over the Germans and the Italians in the Battle of El Alamein in North Africa. Unlike World War I, when the powers met for the Paris Peace Conference after the war was over, the leaders of the Grand Alliance met frequently to formulate plans and devise strategies while the war was still going on. After the Atlantic Charter Roosevelt and Churchill met in Casablanca between January 14 and 24, 1943, to discuss the surrender of the Axis countries and plan the Italian campaign. At the 1943 Cairo Conference, from November 22 to 26, both leaders, along with Kuomintang leader Chiang Kaishek (1887–1975), pledged to defeat the Japanese, stripping Japan of its acquisitions in the war and gaining independence for Korea. The Tehran Conference, held between November 28 and December 1, was the fi rst meeting of the “Big 3.” Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin decided to open a second front in western Europe, Operation Overlord. There were heated debates regarding the date and place of attack. ALLIED VICTORY The Allied invasion of Sicily took place in May 1943, and Italy surrendered in September. Mussolini set up a puppet government in northern Italy with Nazi help, but it was short lived because the advancing Allied army occupied Rome on June 4, 1944. Mussolini was captured and executed by communist partisans while fl eeing in April 1945. The D-day invasion began on June 6, 1944, with the Allied landing in Normandy, France. Thus, the second front was opened against Germany. Paris fell to the Allied army on August 25, after the surrender of German forces. In the latter half of 1945, the Japanese were defeated several times. General Douglas MacArthur, commander of the Allied forces in the southwest Pacifi c area, invaded the Solomon Islands, New Guinea, and the Philippines. By May 1945 the Japanese imperial army had lost Iwo Jima, Okinawa, the Philippines, Borneo, and Myanmar. Pressure on Germany continued with carpet bombing and Allied advances. Romania and Bulgaria had surrendered in August and September 1944, respectively. The Red Army was advancing from Poland. Hungary fell in February 1945, and after two months the city of Berlin was surrounded by Russian troops. In April Leipzig and Munich fell to U.S. troops. Hitler committed suicide on April 30, and on May 7 the Germans signed surrender terms at Rheims, France. The next day (V-E day) the German commanders surrendered to the Red Army in Berlin. On July 26 the Japanese were asked to surrender and refused. On August 6 and 9 atomic bombs were dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with devastating effects. Japan surrendered after signing the instrument of surrender on the USS Missouri in Tokyo Harbor on September 2, 1945. Japan was placed under international control by the Allies and lost all its overseas possessions. For the fi rst time in its history, Japan was under occupation by a foreign power. THE AFTERMATH In the wartime conferences of Yalta (February 1945) and Potsdam (July 1945), differences were emerging between the Soviet Union on the one hand and the United States and Great Britain on the other. Once the war was over and the common enemy was defeated the cold war began. A process of decolonization began, and the postwar period witnessed the emergence of new nations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America as well as the strengthening of anticolonial movements. There was also a need for new international peacekeeping machinery, and the idea for the United Nations was born during the war. The charter of the United Nations was drafted at the San Francisco Conference of April 25, 1945. It was offi cially born on October 24, 1945. World War II left a legacy of homeless persons, casualties, maimed soldiers, damaged monuments and cities, political instability, economic chaos, and a sense of gloom. About 20 million military personnel and 30 World War II 423 million civilian had perished in the war. The death toll for the Soviet Union was the largest, with 20 to 28 million soldiers and civilians having died. The loss of property amounted to a billion dollars. The United States launched the aid package called the Marshall Plan to help with economic recovery in Europe. The saga of the war will hold a place in the history of the world as a story of savagery, violence, and the cruelty of human beings to their fellow men, women, and children. Hitler stands out as villain number one with his Jewish ghettos, concentration camps, gas chambers, and scientifi c experiments on the Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs. The Holocaust remains a dark chapter, with the death of about 6 million Jews and 4 million Poles, communists, dissidents, gays, Afro-Germans, Soviet prisoners, and others. War crime tribunals like the Nuremberg trials and the Tokyo war crimes trial brought the guilty to justice. Further reading: Anderson, Charles R. Day of Lightning, Years of Scorn: Walter C. Short and the Attack on Pearl Harbor. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2005; Beschloss, Michael R. The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1941–1945. Riverside, NJ: Simon and Schuster, 2002; Burleigh, M. The Third Reich: A New History. New York: Hill and Wang, 2000; Cardoza, Anthony L. Benito Mussolini: The First Fascist. New York: Pearson Longman, 2006; Dewey, Peter. War and Progress: Britain 1914–1945. London: Longman, 1996; Doenecke, Justus D. From Isolation to War, 1931–1941. Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1991; Donnelly, M. Britain in the Second World War. New York: Routledge, 1999; Duus, Peter, et al., eds. The Japanese Wartime Empire, 1931–1945. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996; Evans, Richard. J. The Coming of the Third Reich. London: Allen Lane, 2003; ———. The Third Reich in Power, 1933–1939. New York: Penguin, 2005; Humes, James C. Winston Churchill. London: Dorling Kindersley Publishing, 2003; Keegan, John. The Second World War. New York: Penguin, 1989; Kershaw, Ian. Hitler: Nemesis, 1936–1945. New York: Norton, 2000. Patit Paban Mishra

