The origins of Liberia

Source: http://www.coeworld.org/family/liberia/regional-background 

Liberia was one of the few African territories to remain free of the European imperialism after Berlin Conference. The name of the country means "land of the free" and it was founded by freed African slaves from the USA in 1820. The promoters of the resettlement of former slaves in Africa were the members of the American Colonization Society, an organization of white clergymen, abolitionists and slave owners. The name of its capital city, Monrovia, comes from James Monroe, the president of the USA in the early 1820s, when the resettlement of freed slaves started. 

Liberia's coat of arms

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Coat_of_arms_of_Liberia.svg

In 1847 Liberia proclaimed its independence and became a republic. By the end of the American Civil War (1861-1865) around10,000 former slaves had settled down in Liberia. But the former slaves. But the former slaves took advantage of the situation to submit the indigenous Africans, black like them, but considered to be inferior. For example, the indigenous Africans who lived in Liberia were excluded from citizenship until 1904 and were also exploited by the Americo-Liberian elite, who monopolized political and economic power and restricted the indigenuos people´s rigth to vote.

The Liberian political system drew inspiration from the USA Constitution, but there was one only party, the True Whig Party, founded in 1869. This party held power until 1980, when a coup d' État removed them from power. A period of ethnic tensions and wars started:  two civil wars (1990-1996 and 1999-2003) with around 250,000 people killed. and one million refugees. In 2005 Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf was elected Africa's first female president and started the difficult reconstruction of the country. 

If you want to learn more about Liberia, here you have some extra links: 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-13729504

http://africanhistory.about.com/od/liberia/p/LiberiaHist1.htm

http://www.infoplease.com/encyclopedia/world/liberia-history.html

War atrocities similar to Goya´s War Disasters

Today many of you have been shocked by the atrocities depicted by painter Francisco de Goya in his series of etchings called The Disasters of War. This series of etchings has been considered to be a precedent of war photography. Many war reporters have drawn inspiration from Goya´s harsh representation of violence in wars. Their cameras have reflected how human beings of different parts of the worlds have treated their fellow men and women when words were not able to stop violence. Here you have some of the most famous pictures of several recent wars: 

The following two pictures belong to a book called War Against War, a collection of forbidden pictures of World War One published by the German anti-militarist Ernst Friedrich in 1924. When the war broke up u¡in 1914 he refused military service and was imprisoned until the war finished in 1918. After the war he compiled all the ghastly pictures of the war he could find and published them with the purpose of showing the inhumanity of war and human behaviour when people are supposed to fight for their homeland. Some years later Friedrich also founded an Anti-War Museum in Berlin, destroyed by the Nazis, and reopened in 1981. 

If you want to see more censored pictures of World War 1, here you have some links: 

- War Against War: 

 http://www.greatwardifferent.com/Great_War/Kriege/Kriege_00.htm

- Covenants With Death: 

http://www.greatwardifferent.com/Great_War/Kriege/Covenant_01.htm

- Censored images of WW1 in France, published in the magazine Témoignages in 1933: 

http://www.greatwardifferent.com/Great_War/Images_Secretes/Images_Secretes_01.htm

- Censored images in Germany, also published in Témoignages de Notre Temps: 

http://www.greatwardifferent.com/Great_War/Images_Secretes_2/Images_Secretes_01.htm

- The Brutal Reality of the War, a book published by German war photographer Hermann Rex in 1926: 

http://www.greatwardifferent.com/Great_War/Weltkrieg_Rex/Weltkrieg_Rex_00.htm

- A complete Dutch website about WW1. The collection of pictures Bloody Picnic shows the ugliest face of this war: 

http://www.greatwar.nl/frames/default-picnic.html

Here you have some examples that will remind you of Goya´s etchings: 

Here you have some pictures of World War 2 and a link where you will find more pictures of this war: 

