Weekly History Quiz No.294

The dynasty began with Yekuno Amlak and ended when Haile Selassie was deposed in 1974.

Muslim Chinese Admiral Zheng He dedicated 28 years of his life sailing to 37 countries covering 50,000 km to the Persian Gulf, East Africa, Sri Lanka, East Indies and Arabia. Zheng died during his final voyage in 1433. Following his death and the revival of Confucian philosophy, China became very inward-looking, sea-going trading was banned and in less than 100 years, the Chinese emperor had ordered the destruction of all of China's 3,500 ocean-going ships.

The Melbourne suburb is named after the Schooner The Lady of St Kilda, which is in turn named after the St Kilda archipelago in Scotland.

These islands were originally named Skildir by their Norse settlers, which was mistakenly transcribed as Skildar on a 1583 map and then as S. Kilda in a 1592 pilotage book. Later cartographers based their maps on this, assuming S. was an abbreviation for Saint.

This was a terror famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed three million Ukrainians. The term Holodomor emphasises the famine’s man-made and intentional aspects such as rejection of outside aid, confiscation of all household foodstuffs and restriction of population movement. Since 2006, the Holodomor has been recognized by Ukraine and 15 other countries as a genocide of the Ukrainian people carried out by the Soviet government.

The London underground opened in 1863, followed by Liverpool in 1886.

San Marino claims to have been founded in 301CE and to be the oldest extant sovereign state and the oldest constitutional republic in the world.

Degas was a French Impressionist artist famous for his pastel drawings and oil paintings. The painting depicts the US south in the immediate aftermath of the US Civil War. Members of the Degas family owned slaves, supported the Confederacy, and had ties to and participated in white supremacist groups during Reconstruction.

The first commercial steam-powered device was a water pump developed in 1698 by Thomas Savery. It was designed to pump water out of mines.

The Arab Spring was a revolutionary wave of both violent and non-violent demonstrations, protests, riots, coups, and civil wars in North Africa and the Middle East that began in 2010 with the Tunisian Revolution.

A soldier and spy for the Union Army during the Civil War, Tubman lead men of the 2nd South Carolina Infantry Division in the Combahee Ferry Raid. This action destroyed confederate rice plantations and freed over 700 enslaved people.