The Contemporary World 1950 to the Present

Wajed, Sheikh Hasina (1947– ) Bangladeshi leader Sheikh Hasina Wajed is the president and head of the Bangladesh Awami League. She is the daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the popular Bangladeshi leader who played a leading role in the founding of Bangladesh. Sheikh Hasina Wajed was one of only two members of the Mujib family to survive a bloody August 15, 1975, military coup. Sheikh Hasina Wajed was born on September 28, 1947, in the city of Tungipara in the Gopalganj district of Bangladesh. She earned her B.A. from Dhaka University in 1973. During her school days, she became active in politics, becoming the chief of the Student Union at the Government Intermediate College for Women in 1966. She and other members of her family were imprisoned several times by Pakistan’s military government leading up to the Bangladesh liberation struggle in 1971. After the assassination of Mujibur Rahman in 1975, Wajed was forced by the military government of General Ziaur Rahman to live in exile until 1981. In 1981 she became the president of the Bangladesh Awami League. With an absolute majority secured by her Awami League in the 1996 election, Wajed became the prime minister of Bangladesh on June 23. She took many measures to alleviate rural poverty, enhance per capita income, create job opportunities, and increase agricultural production. She also introduced new welfare schemes, innovative housing programs in rural areas that reversed the trend of migration from rural to urban areas. She was the leader of the opposition in the Bangladeshi parliament from 1986 to 1987, 1991 to 1993, and 2001 forward. Under her stewardship, the Awami League boycotted parliament until June 2004, accusing the government of Khaleda Zia of corruption and nepotism. Wajed is a fierce, enigmatic leader who believes in political parties based in the needs of the masses and in mobilizing the party cadre to win elections. Coming from a political family and with a father who was a highly revered personality in Bangladesh politics, Wajed is a political force to be reckoned with and is likely to play a prominent role in Bangladeshi politics for the foreseeable future. She is also an author of repute. See also Bangladesh, People’s Republic of; Pakistan People’s Party. Further reading: Habib, Zafarullah. The Zia Episode in Bangladesh Politics. Dhaka: University Press of Bangladesh, 1997; Makasudra, Rahamana Mohammed. Politics and Development of Rural Local Self-Government in Bangladesh. Dhaka: Devika Publications, 2000; Rafiuddin, Ahmad. Religious Identity and Politics: Essays on Bangladesh. New York: International Academic Publishers, 2002. Mohammed Badrul Alam W Warsaw Pact Warsaw Pact is the informal title given to the Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO), a group of Eastern European nations and the Soviet Union pledged to mutual assistance and defense. In 1955 the member nations signed the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance. The Warsaw Pact’s objectives from its inception to its demise in 1991 changed, but throughout that time, the organization served as the means by which the Soviet Union bound its Eastern European client states together militarily. The Warsaw Pact agreement replaced a series of bilateral treaties of defense and friendship between the Soviet Union and these nations. Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania joined with the Soviet Union. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (nato ) had been in existence since 1949, but NATO announced in May 1955 that it would include West Germany as a member; this prompted the formation of the Warsaw Pact. Thus only 10 years after the end of World War II, the Soviet Union not only was engaged in a cold war with the West but also faced a resurgent Germany. It was not only an external threat that moved the Soviets to change their agreements with these nations, but there was the matter of internal stability as well. Following World War II, there had been significant armed resistance to the Soviets, who had entered these nations while advancing against the retreating German armies. Polish anti-Soviet partisans opposed the Soviets until well into the late 1940s. Demonstrations against the Soviets caused real concern about the stability of the communist elites running these countries. By bringing in Soviet troops to occupy these countries as part of Warsaw Pact activities, the Soviet Union allowed itself to more easily defend any attacks that might come from the West and, at the same time, to keep these friendly regimes stable. East Germany joined in 1956. Yugoslavia did not join at any time. The treaty clearly stated that national sovereignty would be respected and that all of the signatories were independent. The treaty was to last for 20 years, with an automatic 10-year extension. Each member nation could unilaterally leave the organization; the reality proved to be very different. In 1956 the Hungarian government of Imre Nagy declared that it would no longer be allied with the Soviet Union but would become a neutral. Part of this neutrality process would be its withdrawal from the pact. Regardless of any promises, the Soviet Union acted quickly to defeat this rebellion. Using the request of some Hungarian Communist Party members as an invitation to act, Soviet infantry and armor invaded the country and after a two-week struggle replaced Imre