The head of a Japanese soldier hanging from a tree

Source: http://www.ww2incolor.com/dramatic/?g2_page=66

Croat Ustashi torturing a Serb with a saw before executing him

Source: http://www.ww2incolor.com/dramatic/Saw-head.html

You can see more pictures of this war on the following link: 

http://www.ww2incolor.com/dramatic/

The different armies of the world tried to censor the most dramatic pictures of wars, because they wanted to keep morale and hide the worst face of war to their populations. But secrecy ended with Vietnam War. Different war photographers contributed to people´s knowledge of war and their pictures had a strong influence in the beginning of pacifist movements and anti-war reaction in the USA. Here you have some of the most hair-raising pictures of this conflict: 

- This picture was taken by Eddie Adams and shows the in cold blood execution of a Vietcong member  by the chief of police of Saigon in February 1968.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nguyen.jpg

This picture represents Kim Phuc, a little girl whose body was burnt by a napàlm attack of the USA Army. This picture was taken by photographer Nick Ut and contributed to accelerate the end of Vietnam War, due to the increasing rejection of the USA population to what their army was doing there:

Source: http://listas.20minutos.es/lista/la-mejor-fotografia-de-guerra-170161/

Here you have more Vietnam War pictures: 

http://www.angelfire.com/ultra/vietnamwar/photos.html

And finally, these are pictures from different recent conflicts: 

- A USA soldier playing with the corpse of an Afghan insurgent. This photo belongs to a collection of  photos taken by the soldiers themselves, censored by the Pentagon:  

Source: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/pictures/the-kill-team-photos-20110327/0232760

- An recent image of Syria´s civil war. It show a member of the government security force beating handcuffed and blinded prisoners. You can see a complete series of pictures of this conflict if ypu click on the link below the photograph: 

Source: http://world.time.com/2012/04/02/syrias-year-of-chaos-photos-of-a-slow-motion-civil-war/

All these pictures show us that war continues to be as cruel as it was two centuries ago and human beings don´t learn. 

The Reapers´ War and the Catalan anthem

Corpus of Blood, 1640

Source: http://blogs.sapiens.cat/socialsenxarxa/etiqueta/guerra-dels-segadors/

As we studied last Friday, the Count-Duke of Olivares´ projects for all the territories of the Hispanic Monarchy provoked generalized revolts, which were more serious in Catalonia and Portugal. In Catalonia the revolt started in January 1640, when the population revolted against the royal order of accomodating 10,000 soldiers. The protests, headed by peasants, were strongly repressed by the royal army. Armed peasants occupied the city of Barcelona, killed the lieutenant of the royal army and the Generalitat broke up with the Monarchy. The Count -Duke of Olivares planned the invasion of Catalonia and the representatives of the Generalitat contacted Louis XIII, the king of France. Although France had always been Aragon´s enemy, Louis XIII decided to support the Catalans in order to take advantage  of political instability in the Hispanic Monarchy and open a new front against Philip IV (remember, "my enemy´s enemy is my friend")

The Reapers´ War  lasted for almost 19 years. It ended in 1659, with the signature of the Peace of the Pyrenees:  Catalonia lost the territories of Roussillon and Cerdanya and a marriage alliance was established: Louis XIV would marry María Teresa of Austria, Philip IV´s daughter and Charles II´s sister. This marriage would be decisive some years later, when Charles II died without direct successors. The French branch of his family got rights to the Hispanic Monarchy, but Charles II´s testament wadn´t accepted by the Habsburg branch and other European powers. 

The Reapers´ War belongs to the events Catalans consider part of their national history of fight for independence. In fact, the Catalan anthem takes its name and music from those events. Its´called  Els Segadors (The Reapers), because peasanst had an important role in the uprising against the royal troops and the beginnig of the Corpus of Blood , in June 1640, was related to an incident with a reaper. The music of the anthem was composed by Francesc Alió in 1892, drawing inspiration from a 17th century folk song. The lyrics were composed by Emili Guanyavents in 1899, for a song contest organized by Unió Catalanista, a political group which demanded self-government (not independence) for Catalonia. Guanyavents draw inspiration from a 17th century popular ballad collected by Manuel Milà i Fontanals on a book called Romancerillo Catalán. On the following video you can listen to the old version, with the lyrics of the old ballad compiled by Milà i Fontanals: 

The song was adopted by the Catalan Parliament as anthem in 1993. This is the modern version, with Emili Guanyavents´ lyrics:

If you want to read the translation in Spanish, click here.

