2024-2025 International History Bee & Bowl Study Guide PDF

2024-2025 Regional Finals Study Guide – Beta Question Set Instructions: This study guide should be your first resource in preparing for the International History Bee and Bowl Regional Tournament that is run on the Beta Set of questions for the 2024-2025 academic year. Most of the facts below are fo...

2024-2025 Regional Finals Study Guide – Beta Question Set Instructions: This study guide should be your first resource in preparing for the International History Bee and Bowl Regional Tournament that is run on the Beta Set of questions for the 2024-2025 academic year. Most of the facts below are found at some point in the preliminary rounds of this Set. Thus, we have selected these facts for this study guide to help make your preparation easier and more efficient. This study guide is particularly meant to help new players and teams – not to determine the ultimate winner of the tournament. For that, you will need to do more preparation. In particular, we recommend reviewing the past questions that are posted on the website at www.ihbbeurope.com, www.iacompetitionsasia.com, or www.ihbbcanada.com as well as the other resources there, such as the Nationals Capitals Study Guide. Remember that the questions are all short paragraphs on a particular topic, so if a topic is referenced below, then it is a good idea to learn a bit more about it on your own than what is listed here (since additional facts about a topic will also be referenced in the question). On the other hand, it is generally not helpful to memorize the dates of events or of famous people’s birth and death years, as those are provided below for historical context, not because we will likely ask for those. It is also helpful to read, at a minimum, the introduction of a Wikipedia page on a topic to gain additional historical context about why it is significant. For the International History Bowl, we strongly recommend that your team divide up the topics here among the players who will be competing, so that at least one person on the team is responsible for knowing each of the various topics. On the other hand, remember that some of the topics below will be referenced in the questions in the International History Bee preliminary rounds, where students play individually, so it behooves students playing in the Bee to know all of the information contained below here. Good luck! African History 1. Jomo Kenyatta was the founding father of Kenya and its first president from 1964 to 1978. 2. The Second Boer War was a 1899 to 1902 conflict in which the British fought Dutch-speaking settlers in South Africa. 3. The Nubian language is a language of the Christian section of Sudan, whose speakers were deposed by the building of the Aswan High Dam. Ancient History 1. The First Punic War was a 264 to 241 BCE war that was the first conflict between Rome and Carthage. 2. The Battle of Marathon was a 490 BCE victory for the Greeks over the Persians that gave its name to a modern 26-mile race. 3. Jade is a vibrant green gemstone that was used to create many ancient Chinese artifacts. 4. The Olmec were the earliest known Mesoamerican civilization, inhabiting present-day Mexico. 5. The ancient Egyptians employed a formal writing system called hieroglyphics. Asian History 1. Kim Il Sung (1912-1994) was the first leader of North Korea, who has been deified by the state since his death. 2. Mauritius is an Indian Ocean island nation with capital at Port Louis where the dodo was driven to extinction in the late 1600s. 3. Indira Gandhi (1917-1984) was the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru and the first female Prime Minister of India. 4. Pol Pot (1925-1998) was the Communist leader of the Khmer Rouge who ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. 5. The Forbidden City is a complex in Beijing that was inhabited by the emperor of China for over 500 years, beginning with the Yongle Emperor (1360-1424). 6. Sri Lanka faced a Tamil rebellion in the late 1900s and 2000s, led by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or Tamil Tigers. 7. The Shang dynasty (founded c. 1600 BCE) was the first Chinese ruling dynasty known to have actually existed, following the semi-legendary Xia dynasty. 8. Myanmar is home to a Muslim-majority ethnic group called the Rohingya. 9. Korea’s longest-lived dynasty was the Joseon, which ruled in 1392 until it was supplanted by the Korean Empire in 1897. 10. In 1819, the port city of Singapore was founded by an official of the British East India Company, Stamford Raffles (1781-1826). European History 1. The Rothschilds are a German-Jewish banking family who have been the target of many anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. 2. In 1990, the Baltic states Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia declared their independence after the fall of the Soviet Union. 3. Roald Amundsen (1872-1928) was the Norwegian leader of the first successful expedition to the South Pole. 4. The Battle of Waterloo was an 1815 battle in which unified forces under the Duke of Wellington dealt Napoleon Bonaparte his final military defeat. 5. Warsaw is the capital city of Poland, where a namesake pact was signed that served as the Eastern bloc’s equivalent to NATO. 6. French composer Claude Debussy (1862-1918) is best known for impressionist piano pieces such as La mer and Clair de Lune. 7. Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) was a Conservative prime minister of the United Kingdom noted for his rivalry with William Gladstone (1809-1898). 8. Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971) was the Soviet leader known for his policy of de-Stalinization. 9. Vladimir Putin (1952 - ) is the leader of the United Russia Party and the current President of the Russian Federation. 10. Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013) was the Conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979-1990, known as the “Iron Lady.” 11. Catherine of Aragon (1485-1536) was the first wife of Henry the Eighth. Her inability to produce a male heir sparked the English Reformation. 12. The Hanseatic League was a medieval confederation of market towns and trade guilds that grew from small north German towns to the dominant economic force in northern Europe. 13. Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) wrote novels including Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. 14. Karl Donitz (1891-1980) was a German admiral who was the second and final Fuhrer of the German Third Reich for one week before the end of the Second World War. 15. Notre-Dame is a Paris cathedral in the Ile de la Cite that was the site of Napoleon Bonaparte’s coronation. 16. Joan of Arc (1412-1431), known as the “Maid of Orleans”, was a French military leader during the Hundred Years’ War and a Catholic saint. 17. Twelfth-century England was blighted by a lawless civil war called the Anarchy. 18. Oliver Cromwell was the military leader who was Lord Protector and de facto dictator of England from 1653 to 1658. 19. The Reichstag fire was a staged 1933 arson of the German parliament building that helped Adolf Hitler solidify his grip on power. 20. Catherine the Great was the Empress of Russia from 1762 to 1796. Latin American and Caribbean History 1. The Inca Empire was founded in modern Peru, which had its historical center at Cusco prior to being conquered by Francisco Pizarro (1478-1541). 2. Augusto Pinochet (1915-2006) was the dictator of Chile from 1973 to 1990. He overthrew Salvador Allende in a 1973 coup. 3. Simon Bolivar (1783-1830) was a Venezuelan soldier who led six South American nations to independence from the Spanish Empire. 4. Benito Juárez (1806-1872) was Mexico’s first president of indigenous ancestry, who served from 1858 to 1872. 5. Patagonia is a historical region located in the south of Argentina and Chile. It is home to the Strait of Magellan and north of the Drake Passage. 6. Hugo Chávez (1954-2013) was the president of Venezuela from 2002 until his death in 2013. He was succeeded by the country’s current president, Nicolás Maduro. 7. Belize is the only country in Central America to have English as its official language, as it was a British colony for nearly 200 years. 8. For nearly 50 years, Cuba was ruled by Fidel Castro following his overthrow of Fulgencio Bastista in 1959. U.S. History 1. The Wounded Knee massacre was an 1890 massacre of Lakota people by the U.S. Army soldiers. 2. Herman Melville’s (1819-1891) experience in the whaling industry informed the content of his 1851 novel Moby-Dick. 3. The Battle of the Bulge was a 1944 World War Two battle that was the final German offensive of the war.