Nagy’s government with a more compliant government under János Kádár. Although the Soviets cited the danger of breaking up the alliance to justify the invasion, it was only Soviet troops that took part in the operation. In the early days of the Warsaw Pact, the nature of the alliance was somewhat vague. Each of the member nations, while influenced by the Soviet Union, still had a certain amount of independence in its tactical doctrine and did not coordinate its training with either the Soviet Union or other members. That situation would change in the coming years. From 1961 on, combined exercises were conducted, and Soviet-manufactured weapons and equipment were purchased by the member nations. High-ranking Soviet officers were assigned to the defense ministries of Warsaw Pact members to ensure a uniformity of training and to keep the national militaries subservient to and a part of the armed forces of the Soviet Union. Although the Warsaw Pact gained cohesion in terms of command and control, there were movements that served to weaken it. In 1962 there was another defection from the Warsaw Pact, this time a successful one. In this case it involved Albania strengthening its ties to China and distancing itself from the Soviet Union. Because Albania did not border on any other Warsaw Pact member, the Soviet Union had no choice but to accept this action. The Soviets thus lost access to a Mediterranean port. Albania’s formal defection in 1968 merely ratified what already existed. independent streaks Another unhappy member of the alliance was Romania. This country managed to conduct a very successful balancing act in staying within the alliance, exercising a surprising degree of independence, and not paying a very high price for its actions. Romania’s independent streak began as early as 1958, when it stated that Soviet troops were not welcome on its territory, continuing through 1968, when it would not participate in the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Romania’s position was that the pact existed only for self-defense and not to maintain communist elites in the separate nations. In part because Romania was loyal in other ways and because it was not close to the potential front with Germany, this independent streak went unpunished. Not every nation was so fortunate. In late 1967 a reform movement within the Czechoslovak Communist Party caused a major change in leadership. These events 456 Warsaw Pact were closely monitored by the Soviet leadership. After the attempted defection by Hungary 10 years before, Albania’s departure, and Romania’s distancing itself, the Soviets were concerned that any reform or liberalization might weaken their control over this state. The continued freedom of the press and freedom of expression forced the Soviets to act. On the night of August 20–21, Soviet troops, assisted by forces from Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, and Poland, invaded. Combined Warsaw Pact exercises had been taking place that summer, and the Warsaw Pact nations had been able to stage their invasion and subsequently move quickly into the country. The Czechoslovak government was changed, and there was no more discussion of changing Czechoslovakia’s role in the Warsaw Pact. Thirteen years later, the Warsaw Pact’s invasion of Czechoslovakia influenced another nation. This time it was Poland, where vigorous opposition appeared in the form of the labor union Solidarity. By the end of 1981, after almost two years of liberalization, the Communist government of Poland imposed martial law. Union leaders were imprisoned, the union was declared illegal, and Polish soldiers took over many of the government’s functions. The rationale for this move was that the imposition of martial law by Polish authorities would eliminate the possibility of a repetition of the events of 1968. soviet leadership As the 1980s wore on, there were significant changes in Soviet leadership. Leonid Brezhnev, who had ordered the invasion of Czechoslovakia and threatened the same for Poland, died in 1982. He was succeeded by Yuri Andropov, who had, earlier in his career, restored order to Hungary after its unsuccessful rebellion in 1956. Andropov, died in 1984 and was for a few months succeeded by Konstantin Chernenko. With the accession of Mikhail Gorbachev to power in 1985, relationships between the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact slowly changed. That year the Warsaw Pact came up for renewal, and the members agreed to another 20-year term to be followed by a 10-year extension, as had been done 30 years before. It became recognized that there would be no more interventions such as the ones that had taken place in Czechoslovakia and had been threatened in Poland. The Warsaw Pact still, however, existed as a force with over 6,300,000 soldiers—20 percent of whom were non-Soviet. The resolution of the Euromissile crisis and changing politics within the Soviet Union were leading to other changes. At the end of 1988 Gorbachev announced that there would be troop withdrawals from East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. The power elites did not look forward to this, as their position within their own countries had been strengthened against dissidents and other opposition by the presence of the Soviet army. Early in 1989 the Hungarian government removed its barbed wire barriers along its border with Austria, and Solidarity scored well in a partially free election. Before the year was out, the regimes had changed in Bulgaria, Romania, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia. Although there were some attempts to keep the Warsaw Pact alive as a political organization, the Warsaw Pact ended in 1991. Eight years later three former members of the