Weekly History Quiz No.225

The Persian Wars (499-449 BCE) were fought between the Persian Achaemenid Empire and the Hellenic world during the Greek classical period. The conflict saw the rise of Athens, and led to its Golden Age.

King George III recognised the US Thirteen Colonies, which had been part of colonial British America, to be free, sovereign and independent states in the Treaty of Paris in 1783, giving up his claims. The first English monarch to claim they were also Monarch of France was Edward III in 1340. Henry VI of England was the only English monarch to actually rule as a French monarch, as Henry II of France. George III chose the 1800 Act of Union which joined the Kingdom of Great Britain with the Kingdom of Ireland to drop his claim to the now defunct French throne.

The Paris 1900 Olympics included a men's 200 metre obstacle swimming event, which was won by Australian Fred Lane.

The Rokeby Venus is the only surviving female nude by Velázquez, nudes were extremely rare in 1600s Spanish art, due to the Spanish Inquisition. It was damaged in 1914 by Canadian suffragette Mary Richardson, as part of their campaign. After the success of the suffrage campaign Richardson became a convert to the political far right, becoming the Chief Organiser for the Women's Section of the British Union of Fascists.

Drake began sailing with his older cousin Sir John Hawkins as a teenager. Hawkins established the triangular trade, where English goods were traded for slaves in West Africa, who were then forcibly taken to be sold in the Caribbean. Drake accompanied Hawkins on several of these slaving voyages.

The 1978 Soyuz 28 mission was a joint Czechoslovak-Soviet mission, which saw Vladimír Remek become the first person from outside the USSR or USA to fly in space. India followed in 1984, the UK in 1991 and China in 2003.

Having gambled away his life savings on the passage over, Italian immigrant Charles Ponzi arrived in America with next to nothing in his pocket. As he would later recount, “I landed in this country with $2.50 in cash and $1 million in hopes, and those hopes never left me.” He escaped prosecution for a significant period because two-thirds of the Boston police force were investors! Read more about his genre defining scam here.

The Chinese civil war lasted for over 20 years, from 1927 to 1949. The Russian civil war was the five years from 1917 to 1922, Cuba's was from 1953 to 1959 and Hungary's was at a low level from 1947 to 1949, followed by an explosion of resistance that was rapidly destroyed by the Soviets in 1956.

A British colony for most of the period 1795-1910, named after the Cape of Good Hope. In 1910 it united with three other colonies to form the Union of South Africa.

Cleopatra VII was Queen of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt from 51 to 30 BCE, and its last active ruler. Caesar had an affair with Cleopatra that produced a son, Caesarion,  Cleopatra traveled to Rome as a client queen in 46 and 44 BC, while there she stayed at Caesar's villa. Several years after Caesar's assassination Cleopatra began a relationship with Mark Antony, who divorced his wife and married Cleopatra. They were successful political and military allies for the following decade, until their defeat at the 31 BCE Battle of Actium.