Weekly History Quiz No.271

A tangled mix of colonial border legacies, Cold War politics, and growing militarism, under intense pressure from rival states in a tense era of world history, finally exploded in 1962. In October of that year, Chinese forces rushed across the pale desert, setting off the Sino-Indian War. After just a month of fighting, thousands lay dead and the frontier between two emerging powers had shifted – a border dispute which is, to this day, unresolved.

Valentina Tereshkova was the first woman to go to space in June 1963 at the age of 26. The former textile worker had no experience as a pilot but was an avid skydiver. This experience proved to be of value as cosmonauts were required to parachute from their capsules upon returning to the Earth. After 18 months of training, Tereshkova launched into space on June 16, 1963 aboard her Vostok 6 spacecraft. During her three-day mission, she orbited the Earth 48 times. Following Tereshkova’s successful flight, the first program for women cosmonauts was scrapped. It would be nearly two decades before the next woman, cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya, would fly in space with her Soyuz T-7 mission in 1982.

Commanded by Josip Broz Tito, the movement was consistently referred to as the “Partisans” throughout the war. According to a British observer ‘The partisan army had long since grown into a regular fighting formation comparable to the armies of other small States, and infinitely superior to most of them, and especially to the pre-war Jugoslav army, in tactical skill, fieldcraft, leadership, fighting spirit and fire-power.’

The Battle of Marathon took place during the first Persian invasion of Greece. It was fought between the citizens of Athens, aided by Plataea, and a Persian force. The battle was the culmination of the first attempt by Persia, under King Darius I, to subjugate Greece. The Greek army inflicted a crushing defeat on the more numerous Persians, marking a turning point in the Greco-Persian Wars.

Read about the similarities between the Jim Crow era segregation laws and Nazi restrictions on Jews

Thucydides fought in the Peloponnesian War on the Athenian side. He wrote the History of the Peloponnesian War, which introduced the concept of the Thucydides Trap.

John Constable was a painter in the Romantic tradition from Suffolk, England. He is best known for revolutionising landscape painting.

Indian Rebellion / First Indian War of Independence - 1857

US Civil War - 1861

Boer War - 1899

Federation of Australia - 1901

The Battle of Stalingrad (August 23, 1942 – February 2, 1943) was a major battle on the Eastern Front of World War II in which Nazi Germany and its allies fought the Soviet Union for control of the city of Stalingrad (now Volgograd) in Southern Russia, on the eastern boundary of Europe.

Marked by constant close-quarters combat and direct assaults on civilians by air raids, it is often regarded as one of the single largest (nearly 2.2 million personnel) and bloodiest (1.7–2 million wounded, killed, or captured) battles in the history of warfare. The heavy losses inflicted on the German Wehrmacht make it arguably the most strategically decisive battle of the whole war and a turning point in the European theater of World War II. German forces never regained the initiative in the East and withdrew a vast military force from the West to replace their losses.

Reval was replaced by the Estonian name, Tallinn, after the country became independent in 1918.