Warsaw Pact—Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary—joined NATO. In 2004 former members Bulgaria, Romania, and Slovakia joined, as did three former republics of the Soviet Union—Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. The Warsaw Pact never functioned as smoothly as desired. There was a great deal of distrust between the Soviet Union and the member states and among the member states themselves. Several of these countries had not enjoyed good relations before World War II and still harbored ill feelings toward each other. Also, although the Soviet Union, could compel these nations to buy Soviet equipment and essentially to become part of the Soviet army, they could not force complete obedience in all matters. Despite Soviet demands that pact members buy substantial amounts of military equipment, many of the nations refused to do so. The purchase of military equipment presented another difficulty. Arms purchases would bring in cash desired by the Soviet Union, and it wanted these nations to field equipment compatible with Soviet issue. On the other hand, the Soviets did not want other pact members to have armies, air forces, or navies that could present obstacles to the Soviet Union. Although the Warsaw Pact sent advisers and provided military aid to Soviet clients, there never was a conflict between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. To predict that pact forces would have fought unreservedly to protect the Soviet Union and socialism is an unrealistic assumption. See also Hungarian revolt (1956); Prague Spring; Soviet Union, dissolution of the. Further reading: Faringdon, Hugh. Strategic Geography: NATO, the Warsaw Pact, and the Superpowers. London and New York: Routledge, 1989; Holden, Gerard. The End of an Alliance: Soviet Policy and the Warsaw Pact. Frankfurt am Main: Peace Research Institute Frankfurt, 1990; Mastny, Vojtech. A Cardboard Castle? An Inside History of the Warsaw Pact, 1955–1991. New York: Central European University Warsaw Pact 457 Press, 2005; Nelson, Daniel N. Alliance Behavior in the Warsaw Pact. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1986. Robert N. Stacy Watergate scandal Watergate is an impressive hotel, apartment, and office complex that overlooks the Potomac River near an old canal lock. It was built between 1964 and 1971. The name evolved to become an all-embracing label for political corruption, intrigue, and the misuse of presidential authority. Watergate, in the lexicon of U.S. politics, is simply synonymous with scandal. In the period from 1972 to 1974 the scandal emerged as an interconnected series of events and deeds that would destroy the Richard Nixon presidency and lead to his resignation on August 9, 1974. In its wake, Watergate produced a national crisis in leadership and a lasting sense of national betrayal. The Watergate crisis began with a burglary on June 17, 1972. A security guard discovered a suspicious tape holding a stairwell door open, and this prompted him to contact Washington police. The police discovered and arrested on the scene Bernard Barker, Virgilio Gonzalez, Eugenio Martinez, James W. McCord, Jr., and Frank Sturgis. The men were in the process of breaking into the Democratic National Committee Headquarters. They also had wiretapping equipment. McCord, a former CIA operative, was the chief of security at the Committee to Re-elect the President (CRP, or CREEP), and in his possession was the telephone number of E. Howard Hunt, a possible incriminating direct link to the White House. After a White House dismissal of the affair, the burglary could have passed into obscurity in this 1972 presidential election year if there had not been continuing media attention, driven by the efforts of Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. Making use of FBI sources, the reporters launched a deep probe of the events. The outcome was that the burglary began to appear as one part of a complex dirty-tricks campaign by Nixon cronies. The basis for such suspicions rested largely with E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, who were tied to the Special Investigations Unit of the White House, known as the “Plumbers.” This group was active in undermining administration opponents through a variety of nefarious schemes such as breaking into the offices of Daniel Ellsberg, a former Pentagon and State Department employee. As the future would reveal, these actions would have unfortunate consequences for the president. The Watergate burglary itself had the approval of former attorney general John Mitchell and the support of leading White House personnel such as Charles Colson and John Ehrlichman, in addition to the president’s campaign manager, Jeb Magruder. Few believed that any of these men would have acted without the personal approval of the president. The Watergate burglars, along with Liddy and Hunt, went on trial in January 1973. All pleaded guilty except McCord and Liddy. All were convicted of burglary, wiretapping, and conspiracy. The defendants initially refused to talk, and the judge, John Sirica, ordered long sentences unless there was greater cooperation. This brought about McCord’s admission that the campaign was behind the burglary and had arranged payments to guarantee silence. With the McCord admission, the political stakes were considerably raised, leading to a Senate investigation chaired by Senator Sam Ervin. Watergate was now on the national agenda, and White House staff faced subpoenas to testify. Nixon’s close advisers H. R. Haldeman and Ehrlichman resigned, and White House counsel John Dean was fired. A new attorney general, Elliot Richardson, was also appointed. Richardson appointed Archibald Cox to head an independent inquiry. The Senate investigation