And here you have the score:

Source: ://nonsoloflauta.blogspot.com.es/2010/11/popular-catalana-els-segadors.html

The way to war in some cartoons

Today we have seen some meaningful cartoons about the increasing tension in the first decades of the 20th century in Europe. Here you have some more: 

This is the cover of the French magazine Le Petit Journal Illustré. The cartoonist represented the unstoppable collapse of the Ottoman Empire  in 1908, when Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina and Russia won influence at the Balkans after the independence of Bulgaria. The Austro-Hungarian Emperor and the Russian Tsar were represented seizing parts of the Balkans before the Ottoman Emperor´s impotence. 

The Eastern Question´s Wake-up, Le Petit Journal Illustré, 18th October 1908

Source: http://cent.ans.free.fr/pj1908/pj93518101908.htm

This is a cartoon of the beginning of October 1912, appeared on Punch, a British satirical magazine. The main  European powers were represented over the pot, trying to content the Balkan troubles.

The boiling point, Punch, 2nd October 1912

Source: http://punch.photoshelter.com/image/I0000iH8cW9ntRC4

Finally war started and the Balkan League (Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro and Serbia) declared war to the Ottoman Empire. The following cartoon comes from a German magazine called Simplicissimus and it represents the British lion, the two-headed Austro-Hungarian eagle, the French Gallic rooster, the Russian bear and the German eagle trying to stop the fire of war at the Balkans after the outbreak of the First Balkan War.

"Unfortunately the united European fire brigade was unable to stop the fire"

Simplicissimus, 28th October 1912

Source: http://rambambashi.wordpress.com/tag/simplicissimus/

And this last cartoon was published by The Chicago Tribune in August 1914, a little after the outbreak of the war. It´s called "The Crime of the Ages- Who did it?". Every country involved at war is represented as a soldier and all of them are pointing with their swords at the ones they consider responsible for the outbreak. Only Italy kept out of war.

The Crime of the Ages-Who did it?, 5th August 1914

Source: http://www.antiessays.com/free-essays/176889.html

The Russian Campaign explained from a grave

In 1812, by Illarion Prianishnikov

Source: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:Prianishnikov_1812.jpg

Here you have some interesting links about the extreme suffering of the Napoleonic army in their retreat from Russia. The following articles explain the discovery of a mass grave in Vilnius, Lithuania. In 2002 some bulldozers, removing the remains of an old housing development, discovered the tomb where more than 2,000 soldiers of the Grande Armée had been buried during their retreat from Russia. This immense grave has been excavated for some years and the archaeologists have found a lot of interesting data to determine the causes of death of the soldiers and many other aspects about the Napoleonic Army in Russia. 

The following links explain the discovery of the grave in 2002: 

http://www.rferl.org/content/article/1099422.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2230656.stm

And this one is in Spanish: 

http://www.elmundo.es/cronica/2002/343/1021277145.html

And here you have a complete report with the conclusions of the study of the grave: 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/archaeology/napoleon_army_01.shtml

2011-2012 Challenges. Number 6

This week´s research will make you discover some curiosities related to the War of Spanish Succession(1700-1714)  and its consequences:

QUESTION 1

There is a Catalan proverb related to the consequences of the Battle of Almansa in 1707. What is this proverb and what´s its meaning?

QUESTION 2

Since 1943 the Almodí Museum of Fine Arts of the city of Xàtiva includes a portrait of Philip V hanging upside down. Why?

Source: http://puntsdevista.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/felipe-v.jpg

QUESTION 3

One of the decisions of the Utrecht Treaty was that Spain had to cede Gibraltar and Minorca to Great Britain. When did Minorca come back to the Spanish sovereignty?

QUESTION 4

Other decisions of the Utrecht Treaty were the two rights Great Britain got in the Spanish Indies: the assiento and the ship of permission. The violation of the limits to these rights by Great Britain led to a war between Spain and Great Britain in 1739. This war had a very curious name: War of Jenkins´Ear. What was the reason for this name?

  

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:JenkinsEar.jpg