was televised from May 17 until August 7, 1973, and many former White House officials testified, including John Dean. The testimonies produced disastrous results for the president. The situation became even more complex after a White House official, Alexander Butterfield, admitted the existence of a White House taping system, which seemed to offer a way of finding the truth. The tapes then became part of the subpoena process. Nixon thought that this particular intrusion represented an attack on executive privilege. He ordered the attorney general to dismiss Cox if he didn’t cancel the subpoena. This led to what has come to be known as the “Saturday Night Massacre,” which produced the resignation of Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus. Nixon appointed a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, and as a desperate compromise gesture released the tapes in an edited form. The tapes seemed to cause not less but more distress for Nixon, particularly after it was revealed that there had been an 18-minute erasure as well as many additional erasures. Ultimately, the issue of the tapes was resolved on July 24, 1974, when the Supreme Court in its decision 458 Watergate scandal United States v. Nixon denied the presidential claim of executive privilege. Nixon’s position throughout 1974 had also been progressively undercut through an ever-increasing series of guilty pleas by White House associates. In January campaign aide Herbert Porter admitted lying to the FBI; in February Nixon’s lawyer, Herbert Kalmbach, pleaded guilty to illegal electioneering; and in March the so-called Watergate Seven were all indicted for conspiring to interfere with the Watergate investigation. To make matters worse, other Watergate grand jury indictments followed in April when Ed Reinecke, a lieutenant governor of California and a Nixon campaigner, was charged with three counts of perjury. Also in April Dwight Chapin, Nixon’s appointments secretary, admitted perjury and lying to the Senate and a grand jury. The situation for Nixon was now without redemption. The House of Representatives began preparations for impeachment following a July 27, 1974, vote of 27 to 11 by the House Judiciary Committee on obstruction of justice charges. Other impeachment articles followed on July 29 and 30. The release in early August of a damning tape from June 23, 1972, which revealed Nixon and Haldeman discussing possibilities for blocking FBI investigations, proved to be the final blow that toppled Nixon from power. Without support in the House and little promise of support in the Senate, Richard M. Nixon announced to the nation on August 8, 1974, that he would resign as of noon on August 9, 1974, becoming the first U.S. president to do so. He was succeeded by Gerald Ford. Ford, on September 8, pardoned Nixon and thus saved him from criminal prosecution. Until his death, Nixon maintained his innocence. Watergate poisoned the political waters of the nation and left a jaundiced, cynical view of politicians and their promises. When stripped of their offices and the emblems of power, the politicos appeared disgraceful, dishonest purveyors of power for power’s sake without regard for the well-being of the democracy. This would create a lasting legacy of paranoid suspicions and give rise to a climate receptive to conspiracy theories. On a more positive note, the events surrounding Watergate led to reforms in campaign financing as well as the passage of the Freedom of Information Act in 1986. The media became a much stronger voice, particularly as the nation moved toward news coverage on a 24-7 basis. This led to the quandary of instant analysis, often incorrect, which can shape policy and possibly undermine the best democratic interests of the nation. The cult of personality and celebrity has now perhaps replaced the cult of power. See also presidential impeachment, U.S. Further reading: Bernstein, Carl, and Bob Woodward. All the President’s Men. New York: Pocket, 2005; Olson, Keith W. Watergate: Presidential Scandal that Shocked America. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2003; Schorr, Daniel. Introduction, Senate Watergate Report. New York: Carroll and Graf, 2005; Smalls, Melvin. The Presidency of Richard Nixon. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003; Woodward, Bob. The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate’s Deep Throat. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005. Theodore W. Eversole Wen Jiabao (Wen Chia-Pao) (1942– ) Chinese politician Wen Jiabao was born in Tianjin, China, and attended Nankai High School. He graduated from the Beijing Geological Institute, joined the Communist Party in 1965, and began his career in the Gansu provincial geological bureau. Wen moved to Beijing in the 1980s and advanced through the ranks of the General Office of the Central Wen Jiabao 459 Richard Nixon (right) departs the White House after his resignation. His administration was devastated by the Watergate scandal. Committee of the Communist Party. He worked closely with Zhao Ziyang in the late 1980s and was demoted after Zhao’s fall from grace following the Tiananmen Square massacre. Unlike Zhao’s, Wen’s career recovered quickly, and he was able to continue to work under Jiang Zemin, becoming an alternate member of the Politburo in 1992. In 1998 premier Zhu Rongji entrusted him with oversight of agriculture, finance, and environment policies. Wen became premier of China in 2003, succeeding Zhu Rongji. He is noted for his encyclopedic knowledge, practical approach, and consensual management style. He has proven himself to be a political survivor and has built up a network of influential friends during his political career. Wen has shifted the focus of China’s economic policies from growth and development at all costs to consideration of social goals such as public health and education, more egalitarian development, and an awareness of the costs of development such as pollution and workers’ illness and injury. Wen has not been afraid to deal publicly with controversial matters involving public health and safety. In 2003 he ended public silence over the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak, which began in Guangdong Province in November 2002. He was also the first Chinese official to address the AIDS problem in China. AIDS is already a serious and growing problem in China, and some experts estimate that there will be 10–20 million cases by 2010 if the problem is not addressed aggressively. In his efforts to address rural poverty Wen indicated the seriousness of his concern by making numerous unannounced visits to rural areas, thus avoiding elaborate preparations by local officials to cover up problems that exist. Further reading: Grasso, June, Jay Corrin, and Michael Kort. Modernization and Revolution in China: From the Opium Wars to World Power. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2004; Hutchings, Graham. Modern China: A Guide to a Century of Change. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Sarah Boslaugh Western Saharan War Spain ruled the western Saharan region known as Río de Oro as part of its colonial empire. The region was sparsely populated by mostly Sunni Muslim nomadic peoples of mixed Berber and Arab ancestry who were Arabic speaking. The region contained some of the world’s richest phosphate mines but was otherwise desperately poor. In the early 1970s the Polisario Front (Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia al Hamra and Río de Oro) initiated an armed nationalist struggle for independence from Spain. After the death of Francisco Franco, a committed imperialist, the new Spanish government granted the territory independence in 1975. Although the United Nations declared that the Sahrawi should have selfdetermination, Morocco and Mauritania both immediately claimed the territory. King Hassan II of Morocco launched the “Green March” of over 300,000 unarmed Moroccans to march into the territory and incorporate it into Morocco. Because of its rivalry with Morocco as well as its desire for access to a port on the Atlantic Ocean, Algeria supported the Polisario, supplying it with arms and assistance. The Polisario proclaimed the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) in 1976. Recognized by some 70 nations, SADR became a full-fledged member of the African Union. The war between the Polisario, Morocco, and Mauritania lasted from 1975 to 1984. The Polisario was able to defeat Mauritania, which withdrew its claims in 1979, but it was largely defeated by Morocco, which obtained arms from the United States. Moroccan troops moved into the northern sector of the territory and occupied the huge phosphate mines at Bu Craa. The war and Moroccan occupation resulted in the displacement of over 200,000 Sahrawi, who continue to live in refugee camps in surrounding regions to the present day. By the early 1980s Morocco controlled the majority of the territory, and SADR administered the remainder as liberated territory. To protect its holdings, Morocco built a 380-mile earth wall studded with electronic sensors and antipersonnel radar provided by the United States. The wall effectively enclosed the Moroccanheld sections of Western Sahara. The United Nations called for a referendum, for the people to vote for independence or for union with Morocco. The Polisario supported the referendum, but Morocco moved in settlers, who probably now outnumber the indigenous Sahrawis, to the territory it held. Morocco argued that the settlers, presumably all in favor of union, should be allowed to vote in the proposed referendum. Not surprisingly, SADR and its supporters strongly rejected Morocco’s claim. Both the United Nations and the United States attempted to mediate but failed to break the impasse. It appeared that Morocco would refuse any referendum until it could guarantee a victory in the election. An esti- 46 0 Western Saharan War mated 160,000 Moroccan soldiers continued to occupy the territory, which had a population of some 267,000 Sahrawi people. In 1983 King Hassan II negotiated an agreement with Algeria, which then halted its support for the Polisario, although many Sahrawis remained refugees in Algeria and other neighboring countries. After Hassan’s death in 1999 his son King Muhammad VI announced his desire for a resolution to the problem, but he also opposed holding a referendum on independence. In 2005 riots by supporters of the referendum in Moroccan-held territory broke out; Moroccan forces quickly quelled the riots and repressed SADR supporters. Hence one of the longest liberation struggles in the contemporary era continued to be unresolved. Further reading: Hodges, Tony. The Western Sahara: The Roots of a Desert War. Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill, 1983; Shelley, Toby. Endgame in the Western Sahara: What Future for Africa’s Last Colony. London: Zed Books, 2004. Janice J. Terry World Bank Founded at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in July 1944 by representatives of 44 governments, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), commonly known as the World Bank, was conceived as a mechanism through which financial resources could be funneled to Europe to aid in the rebuilding effort in the aftermath of World War II. Initially based solely in Washington, D.C. (where its world headquarters remains), and from its founding to the present day dominated by the United States, the World Bank played a key role in the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union: at first in western Europe, and then through its loans to nation-states in Asia, Africa, and Latin America (the so-called Third World), considered by the United States key sites in the struggle against international communism. From the 1950s the World Bank broadened its mandate to encompass economic development and poverty issues in Third World countries through its International Finance Corporation (IFC), its International Development Association (ADA), its International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), and its Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), which together with the IBRD compose the World Bank Group. In 2007 the World Bank Group had 185 member states, with close coordination between the activities of its five entities and some 40 percent of its staff based outside the United States. Its governing structure consists of a board of governors, with a representative from each member state; a board of executive directors; and a president. In the decades following its foundation, the World Bank underwent a number of broad shifts, from funding postwar reconstruction to large development projects in Third World countries to its current focus on the alleviation of poverty and sustainable development. Scholarly interpretations of the World Bank’s role in world affairs vary widely. Neoclassical and neoliberal economists and social scientists tend to interpret the World Bank in positive terms, as a force for progressive social change. In contrast, many leftleaning social scientists tend to view it as serving the interests of multinational corporations and facilitating the foreign policy goals of the world’s advanced industrial countries, particularly the United States. The bank itself acknowledges many of its past mistakes, particularly its support for massive “white elephant” projects in Africa and Latin America that lined the pockets of corrupt politicians and business owners while doing little to alleviate poverty or advance genuine economic development. Such projects included the Kariba Dam in Zambia and Zimbabwe (Southern Rhodesia) in the 1950s, which displaced and impoverished thousands of Tonga people; the Singrauli thermal coal mining projects in India (financed from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s and accused of causing massive environmental damage and human misery); and the Yacyreta Dam in Paraguay and Argentina (financed in the 1980s and early 1990s and denounced as an environmental catastrophe and a “monument to corruption”). Despite divergent interpretations, all observers agree that the World Bank and the closely affiliated International Monetary Fund, also founded at Bretton Woods in 1944, have been among the most important international financial entities of the postwar era. See also International Monetary Fund (imf). Further reading: Easterly, William R. The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001; Hunt, Diana. Economic Theories of Development: An Analysis of Competing Paradigms. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989. Michael J. Schroeder World Bank 46 1 World Trade Center, September 11, 2001 The United States of America and, in fact, the world, would not be the same after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. The term 9/11 was added to the U.S. vocabulary, symbolizing armed aggression holding humankind for ransom. American Airlines Flight 11, United Airlines Flight 175, American Airlines Flight 77, and United Airlines Flight 93 were hijacked by al-Qaeda, a group owing allegiance to the militant Islamic leader Osama bin Laden. The aircraft, respectively, were crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center (WTC), the south tower of the WTC, the Pentagon headquarters, and a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. About 3,000 people died, and property worth billions of dollars was lost. Bin Laden, the son of Saudi Arabian construction tycoon Mohammed Awad bin Laden, was the mastermind behind the September 11 attacks. Bin Laden had a deep hatred of the U.S policy in the Middle East and called for the liberation of the region from the United States. previous target The United States had previously been the target of terrorist attacks such as the World Trade Center bombing (February 1993), a truck bomb at the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City (April 1995), bomb attacks on U.S. barracks in Dhahran (June 1996), the bombing of U.S. embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi (August 1998), a bomb attack on the USS Cole (October 2000), and year 2000 millennium attack plots. But these were not like September 11 in magnitude and precision. Bin Laden was linked with many terrorist attacks all over the world. The successful execution of the attack inside U.S. territory by 19 Islamic militants was a demonstration of the failure of U.S. intelligence. The terrorists dispatched by al-Qaeda passed through security checkpoints of airports easily and performed their mission. It was one of the greatest failures of U.S. intelligence since Pearl Harbor. The militants had visited the United States and stayed there. Targets, as well as the type of aircraft, were being modified until the final decision. The plan had begun with Operation Bojinka, which was conceived by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi Yousef as early as 1995 in Manila. While Khalid was in Afghanistan, he presented al-Qaeda with the argument that instead of using aircraft loaded with explosives, commercial planes could be used to hit the targets. Nine planes were to be crashed into different targets such as the WTC, the Pentagon, the White House, and the Capitol. A 10th plane was to be hijacked by Khalid himself. It would be landed in the United States after all the male passengers were killed. Bin Laden decided to use four planes. The WTC, the Pentagon, and the United States Capitol were to be the targets. A new terrorist cell was established in Hamburg, Germany, and militants were chosen by bin Laden. Bin Laden was eager to carry out the plan. At a January 2000 meeting held in Kuala Lumpur, militants discussed the USS Cole bombing and the September 11 attacks. Some of the members had already been to the United States, renting apartments and undergoing training as students at flight schools. By June 2000 al- Mihdhar, al-Hazmi, Mohammed Atta, and Marwan al-Shehhi were already in the United States. Omar al- Bayoumi had been in San Diego, California, since 1995. The terrorists often changed their places of residence, spent money on airline tickets, and got driver’s licenses by obtaining mailboxes. In the final preparations, four teams were chosen and airline tickets were purchased. The first plane, AA Flight 11, crashed into the north tower of the WTC and had on board the hijackers Walid Al Shehri, Wail Alsheri, Mohammad Atta, Aabdul Alomari, and Satam Sugami. UA Flight 175 hit the south tower of the WTC and had on board Marawn Alshehhi, Fayez Ahmed, Mohald Alshehri, Hamza Al Ghamdi, and Ahmed Al Ghamdi. The Pentagon was hit by AA Flight 77, this third plane carrying Khalid al-Mihdhar, Majed Moqued, Nawaf Al Hazmi, and Salem Al Hazmi. Ahmed Al Haznawi, Ahmed Alnami, Ziad Jarrah, and Saeed Alghamdi had overpowered the fourth plane, UA Flight 93, which eventually crashed into the ground in Shanksville. Flight 11 crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46:40 a.m. local time and at 9:03:11 a.m. Flight 175 crashed into the south tower. Millions of people watched the live collapse of the north and south towers. The casualty figure was 2,986. shock around the world The whole world was shocked by the attacks. Some European countries observed three minutes of silence. Messages of sympathy poured in to the administration and the people of the United States. The United Nations, in Resolution 1368, expressed its support to the United States in defending its homeland. The member countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (nato ) declared that the attack on the United States was an attack against all NATO members. The 462 World Trade Center, September 11, 2001 immediate reaction of shock and fear gave way to anger and vengeance afterward in the United States. President George W. Bush addressed the nation on the evening of September 11, saying that the United States was not going to be cowed by the acts of mass murder. The United States declared al-Qaeda the prime suspect, and bin Laden became a wanted man. Patriotism reached a new height, and sales of the U.S. flag soared. Donations to charitable organizations topped half a billion dollars within two weeks after September 11. Blood donations increased. A $40-billion emergency fund was granted by the U.S. Congress to tackle terrorism and help in recovery operations in New York and Washington after the attack. Counterterrorism laws were introduced by the Bush administration infringing on the personal liberty of citizens. A Council for Homeland Security was established for internal counterterrorism efforts. The USA Patriot Act empowered federal authorities to prosecute terrorism suspects and detain them without charges. The Information Awareness Office (IAO), created in 2002, initiated measures for collecting information pertaining to Internet activity, credit card purchase histories, airline ticket purchases, medical records, driver’s licenses, and personal information. The Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001, released its final report in December 2002. The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (9/11 Commission), the bipartisan commission created by Congressional legislation, made its report public on July 22, 2004. The attacks also had significant economic repercussions, pushing the United States deeper into a recession. U.S. stocks lost $1.2 trillion in value in a week, after the stock market was reopened six days after the attack. Recovery operations took months to complete, and the WTC fire was extinguished after burning for three months. The September attack led to the “War on Terror,” with the United States increasing it military operations, putting pressure on terrorist groups, threatening governments sheltering the militants, and waging war in Afghanistan and afterward in Iraq. Operation Enduring Freedom, which lasted for two months, began on October 7, 2001, against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Although a cooperative World Trade Center, September 11, 2001 463 The September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon shocked the world. The ruins of the twin towers are seen in an aerial shot. The towers had previously been the target of a terrorist attack in 1993. government was installed in Afghanistan, bin Laden was not captured. But initial support for the War on Terror waged by the United States began to drop significantly after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. See also Iraq War; terrorism. Further reading: Bernstein, Richard, and the staff of the New York Times. Out of the Blue: The Story of September 11. New York: Times Books, 2002; Carlisle, Rodney P., ed. One Day in History: September 11, 2001. New York: HarperCollins, 2007; Clarke, Richard A. Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror. New York: Free Press, 2004; Graham, Bob, and Jeff Nussbaum. Intelligence Matters. New York: Random House, 2004; Posner, Gerald. Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11. New York: Random House, 2003. Patit Paban Mishra